[Sigia-l] String search question

[James Kalbach]

David,

[Andrew wrote]
> ... There is little "common practice" to help you do what
> users expect. The best you might do is include minimalistic instructions
> below the box. (E.g. "separate words with commas" or "Matches all words"
> as opposed to "Matches any word")

Agreed. But, there may indeed be more you can do: reveal any query
transformations in the results. That is, somehow indicate implicit
operators, stemming, etc. that may have occurred. Highlighting query term
within documents could also help, so users know why "vid" found "VIDeo"
and "daVID".

Here's a good investigation of the effects of making query transformations
transparent: <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~pratt/pubs/SIGIR-TQ.pdf>

Cheers,
Jim