Recently I sat in on a very interesting presentation on an advanced search and matching engine called Elise. The power of this engine lies in the fact that it does not just query records, returning the set of records that satisfy the search criteria – although it has some pretty advanced search filters and operators, but is able to score all records according to the match criteria. Every record gets a score – which can be zero, meaning that not a single search criteria matched even the smallest way. Higher scores mean better matches on more, or on the most important, criteria.

Many search operations do not necessarily need perfect matches. They need possibly multiple results that are all matches to a certain degree. Google for example returns web pages that meet your search criteria to a certain degree. The most relevant matches are at the top of the search results – or at least that is the intention. Searching for interesting job vacancies, holiday destinations, new real estate, electronic devices, dating partners on a e-dating site, books on Oracle technology are other examples of searches that look for best matches given criteria, not necessarily perfects fits for all criteria More >