Searsia Blog

Information Retrieval has come a long way since Cyril Cleverdon conducted his famous Cranfield experiments on 1400 paper abstracts in the 1960’s. At the time, searching the massive 1.6 megabyte Cranfield collection was a big deal. Today, we routinely take pictures that are much bigger, and even a crappy smart... [Read More]

Last week we launched our software for query autocompletions: Type in the first character of your query, and Searsia will recommend a query that best completes your prefix. The autocompletions are targeted to the users of the search engine, without the need to track those users. Searsia’s autocompletions are demonstrated... [Read More]

Today, we launch searsiasuggest, a simple but effective open source solution for query suggestions. It implements 3 kinds of query suggestions: 1) autocompletions, 2) spelling correction, and 3) related queries. The software works pretty much like many similar solutions: It inputs a list of queries with their popularity, it indexes... [Read More]

Search engines suggest completions of partially typed queries to help users speed up their searches, for instance by showing the suggested completions in a drop down box. These query autocompletions enable the user to search faster, searching for long queries with relatively few key strokes. Jakobsson (1986) showed that for... [Read More]

The Dutch chapter of ISOC asked the great Anne Stalinksi to make a cartoon of Searsia. Translated to English, the cartoon says: “Searsia allows users to search sources that Google cannot use”. The user enters the query “How to bake a quiche?”, and Searsia not only searches the “Internet”, but... [Read More]