Finding buying guides with a Web carnivore

Abstract

Research on buying behavior indicates that buying guides perform an important role in the overall buying process. However, while the Web contains many buying guides, finding those guides is difficult to impossible for the average consumer. Web search engines typically index many buying guides on many topics, but simple queries do not often return these results. Given this, we built a Web carnivore that finds buying guides on behalf of consumers. Web carnivores leverage the crawling, scrubbing, indexing and ranking activities of Web search engines (the "herbivores") to provide more specific services. Ours finds buying guides by issuing machine-generated queries to google and filtering the results. We describe our system and quantitatively compares it to a basic search engine. Our system almost always returns more buying guides, often twice as many. Our user study also suggests that we return better buying guides. Finding buying guides is an instance of the more general problem of "genre search;" we point out novel aspects of our system that are applicable to a variety of genre-search problems.