inconsistencies web search performance

[Leonard Will]

In article <3.0.3.32.19971107154908.0076e9f8 at panix.com>, "Karen G.
Schneider" <kgs at bluehighways.com> writes
>Imho, the problem with controlled vocabularies--what makes them
>idiosyncratic--is that they are not associated with an intelligent
>mechanism that can reason, as the human brain does, "water closet = toilet"
>or "smile is near grin," then pocket that information for further use.

Surely the whole point of a controlled vocabulary, in the form of a
structured thesaurus, is that an intelligent human can make and record
these links, so that the machine doesn't have to. This is not a problem
of controlled vocabularies, it is their strength.

Rather than relying on machines to group terms on the basis of chance
co-occurrences, we should be developing a good thesaurus (or its big
brother, a semantic net). Search software should then either use this
automatically to find other terms to include in a search or should allow
a user to interact with it at search time, by asking questions such as:
"There's not much in the database on 'water closets'; would you like me
to search for 'toilets' too, or should I include all sorts of bathroom
fittings?"

One way in which this can be done has been shown by Eric H. Johnson and
Pauline A. Cochrane in "A Hypertextual Interface for a Searcher's
Thesaurus" available at:

http://csdl.tamu.edu/DL95/papers/johncoch/johncoch.html


Leonard Will
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