19. The method of claim 18 , wherein performing the normalization process includes conducting a query for the one or more topics in the topic database using a crowd-sourced information source, and updating the topic database based at least in part on the results of the search query.
18. A method for improving search and retrieval of input items being published to a computer network, the method comprising: while publishing one or more input items to the computer network: identifying, by a computing device, one or more external data sources; retrieving, by the computing device, topics from the identified one or more external data sources; aggregating, by the computing device, the topics into a topic database; generalizing, by the computing device, the topic database by performing a normalization process; conducting a query, by the computing device in a publicly available search engine, for each topic in the generalized topic database; constructing, by the computing device and based at least in part on the results of the query, a topic context database; identifying, by the computing device, information about the one or more input items, wherein the information about the input item comprises a title; conducting a query, by the computing device in a publicly available search engine, for content in the title for the one or more input items; constructing, by the computing device and based at least in part on the results of the query, a respective title context for the one or more input items; comparing, by the computing device, the title context and the one or more topics in the topic context database using a text similarity computation model; determine, by the computing device and based at least in part on the results of the comparison, one or more topics from the topic context database with which to annotate the one or more input items; and after annotating, by the computing device, the one or more input items based on the determined topics, publishing, by the computing device, the one or more items to the computer network.