[Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching

[Ken Bryson]

>> 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?

> 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.


I don't think it's just a matter of natural language sucks in all instances
over 10 documents. There's no reason you can't make good use of metadata and
thesauri AND put a natural language front end search on it.  When you do
that, the differences between natural language and keyword boolean searching
becomes clear, at least from my own research.

Boolean searches are better for known item searches, and natural language
searches are *sometimes* better for subject searches.  It all really depends
on the skill, or lack thereof, of the searcher.


-kb