posted 11 years ago
Hi Paul,
The Frankenstein example in the first chapter is really just a toy to get people thinking about the problem space. Chapter 8 contains a system that is a few levels up, but still not production ready, IMO. I would suggest that the concepts and basic principles are applicable for a web-based engine, but there is a whole lot more engineering and capabilities that need to go into a system in order to make it effective in that area. I would say, it is a bit closer to ready if you are looking for a bit smaller scale, but you still have a lot of work to do, as the example really only handles simple fact-based questions and only returns a window around the candidate answer.
As for performance at web scale, you often will need leverage some type of distributed text analysis pipeline up front to handle the incoming documents.
HTH,
Grant