More on Advanced Match

Posted: October 3, 2004

Advanced match works differently than broad match.
The system analyzes the entire query.
It checks for standard matches.
It then checks the advanced matches.

Standard matches are shown first.
Advanced matches are run through filters.

An advanced match must have everyword in the query – it doesn’t broad match similar keywords like Google where ‘ring’ can be matched to ‘jewelry’. It does use stemming matches though.
See: http://www.content.overture.com/d/AUm/ac/ba/mt_int.jhtml

It then has another algo that determines if the searched for query is close enough to the advanced matches to show. In a lot of cases, ‘junk keywords’ can’t be matched to anything – so no matches are shown.

Now, the above is more sophisticated than it sounds.
A search for ‘red widget Alaska asdfe’ will usually show an ad for ‘red widget Alaska’ as 3 out of 4 words are identical.

The search for ‘widget asdfead’ most likely won’t show anything as half the words aren’t matched to anything.

Advanced match is good to use to pick up phrases like ‘buy a red widget’, ‘buying red widgets’, ‘finding pink & red widgets’ etc.

Geo based keywords stop a lot of advanced matches. Overture has worked hard on ‘Overture Local’, and many geo qualified terms stop advanced matches unless the geo term is included in the phrase. This isn’t true for many product searches (like wedding gift), but it is true for many local services, like ‘dentist’.

However, their geo terms aren’t perfect yet. A search for ‘Juneau Alaska dentist office’ brings up 0 results, where a search for ‘Alaska dentist office’, brings up a pageful (and some have the keyword phrase ‘Alaska dentist’), so the system should be showing the ad for ‘Alaska dentist’ in that search – but it’s not for some reason.

I think we’ll see advanced match showing more impressions over time. Not because of increased search volume, but because the system will start to better target geo qualified terms and understand longer product based phrases (i.e. buying a wedding gift in Chicago)

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