my 2c worth:
just as important as decent search functionality is the ability to
quickly review the results for relevance.
one of the things I like about Google is the keywords being *bolded* in
the search results (like mail-archive.com already does) but in using
Google's "cached" link, shows the item in full with the keywords
highlighted. It makes it brilliant to see the keywords in context,
allowing quick scanning of the item for relevance - down to a couple of
seconds. Additionally, seeing the keywords in full context is far more
useful to me than some indicator saying the item has "75%" relevance...
>A tutorial would be helpful.
can I respectfully suggest that if a tutorial is needed then it's not
intuitive enough anyway? At least not without a bit of experimentation
to see what makes it tick...
just some polite suggestions, nothing more
cheers
barry.b
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: search library battle royale (Jeff Breidenbach)
2. Re: search library battle royale (Mac Oglesby)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 21:01:09 -0700
From: "Jeff Breidenbach" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Gossip] search library battle royale
To: "Mac Oglesby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: gossip@jab.org
Message-ID:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I don't understand a lot of what's been said about evaluating these
search engines, but I'll comment anyway.
Thanks, appreciated. Much of what's been said is just me having fun.
Since, for me at least, easy to use but full-featured search software
is a vital part of any archive, the ideal search engine should be
powerful, yet intuitive to operate, or come with good instructions. A
tutorial would be helpful.
That's a great point. Once we've settled on which search
software to use, I promise to make sure there's a "help" link
leading to some examples. In the meantime, here's some
documentation from the two vendors. To my eye, they are both
offer ridiculously overpowered. Kind of like monster trucks. :)
PyLucene:
http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html.
Xapian:
http://www.xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html
I'd like to be able to search the results of an earlier search.
Here's an example of two searches. The second will return a
subset of the first.
"Mac Oglesby"
"Mac Oglesby" AND machines
Xapian even has a super fancy algorithm that tries to figure out
subtopics within search results. It is way too confusing for my taste,
but you can see it action below. Apparently the software thinks
you are into dipleidoscopes and ebay. Are you?
http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/omega/omega?P=%22Mac+Oglesby%22&DEFAULTOP=or&DB=sundial%40rrz.uni-koeln.de&FMT=query.orig&xP=Rmac.Roglesby.machin.&xDB=sundial%40rrz.uni-koeln.de&xFILTERS=--O
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 09:26:04 -0400
From: Mac Oglesby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Gossip] search library battle royale
To: jeff@jab.org
Cc: gossip@jab.org
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
Hi Jeff,
Once we've settled on which search
software to use, I promise to make sure there's a "help" link
leading to some examples. In the meantime, here's some
documentation from the two vendors. To my eye, they are both
offer ridiculously overpowered. Kind of like monster trucks. :)
Thanks for your time and the examples you developed. And thanks for
your promise to post a help link. Please keep in mind that when those
of you who already know a process try to explain it to those of us
who don't, the result, far too often, is about as clear as mud.
Xapian even has a super fancy algorithm that tries to figure out
subtopics within search results. It is way too confusing for my taste,
but you can see it action below. Apparently the software thinks
you are into dipleidoscopes and ebay. Are you?
http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/omega/omega?P=%22Mac+Oglesby%22&DEFAULTOP=or&DB=sundial%40rrz.uni-koeln.de&FMT=query.orig&xP=Rmac.Roglesby.machin.&xDB=sundial%40rrz.uni-koeln.de&xFILTERS=--O
Well, just about everyone is into eBay. And if you aren't into
dipleidoscopes yet, what's holding you back? ;-)
It's almost frightening how much information we voluntarily put out
there for anyone to see!
It's beyond frightening to see what that Xapian search string looks like!
On the other hand, it seems as though you intend to improve our
archive search tools and help us understand how to use them.
Thank you.
Mac
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