[Sigia-l] Full-Text vs Keyword Searching

[Drop, Daniel SIK]

Alice,

I don't have the experience to answer all your questions.  I did have a
reaction to your gut instinct to step further away from full-text search.
Depending on the ability of your search engine, your fears of the engine
finding text "out of context" can be minimized.  

Some search engines when given a multi-word search can give a document
greater relevancy if those words appear in proximity to each other.  For
example, when doing a Master's school project, I observed that Teoma gave
much weight to the proximity of words.  Thus, if proximity is a greater
relevancy predictor in your search engine, the possibility of having "out of
context" words influence relevancy results will be lessened.  

I agree that keywords also can help your situation.  I suggest, if possible,
also researching different search engine technologies that may increase the
accuracy of full-text search with your types of documents.  Alas, although I
know search engine theory and have analyzed a few web search engines, I have
not done research on commercially available site search engines to help you
determine which search engines are better in your situation.  Others on this
list may be able to provide this information.

Good luck.

Daniel R. Drop
Programs Information Architect
Sikorsky Aircraft
Mail Stop S439A 

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Alice Preston [mailto:aliceflute at hotmail.com] 
Sent:	Thursday, February 24, 2005 2:40 PM
To:	sigia-l at asis.org
Subject:	[Sigia-l] Full-Text vs Keyword Searching

....

My gut instinct is to step farther away from full-text search (especially 
because some of the materials are "in context"--think full pages of 
newspapers instead of just clippings--and the searching will find the text 
strings on the same page around the piece in question, not only within the 
piece itself). 

	....