Improving searching usability in direct shopping portals

E-commerce became very popular in recent years because of the great success achieved by some applications such as online auctions. However, currently the trend is that users of these portals execute more transactions in direct shopping than in online auctions and, probably because of the beginning of many of such portals as auctioning sites, their effectiveness decreases when searching for products in the direct shopping context. In this paper, we introduce a usability-improved fuzzy searching mechanism that allows the specification of uncertain and vague searching preferences to return more relevant results in direct shopping.