High-Quality Results: Citation Ranking
Early on, IT.com realized that vertical search means more than simply limiting scope of the information to be searched. In order for vertical search to take full advantage of its focus, it has to go beyond horizontal ranking algorithms and take into account the perspective of the searchers that use it. We developed citation ranking to achieve this objective.
In addition to keyword matching, phrase detection, stemming, and the best of other traditional search approaches, our search technology is augmented by an analysis of documents related to, but outside of, the corpus of documents to be searched. By analyzing these documents, we are able to discover authorities that consistently reference known, high-quality resources within the search corpus. By iteratively applying this technique, we're able to "bootstrap" a network of authorities that consistently cite documents in the search corpus that are particularly useful to your searchers. We call this technique "citation ranking", and it forms the core of our ability to tailor vertical search result delivery. By applying this technology in a vertical context, we're able to deliver better, more intuitively ranked search results than even the best of keyword search approaches.