[Sigia-l] a word or two that means 'go to advanced search'

[Listera]

"Louis Rosenfeld" wrote:

> In any case, it's always good to question whether "Advanced Search" is
> really necessary; while it may be a convention, it usually seems to be a
> useless one.

Unless, of course, you actually need one.

Simple example: You have a search engine to a mail list (remarkably like
this one :-) The user wants to see posts from a specific person.

Search:  "Mr. Seldom"  GO>

This finds, presumably, all posts not just FROM Mr. Seldom (who doesn't
bother to post unless he's promoting a book), but also any other post that
mentions Mr. Seldom. So you get a long list, instead of the one or two you
expected.

Now, you can provide a filter on this results page and force the user to do
another search. This is a waste of the user's time (let's assume he knows
what he wants) and an extra burden on the backend resources which must make
a trip to the database, find records and ship them to the browser over the
network, just so that the filter that should have been available to begin
with can be offered *after* the fact.

As an occasional problem, this may be tolerable. In an intranet situation or
a highly-frequented search engine used by professionals, it may not be.
Having to search *twice* just to perform a simple filter like:

Search |From|:  "Mr. Seldom"  GO>

would be irritating time after time, to say the least.

As XML/structured data/info become more prevalent, segmented/'advanced'
searches (which would produce really specific, on-the-money results) may
indeed become far more attractive/necessary even in more general contexts.

'Useless'? Like all things IA, it all depends.

Best,

Ziya