[Sigia-l] String search question

[David Heller]

Hi Everyone,

Thanx Eric and Andrew for your responses.

Some clarifications:
1. This system is not a content site but an content management system where
people are going to search the contents and the metadata of unstructured
data. It is similar to a content site, but different in that the name of
objects is more important and more similarly behaves like an OS file system.

I think this is why the vid=video is important.

In general I'm trying to decide where I can assume google like search
behavior as a standard to build upon and where I have to use windows
explorer find as a standard.

Andrew is right that there just aren't any conventions other than the
ubiquity of OS and google to stand upon.

-- dave



-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf Of
Eric Reiss
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 11:01 AM
To: andrew.gent at hp.com; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] String search question

David, 

I assume you're referring to site search tools.

Our experience suggests that people usually expect the site search to take
things pretty literally, video = video. 

Users also take the Boolean operator AND for granted if more than one
keyword is entered - even if they don't actually know what a Boolean
operator is.

They expect the search box to respect a phrase search enclosed in quotes.
Note: people who do phrase searches are generally pretty search-saavy.

So much for the basic expectations.

Most important of all, users desparately want the results page to give them
more than just a page title. An executive summary, or a short page excerpt
(particularly if it highlight the search term) makes people VERY happy. This
is without question the single best way to improve the usability of a site
search engine.

To get back to your question regarding vid = video = david, people don't
usually search for parts of words unless they are experienced searchers,
sloppy, or lazy. The danger in allowing partial word searches is that you
can end up with an idiotically large number of search returns, which
irritates people. On the other hand, a good thesaurus, hidden in the back,
is great for dealing with the problem of plurals and acknowledging common
spelling errors.

Hope this helps.

All my best,
Eric

e-reiss.com
copenhagen, denmark

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