Monday, January 26, 2009
Keeping things in (partial) order
In this second episode of the series in which I publish some code from my repository, I will discuss about making order in our life… well… at least in a long vector of objects… OK, just a small part of that vector.
This is a fundamental aspect of search engines: you are interested in getting only the k most relevant results, whatever the size of the collection you are searching on is.
The k value is usually very small with respect to the collection size, e.g. on the Web one is likely to look at just the first ten-twenty results. Search engines typically set a z value of maximum returned results that is designed to be larger than the largest part of possible k values, e.g. Google returns at most one thousand results.
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