SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: The Best Search Engine Inte
RE: SIGIA-L: The Best Search Engine Interfaces
From: Jess McMullin (jess_at_cognissa.com)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2001 - 23:25:12 EST
craig writes:
[regarding search engine interfaces]
But are you getting all the results [with Google]? Probably not. Thus, we
need to develop a more
traditional search interface.
Hey Craig,
I'm not sure what your particular situation is, but for Google, the whole
point is that you don't get "all the results". A key to search engines is
relevance i.e. restricting the results to the ones that are relevant to you.
Google's citation analysis is the best way yet to get relevant results for
the mainstream audience. It's not the best for an LIS professional, but for
Joe & Jill Webfolk, Google rocks, precisely because you don't get all the
results *and* they know about it from Yahoo (and they don't know better
alternatives).
Think of search results as giving an answer to a question. Now pretend the
search engine is a person giving you the same answer to the same question.
Is your search engine rude, does it talk too much, and doesn't seem to
really understand what the question was about? Paul Grice proposes 4 maxims
of polite conversation: Quality, Quantity, Relevance & Clarity. I think
there's a lot of mileage applying them to search results (with thanks to
Cliff Nass & Byron Reeves in "the media equation").
see
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/cl/slals/maxims.htm
and
you might want to see Ch. 5 in Jennifer Fleming's "Web Navigation"
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/navigation/chapter/ch05.html
for a quick recap of Reeves & Nass
Do you want to have your search engine return the ten best documents, or the
ten thousand that match the search string?
cheers,
Jess
-------------------------
Jess McMullin
Usability Analyst
Cognissa
780-903-4544
jess_at_cognissa.com
www.cognissa.com
-------------------------
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