'Child biting' -- response from Northern Light

[Joyce Ward]

Chizuko,

Northern Light interprets the queries 

	child biting 
and

	+child +biting

in the same way: 

	child [and] biting

and retrieves the same number of documents (7,728) for each.  The words in
the document are not
required to appear next to one another.  (If you want the phrase "child
biting", put it in quotes.  This retrieves 14 documents, where the terms
are proximate.) 

The documents are displayed in somewhat different relevancy order in these
two quereis because in the +child +biting case, we don't use phrase info in
the ranking, since the assumption was that phrases would be entered as

	child biting

or
	"child biting"

but not

	+child +biting.

We have noticed that people do sometimes use the 'plus' syntax when they
mean a phrase, so we are considering changing the ranking so that it would
be identical with or without the plus's.

As for the duplicates you noted, the two documents are not exact
duplicates...slightly
different links out at the bottom, one of which contains the word 'child'
and thus causes that document to rank higher.

Joyce Ward & Marc Krellenstein