Welcome to Match4J

Match4J is a match engine, an advanced search engine for searching in structured and semi-structured data. Match4J provides better search results by using knowledge about the data, instead of appearances of keywords in the data.

The well known search engines are based on instances of keywords in text documents. These search engines handle documents as meaningless pieces of text.

The current generation of search engines only finds the information that exactly matches the search criteria and not the information that looks like it. Phrases like relevance and quality of the results are unknown to the current search engines.

When the meaning of information is available, better search methods are possible than the text based search engines offer.

Searching becomes matching.

How does the Match4J match engine work?
Match4J uses three types of information:

• dataset: contains the data to search in;
• request: indicates what to search for;
• matchrules: indicate how to match the request
  with the elements from the dataset.

The image above shows how this works: For each element from the dataset, the element is matched against the request by a collection of match rules. This leads to a match score. The higher the score, the better the match.

Applications
Matching can be used in many applications. For example employment bureaus that try to match jobs to candidates. Another example are websites where you can search for your ideal home or car. The advanced matching technology of Match4J will produce better search results because it has more knowledge of the data you are searching in.