Internal Revenus Service/AltaVista

[Nick Arnett]

At 02:14 PM 4/22/97 -0700, Bill Crosbie wrote:

>I think that it is important to realize that Alta-Vista did exactly what it
>was supposed to do.  It behaved exactly the same as any other search engine
>would have performed given the (wrong) data that it had to index with.

Sorry, but that's simply not true.  Advanced search engines go well beyond
just looking for words in the document and counting their density.  They're
not as good as humans at understanding the nature of a document, but they're
a lot better than this example.  Another clue should have been the absence
of search terms or related concepts in the title and headings.

But the bottom line is that it's somehow more politically correct to blame
the "stupid" human than to build a smarter search engine.  That's wrong, in
my opinion.  People don't enter one- or two-word queries because they are
stupid -- they don't walk up to librarians and say "Internet Revenue
Service" and expect good answers.  They ask these short, broad questions of
the search software because experience has taught them that it is stupid and
won't carry out the dialog that a librarian would to find out what they
really mean.

Nick

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