[Sigia-l] The category of "Miscellaneous"

[Richard Wiggins]

Define your terms carefully.   There's total searches performed, but
then there's the distribution of unique searches.

A small fraction of unique search terms accounts for a huge percentage
of all searches performed.  For many institutions, 500 searches may
account for 40% of all searches.  Google won't get those 500 top
searches "right" -- humans who understand the institution know more
than Google does.

Of course, you'd never hand-craft the one-off searches at the tail of
the curve -- that would be silly, that's why we have robots -- but
hand-crafting the top 500-1000 searches has huge payoffs.  You may
choose, of course, to stick your neck somewhere else, or to stake your
claims as you please.

/rich

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 20:48:16 -0400, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> 
> I have no problem at all sticking my neck out and proclaiming that
> algorithmic search will stomp manually-crafted search for the vast, vast
> majority of cases out there until the comes come home. It's better than good
> enough.
> 
> Ziya
> Nullius in Verba
> 
> 
> 
> 
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