Moving from search toward assistance in the next generation e-marketplaces for small business

The present research paper introduces and discusses a novel approach to business-matching and recommending systems for next-generation e-marketplaces. The goal from this approach is to shift the focus from search-oriented matching, toward assistance-providing business matching, especially for small businesses. The proposed matching system makes use of Collective Intelligence (CI) means to identify and recommend business opportunities that are best correlated with the user´s need. At first, the content of business proposals and compannies´ profiles are parsed and indexed. The indexed data may be collected from electronically submitted entries as well as from scanned or handwritten documents. The search engine starts by expanding the queried keywords in order to enable an intuitive-like search. The look-up results are then filtered based on compatibility scoring mechanisms, based on CI techniques. The personalized business-matching results and recommendations are then served to the user via a novel visual interactive graphical interface. An experimental prototype applying the proposed and described approach is developed and being experimentally tested to fully demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed system on real-world data.