BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Field of the Invention

The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, it relates to a method, system, and computer-usable medium for optimizing the execution of rules modifying search results.

Description of the Related Art

With the increased usage of computing networks, such as the Internet, users are currently inundated and overwhelmed with the amount of information available to them from various structured and unstructured sources. Information gaps abound as users try to piece together what they can find that they believe to be relevant during searches for information on various subjects. To assist with such searches, recent research has been directed to generating knowledge management systems which may take an input, analyze it, and return results indicative of the most probable results to the input. Knowledge management systems provide automated mechanisms for searching through a knowledge base with numerous sources of content, e.g., electronic documents, and analyze them with regard to an input to determine a result and a confidence measure as to how accurate the result is in relation to the input.

Online commerce with numerous shoppers and merchants, makes use of such knowledge management systems. Merchants typically have various items, such as goods and services to offer shoppers. Shoppers may not be certain as to which items they would like to purchase. The use of knowledge management systems can assist merchants in selling their items and shoppers in finding items to purchase.

Typically, a prospective shopper visits a merchant's website, and searching is performed for items that are offered by the merchant. A search result list with items available from the merchant is returned to the shopper. In order to maximize profitability, merchants may use rules (i.e., search rules) that influence searches of items. For example, search rules may return search results of items that are of special interest to a merchant, such as items that have a high profit margin, items that are in high stock, items that have a great promotional value, etc. A search result list based on the search, provides for the special interest items of the merchant to be at the top of the search result list, and is returned to the shopper.

The search result list should be sent to a shopper relatively quickly. If a search takes too long, the shopper may leave the merchant's website and go to another merchant's website. Merchants' search rules can be complex and require considerable resources to process, such as computing and memory resources. The challenge is to use such search rules and maximize the resources that implement the search rules. This is especially challenging, for example, when implementing multi-tenant (i.e., merchant) micro-service based environments with multiple evaluation models processing different merchant search rules that are hosted and evaluated.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

A method, system and computer-usable medium are disclosed for optimizing of search rules modifying search results. A rules service is initiated prior to executing a search query from a shopper for items from a merchant. A search rule evaluation is performed for the given search request modification by implementing search rules where conditions are determined to be true for the given search query and implementing a search rule causes actions defined by that search rule to be applied to the given search query. A list of search rules that are fired or implemented for the given search query is stored. A corresponding search rule evaluation tracking record is built based on search rule evaluation that includes rule impact tracking (RIT) records.

