Thursday, January 29, 2009

Magy: how can you improve the ranking time?

Magy!'s engineers are spending too much time in ranking search results. Their AlgoGuru said "well, we have n results for this search and this will cost us O(n * log n), we cannot be better than this. We must resort into heuristics and approximations such as stopwords, caching, index pruning, and the like".

A young and proud eng stood up and he said "Hey, I know that you are wrong. We can make this better from an algorithmic point of view and still get exact results".

Do you know why?

2 comments:

  1. http://www.esuli.it/index.php/2009/01/26/keeping-things-in-partial-order/

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  2. Here the problem is that you are interested to order the first K and not interested in the remaining ones.

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