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FACETED SEARCH


Facets are the groups of similar items in terms of some measures and hence, can be used to facilitate the information retrieval for the end user. It is similar to filters that we see on almost every online shopping website. The only difference between a filter and a facet is that a filter breaks the entire list of items into various groups or sets that can be managed and a facet is a set of many filters together.

Faceted search uses a hierarchical structure to find the best matches to the user query by searching in some pre-defined categories.


 

USES:




It is now being extensively used to refine user queries to provide them with the best-suited results or even similar results, especially E-commerce websites where users tend to be very selective at times and thus require much more refinement in order to shop. Not only does E-commerce websites find facets integral but also other websites like the very popular video-sharing website-Youtube also uses facets to refine the user query for a video and provide the uses with the best matches.

Faceted search can be best used where the users of the database are huge and they have similar needs with minor variations for instance, I may want to take admission in a college in CSE branch which is far from cityside while you might be willing to take admission in a similar college in the same branch but which is situated in middle of the town near the supermarket and so on. To search for such colleges faceted search will definitely be a super cool option.

WORKING:




Two primitive search paradigms that have been extensively used are  Navigational and Direct search:

  • Navigational search: This approach that uses the hierarchy and goes down the hierarchy as the filters are applied to find more specific results matching the user query. An example of this can be Yahoo Directory
  • Direct Search: This approach allows the user to directly type the query and search for it. Query processing is done on it by valuing the important terms in the query and presenting the result accordingly to the user.

Faceted Search uses the features of both direct search, and browsing(navigational search).First, the user is allowed to search directly. Search is performed on his query to retrieve the most relevant information using various content-based information retrieval techniques and then the results are presented to him along with other similar facets.


 Source: https://goo.gl/QBYGZ1

But before facets can be implemented in any website, various other tasks need t be performed like tagging and annotating the items correctly for precise retrieval. For Once content-based retrieval techniques are applied to provide suitable results, then can can facets be implemented to ease the user for framing the query and to assist the retrieval system to understand the query.

Facets might also cause some challenges foe SEOs like replication of a lot of data and so on. Hence they should be applied judicously. There have been design patterns regarding the display of facets on webpage and after an extensive user study it was found that the best position for fscets can be either in the left side of the page(which most popular E-commerce websites like Amazon do) or on the top but definitely not on the right side o the page as the right side goes unnoticed most of the time.

Thus faceted navigation can be a really good option if you wan to design your own website still it needs to be implemented with care both in back-end a well as front-end. Another noticeable thing is the facets should be designed in sucha a way that there is no issue of zero results. Also, the user must be given options of facets as the most frequenty used terms which are obvious to understand. And the facets should always be made more and more flexible to accomodate minor variations for different users and that can be done usig filters

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