GTE SuperPages: Using IR Techniques for Searching Complex Objects

The yellow pages service of GTE SuperPages enables Web users to flexibly search through liitings of 11 million businesses in over 17000 categories. To achieve the flexibility desired it uses an Information Retrieval (IR) engine to search through complex listing objects. The objects themselves are stored in an object database. The use of the IR engine enables us to create an index that spans all the components of a complex object.