'Laddering search service' ???

[Taro Toporific]

As a follow-up to the infamous "5th Generation Project", the world's greatest failure in government-sponsored science, METI's 'Information Grand Voyage Project' is sponsoring this project socking 'laddering search service'?

[floatl][/floatl]

[INDENT]Oki, Recruit to develop 'laddering search service'
Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 11:11 EDT
JapanToaday,
TOKYO ---Oki Electric Industry Co on Thursday announced that it will begin the development of a next generation laddering search service with Recruit Co. This is a service that enables systems to throw out questions to Internet users who are searching, and extract keywords and expressions from them.
With this additional information the system pulls out the services and content that meet the real user-need from the vast amount of content on the Internet...blithering, blah, blah, babble...[/INDENT]

Does anyone have an idea what is actually meant by this garbled translation?
What is the normal technical expression for this 'laddering' search method?

[Kuang_Grade]

There seems to be several listings that have been cribbed from one another concerning a "ladder of generalization" or "LOG" in relation to how to develop a search strategy when using search engines....

http://novella.mhhe.com/sites/0079876543/student_view0/research_center-999/research_center_links33/chapter_2.html

Most of your search terms will be nouns (since nouns name persons, places, things, ideas, concepts, events and so on), and nouns exist along a continuum from very specific ( KH-11 ) to more general ( satellite photograph ) to even more general ( earth image ) to very abstract ( planetary representation ). The farther up the ladder of generalization you go, the broader and more inclusive the term, and hence, generally speaking, the more hits you will get. For example, KH-11 returns 4500 hits and earth image (as an exact phrase--see Chapter 3) returns 7500. You can to some extent control the number of results you get in your searches by moving up or down the ladder of generalization. But remember that the further up you go, the less focused the results may be.

Although the snippet you have sounds like it is more of natural language system with some self learning aspects that will respond to a query of "porn" with "are you looking for ___ or ____ or ____ or something else? instead of throwing back a result of 132 million listings like google does for the term "porn"

[GomiGirl]

I have heard them called "Stairways to Heaven".