Agents (Was Re: Students use of search engines.)

[Paul Hollands]

At 12:46 04/06/96 -0700, Gail Wanner wrote:
>Instead of trying to convince students (and others) that they need to
>learn the complexities of web searching, perhaps we should be trying to
>improve the searching so that people are successful in their searches
>without special training?  Most people find information in the phone book
>without needing to be trained & they expect the web (and library catalogs)
>to be basically the same.   

Can you find all the phone numbers of all the people who live on my street
quickly from a telephone directory? Sorry but any form of information
retrieval requires you learn new skills if you want to get beyond even the
most perfunctory search.

The Holy Grail of electronic information retrieval is precision natural
language searching. Unfortunately, having tested Natural Language engines in
my previous job  which could handle questions like "Give me reports about
airbag crash tests that failed.." we still found that bog standard boolean
searching gave much greater precision.

If you want to see the future, check out an Article entitled 'Agents of
change' in the May 96 issue of Internet World. I think that eventually no
one will ever touch a search engine. All searching will be done on your
behalf by agents.

Also check out the May edition of Wired called "Seek and ye shall find
(maybe)" for an insight into how existing engines are developed. ('Best
phrase in the article' award goes to 'The problem of information retrieval
can be nailed down to synonymy and homonymy.' I think there's a drinking
game in there somewhere. :-)  )

****************************************
Paul Hollands <p.j.hollands at lboro.ac.uk>
Internet Information Officer
Loughborough University UK 01509 222373
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/info/training/e_sources_main.html