Monday, February 12, 2007

Added posts similar

If you click on the permalink for any story, you'll now see a list of any stories that are contextually similar.

The method we use to do this is very crude yet it seems to be highly accurate. And, it's very fast and adds almost no time to the time it takes to build an update.

The content of the actual story is not considered. For instance, Barack Obama's web site shows up as highly similar to Hillary Clinton's web site, though if you were looking for similarity based on the content of those pages alone it would be very difficult to detect that relationship.

At some future date we might add a second list of stories similar by content, or we might decide it would be better to combine the two similarity measures.