Smart Wiki Search
August 23, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Smart Wiki Search. There is a good description of what the system does to identify related queries. Click a related query and the system displays a page of Wikipedia information germane to your original query. I tested the query “Julius Caesar” and got useful links shown below:
The about section of the service explains the nuts and bolts of the system:
Smart Wiki Search uses the link structure of Wikipedia to calculate which concepts each page is associated with. It is easy to see why looking at links can help group pages by concepts. For example, pages about mathematics have a lot of links to (and from) other pages about mathematics. Pages about the Apollo moon landing have a lot of links to pages about NASA and pages about the moon, etc. More specifically, Smart Wiki Search uses the so-called Eigen decomposition of the Wikipedia link transition matrix. Eigen decomposition provides of a number of special vectors, called eigenvectors, and their corresponding Eigen values. These vectors are special because even a relatively small number of eigenvectors having the largest Eigen values can capture all the most important properties of the link structure.
Give the system a spin. Graduate students and those writing research papers are likely to find this content domain specific search system useful.
Stephen Arnold, August 23, 2009
Stephen Arnold
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