Adding Searching to the Blog

Chad Fowler (www.chadfowler.com) got me interested in searching when he published an article on Latent Semantic Indexing (here). Between us we dinged around with the simple part (building the vectors and calculating cosine differences between articles). The interesting part, using Singular Value Decomposition to cluster articles into What’s Related groups is currently beyond my rather pathetic math (somehow I seem to have managed to have either skipped or forgotten any classes on matrices). However, in the meantime it turns out to be rather easy to use the word vectors to implement straightforward searches of the blog. So, while I’m waiting for someone who knows what they’d doing to explain the SVD computation, I’ve made the simple search facility available as a plug-in for the sidebar.