Difference between a search engine's relevance rankings and a recommender system [closed]

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Questions concerning problems with code you've written must describe the specific problem — and include valid code to reproduce it — in the question itself. See SSCCE.org for guidance.

Closed 8 years ago.

Improve this question

What's the difference between a search engine's relevance rankings and a recommender system?

Don't both try and achieve the same purpose, i.e. finding the most relevant items for the user?

Answer 1

There is a major difference between a search engine and a recommender system:

1. In a search engine, the user knows what he is looking for, and he makes the query ! For instance, I might wonder if I should go to see a movie, and search information about it, like actors and directors.
2. In a recommender system, the user isn't supposed to know what we are recommending to her. We match her tastes with neighbours or whatever algorithm you like, and find things that she would't have looked after, like a new movie!

One is more about information retrieval, while the other is more about information filtering and discovery.

Answer 2

No, there are at two differents levels of analysis.

A search engine, look into a collection of data to get data that match a query. Even if all result are identicals or the results doesn't change from day to day. Very like a special form of databases.

The recommender system, use informations about you to provide specific improved content about the searched data. Very like a servant that know you well and use search engine for you.

Beward, some tool that starts as web-search engine are now more like recommender system.