Keyword Search is the process of searching for a given word or phrase in a text corpus. This can be done with Boolean operators and other search techniques. The results of a keyword search can be used to find documents that are relevant to a given topic, or to find all instances of a particular word or phrase in a corpus.
Keyword Search is sometimes confused with other terms, such as Concept Search, Entity Search, and Semantic Search. However, these terms have different meanings within the text analytics industry.
Concept Search is the process of searching for documents that are semantically similar to a given query. This can be done using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or other methods.
The results of a concept search are typically a set of documents that are similar to the query, but may not contain the query terms themselves.
Entity Search is the process of finding all instances of a particular entity in a text corpus. This can be done using Named Entity Recognition (NER) or other methods. The results of an entity search will typically be a list of all entities that were found in the corpus, along with their frequencies.
Semantic Search is the process of searching for documents that are semantically similar to a given query. This can be done using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or other methods. The results of a semantic search are typically a set of documents that are similar to the query, but may not contain the query terms themselves.
Why use Keyword Search ?
Keyword Search has a number of advantages over other search methods. First, it is very fast and scalable. It can be applied to large text corpora with little effort. Second, it is very flexible. Boolean operators can be used to create complex queries, and the results of a keyword search can be further processed and analyzed. Finally, keyword search is well-suited for ad hoc queries, or queries that are not well-defined ahead of time.
How Keyword Search Works
The basic principle behind keyword search is simple: given a word or phrase, find all documents that contain that word or phrase. However, there are many different ways to implement keyword search, and the details can vary depending on the application.