Many consumers desire to order items or goods remotely, e.g., on-line, through the Internet, or using a specially designed application or app on a personal computer or mobile device, such as a tablet or cell phone. At least some known web hosting systems include search engines that allow consumers to enter search criteria and generate search results based on the consumer's search criteria. Known search engines may generate and display product lists to consumers via a website including products that are selected based on the search criteria. Some known search engines may also generate search relevance scores associated with selected products based on the search terms entered by the consumer.
In addition, known search engines may sort the selected products based on product price. However, these known search engines may not take the relevance scores into account when displaying products arranged based on price in either low to high price sorts or high to low price sorts. Rather, these known search engines simply sort results in ascending or descending order of price, which provides no guarantees on relevance of products and often leads to highly irrelevant products showing up at the top of a sorted list. Overtime, consumers may become frustrated with the displayed results, in part, because the sorted lists do not display products that are relevant to the consumers needs.
In addition, in response to a product search request, at least some known search engines retrieve each product record contained in a database and display each product record in a sorted list. Because of the number of product records that may be included in a product database, at least some known search engines require significant computing time and resources to generate and display the sorted product lists to the consumer. As the amount of product records being included in a database increases, the amount of computing resources that are required to perform the search functions increase, thus reducing the overall performance of known web hosting systems.
The present invention is aimed at one or more of the problems identified above.