METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ASSESSING SIMILARITY BETWEEN ONLINE JOB LISTINGS

Job listings retrieved from external sources are pre-processed prior to being stored in the search engine production database and duplicate records identified prior to storage in a production database for the search engine. Inter-source and intra-source hash values are calculated for each job listing and the values compared. Job listings having the same intra-source hash are judged to be duplicates of each other. Descriptions whose intra-source hash values do not match, but whose inter-source hash values match are judged to be duplicate candidates and subject to further processing. Suffixes for each such record are stored to a data structure such as a suffix array and the records searched and compared based on the suffix arrays. Records having a pre-determined number of contiguous words in common are judged to be duplicates. Duplicate records are identified before the data set is stored to the production data base.