Surefit.com enhances site search with the addition of Netrics technology
Slipcover marketer Sure Fit Inc. has launched Netrics Inc.’s Search Server technology on its web site, Surefit.com, which brings the Princeton, N.J.-based technology provider’s clients up to nearly 50, says CEO Stefanos Damianakis, who estimates that a quarter to a third of that number are e-commerce sites.
Damianakis says Netrics puts a spin on much of traditional search technology by tackling a problem attached to most search functionality: that of misspellings and other errors in the entry of search queries. A common approach in matching product descriptions to what users type in the search box is to attach to each product description as attributes all the typical misspelling that might occur. "There really is no core technology in that approach--it’s all manual labor," he says. "And there is no possible way that you are going to be able to enumerate every possible misspelling for every product."
Netrics’ approach doesn’t require anyone to figure out all the possible misspellings of a search term, he reports. The algorithms underlying Netrics’ search technology do the work of finding all the different ways a product description could match a searched term. "Computers by nature are very good at determining when two things are equal, but unlike humans, can’t determine similarity," says Damianakis. Netrics’ technology is built on a mathematical model that allows the computer to determine similarity automatically. In essence, he says, it gives the computer the intelligence to look at two items and model the human notion of similarity, without needing to establish a list of possible misspellings to attach to product descriptions so as to capture those erroneous spellings.
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