C# Finding relevant document snippets for search result display

Question

In developing search for a site I am building, I decided to go the cheap and quick way and use Microsoft Sql Server\'s Full Text Search engine instead of something more robust l

Answer 1

This is a nice problem :)

I think I'd create an index vector: For each word, create an entry 1 if search term or otherwise 0. Then find the i such that sum(indexvector[i:i+maxlength]) is maximized.

This can actually be done rather efficiently. Start with the number of searchterms in the first maxlength words. then, as you move on, decrease your counter if indexvector[i]=1 (i.e. your about to lose that search term as you increase i) and increase it if indexvector[i+maxlength+1]=1. As you go, keep track of the i with the highest counter value.

Once you got your favourite i, you can still do finetuning like see if you can reduce the actual size without compromising your counter, e.g. in order to find sentence boundaries or whatever. Or like picking the right i of a number of is with equivalent counter values.

Not sure if this is a better approach than yours - it's a different one.

You might also want to check out this paper on the topic, which comes with yet-another baseline: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.4357&rep=rep1&type=pdf