Best bets: thousands of queries in search of a client

A number of applications require selecting targets for specific contents on the basis of criteria defined by the contents providers themselves. Performing this task requires inverting the direction of search, retrieving queries from documents rather than vice versa, as in ordinary information retrieval. We present a retrieval system called Best Bets that handles this case. Best Bets generalize Information Filtering and encompass a variety of applications including editorial suggestions, promotional campaigns and targeted advertising. In particular we show how to model Google AdWords™ as a Best Bets system. We discuss how to address performance issues in the implementation of Best Bets, in particular efficient search, incremental updates and dynamic ranking. We report about experiments on an implementation of our techniques and a comparison with previous approaches.contributing with indexes to a central location where the indexes are integrated and deployed for running a search service. Participatory search has distinguishing characteristics with respect to other search service architectures, among these the ability to share with others material which is not available to search engine crawlers. We present the architecture for participatory search and a protocol for index exchange that we are developing. A deployment niche for participatory search is the implementation of search services for community networks