Consideration set generation in commerce search

In commerce search, the set of products returned by a search engine often forms the basis for all user interactions leading up to a potential transaction on the web. Such a set of products is known as the consideration set. In this study, we consider the problem of generating consideration set of products in commerce search so as to maximize user satisfaction. To begin with, we model products as being associated with a set of important attributes and the user queries as composed of specified attributes. In this context, we require that the surfaced products be close to the specified attribute values in the query, and diverse with respect to the unspecified attributes. We cast this as a General Max-Sum Dispersion problem with arbitrary costs wherein we are given a set of n nodes in a metric space and the objective is to select a subset of nodes with total cost at most a given budget, and maximize the sum of the pairwise distances between the selected nodes. We give the first consta...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Sayan Bhattacharya, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Kamesh Munagala
• Keywords: Approximation Algorithms, Commerce Search, Constant Factor Approximation Algorithm, Internet Technology, WWW 2011