Web Search Engines "Made Simple"

[Bob Duncan]

At 12:49 PM 11/6/97, narnett at verity.com wrote:
>
>I don't think InfoSeek treats "date rape" as a simple phrase.  I believe
>they're doing some sort of free text parsing in attempt to figure out the
>subject the user is seeking.

Could be, but behavior is not consistent. So, people tell me I can search
for a phrase by enclosing it in quotes, then the same people tell their
machine to ignore my phrase and figure out what I'm searching for? That
makes a lot of sense. And why would a machine "attempt to figure out the
subject the user is seeking" when no subject indexing exists? (There's more
than a semantic difference between an engine determining whether a record
is relevant to a search query, and determining the "subject" of that same
record.)

>I would strongly agree that no search engine, including ours, makes much of
>anything "simple" unless you know exactly what you want and how it differs
>from the other documents in the collection.

Perhaps searching would be more efficient if engines *did not* try to make
something of "simple" requests when I know exactly what I want.

Bob Duncan


  ~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~
  Robert E. Duncan
  Reference/Instruction Librarian
  David Bishop Skillman Library
  Lafayette College
  Easton, PA  18042
  duncanr at lafayette.edu
  http://www.lafayette.edu/faculty/duncanr/