[WEB4LIB] search engine capable of highlighting

[Avi Rappoport]

At 6:17 AM -0800 1/13/2000, Barbara Stewart wrote:
>I am interested in knowing whether a search engine exists that highlights
>keywords in the document that it is searching. I know that Google
>highlights the key words in a short abstract, and this is useful, but it
>is very time intensive to visually search through long documents for your
>particular keyword requested. I took part in a study about a year ago
>where keywords of requested texts were color coded separately in the text
>- and found this incredibly useful. For example, if you were searching for
>+antique +bottles +"new england", when you went to the text retrieved,
>+antique would appear highlighted in red, +bottles would appear
>highlighted in green, and +"new england" would appear in yellow.
>Not only was this useful to judge relevancy of a document almost
>immediately, it saved much time because you could see'groupings' at a
>glance. So if you were more interested in the +bottles aspect of things,
>you would just search for documents with lots of green highlights, and
>skip over those documents that were predominantly yellow highlighted. Does
>this exist anywhere currently?

Infoseek also highlights the matching terms in the results page text extract.

None of the big public search engines I know of has a display of the 
actual page with the search terms highlighted, but Verity and 
Excalibur RetrievalWare have products that do perform that task, and 
it's often quite useful.

Hope that helps,

Avi

PS is the study published?  I'd love to learn more about what they found.
-- 
________________________________________________________________
Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Maven: <mailto:avirr at lanminds.com>
Guide to Site Indexing and Local Search Engines: <http://www.searchtools.com>