>> You're saying that a search on "buns" should return pages about rabbits? ;-)
>
>Actually, yes. ;-). Those who frequently talk about rabbits use 'buns' as a
>synonym for rabbits. And a search on buns on Alta Vista *does* return pages
>involving rabbits. Along with discussions of food, hair, long distance
>running in cold weather, as well as human and non-human anatomy. This is
>where skill in constructing a search to exclude things that are *not* of
>interest comes in handy.
I'm not sure that this is a good direction -- expecting people to define
the subjects to exclude. After all, this isn't how we tend to "search"
when we have a human being to help us. If you walked up to a reference
librarian and said "Rabbits," what kind of response would you expect? I
think it would be something along the lines of "What about rabbits?" Yet
we expect computers to be better mind readers than humans!
Fuzzy logic -- the more evidence, the better -- seems to get people to
relevant documents with fewer iterations. For example, you could probably
come up with a query that would get rid of the documents that use "buns" to
refer to anatomy (though it's not obvious to me, actually), but why not
spend that energy and time providing more words, phrases and other evidence
that a document is about rabbits, so that the anatomy documents fall to the
bottom of the relevancy list?
Having said all that, I should add that I realize that most of the search
engines used by the major Internet search services don't support this kind
of search -- they're generally limited to Boolean logic.
As robots are increasingly able to extract evidence from documents and
context, the limitations of Boolean search will become more and more
obvious. Ditto as people learn the more sophisticated search query
techniques.
Nick