[Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching

[Locatelli at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/19/2004 9:57:54 AM Eastern Standard Time, david_fiorito at vanguard.com writes:

> Does anyone have any thoughts on the relative merits of these two types of search?  In what context is one more effective that the other?  Pros/Cons of each?  Thoughts?  Opinions?

Natural language searching tells the user simply when words appear in a document. That may or may not imply that the document is ABOUT that topic. When a document has been tagged with a keyword, then some human brain has determined that the document really is about that subject.

So the questions comes down to things like: What is the size of the document corpus being searched. How important is it for users to find information quickly. In a small document set, it's not a problem looking at 5 or 10 documents. But if a natural language search returns several hundred or several thousands of documents, then the search is pretty useless. That's when keyword tagging becomes important.

Fred Leise
Information Architect/Metadata Designer/Indexer
www.contextualanalysis.com