[Sigia-l] search results and thesauri

[Charles Hanson]

If I am a user of this system, my primary goal is to get results that are "relevant."
The underlying vocabulary structure may matter to me, or it may not. If the results are useful, then I suspect I won't care as much, but if the results are not useful, then I will be looking around for additional aids, one of which may be a way in to the vocabulary structure and the ability to search for alternate terms.  

If my search term is truly a synonym to a preferred term within the controlled vocabulary, rather than a "related term," then I am more likely to obtain a satisfying result and thus presumably less interested in the vocabulary in general.  I think that exposure to the vocabulary is more of an issue in the case where there are *no* results, or where there is no direct match to the search term within the vocabulary.  

There's certainly a benefit to noting the underlying relationship between query term and index term regardless -- users can always ignore it if they aren't interested.  But in the search results I don't think you want to highlight anything other than the direct matches to the user's search terms, otherwise the sense of control is diminished.  

Charles 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ziya Oz [mailto:ZiyaOz at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 11:24 PM
To: SIGIA list
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] search results and thesauri


"Michael Fry" wrote:

> So I guess my question is this: any recommendations for how you'd 
> display the results in a scenario like this? Would you explicitly 
> alert users to the cat-feline relationship so they better understand 
> and appreciate the results? Would you simply choose not to show search 
> terms in context? Something else?

If you expect words having *multiple* synonyms then arbitrarily selecting one of the synonyms and returning results based on that is, well, arbitrary. In that case, it'd be better to tell users that there was no direct hit and ask them which one of the synonyms they'd like to see results for. That's client/UI side.

On the server side, if optimization matters to you, then you need to consider the effects *automatically* sending result sets to the browser. If the user is not interested/familiar with 'feline' you wasted their time, network bandwidth and server efficiency. On the other hand, giving them a selection to choose from may mean a query is repeated at the server side, with another round trip.

Of course, this is a perfect case for looking at logs to see which method is more efficient for *your* app and users, from a technical POV.

Best,

Ziya

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