As a component to a product search and browsing portal,
where screen real-estate is is shared with browsing controls,
product listings, merchant oerings and advertisements, a
high-precision ranking is crucial. For this reason, we focus
on the precision of the ranked list of top forums at the rst
ve rank positions. Table 2 shows the precision of the system
averaged across all 96 queries. From this gure, we can see
that precision at the top rank exceeds 85%, and drops to
just under 80% at rank position ve.
Figure 3 shows the precision at the top rank position for
the product categories with the most queries in our dataset.
From this gure we can see that there is a range in perfor-
mance across categories, with some categories like hand-
helds & pdas" retrieving a relevant result at the top rank
100% of the time. Other categories like computer moni-
tors" have much lower precision, only retrieving a relevant
forum 63% of the time.