By Alice Swanberg, of Searchme’s Search Quality department. Alice is a librarian who is responsible for creating, organizing and training the categories that you see on Searchme.

My colleague Dr. Glover wrote in earlier posts about how the classification system works with our ontology. I’d like to write a bit about how and why the categories in the ontology were chosen.

In the early days of the Web, there weren’t many sites out there. That meant it was possible to build a category structure, hire people to find all those sites, and fit those sites into that structure. This model continued for a few years before the snowballing number of sites meant that no human team could fit all of them into a structure. At that point, most search companies gave up on human-generated categories as part of search and began to rely on sophisticated search algorithms to bring up the content users wanted.

As a librarian working for Internet companies, I’ve spent ten years helping design the biggest and most complex category structures on the Web. I joined Searchme because I was really excited to find a company that believed that neither an algorithm nor human intervention should be the dominant factor in building good search results. Human-generated meanings could be overlaid onto a smart search engine to bring about a new sort of search experience.

The category structures I worked with in the past have a strict hierarchy that doesn’t change very much over time. This makes them very easy to browse, as long as you understand where everything is - but that would take some study! These kinds of hierarchical taxonomies tend to offer users just one path through thousands of categories to their goal, and that path is not always easy to figure out.

That’s a very little background on category-based search and its uses. Next I will write a bit about how Searchme is approaching it.

Next: How We Choose Categories - Part Two

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