[...]
>But, your typical Internet user has never had a course in Boolean
>logic.
How can you expect people to express themselves without a language?
Some query languages and techniques may be easier to learn than others,
which probably means that it takes a minimal amount of experimentation
for the user to learn how to compose effective queries, but in any case,
some level of understanding on the part of the user of the querying
mechanism is inevitable.
> What started this thread is the observation that smarter indexing
>could result in better query results.
Not quite; it was a suggestion rather than an observation.
Boolean logic may be rather difficult to learn, but once the principle
is understood, its application will always be easier to understand than that
of a hidden weighting mechanism over which the user has no control.
>Search engines that understand the
>difference between a text word, a title word and an HTML tag will invariably
>return better results for simple queries than one that doesn't. Do you
>disagree with this conclusion?
As a reader of this forum, I would be interested to see any mention of evidence
one way or the other. But I strongly agree with what Benjamin Franz appears
to be saying, namely, if 'smartness' means knowing what the user wants, the
user must supply that information in one way or another. Magic doesn't quite
work with computers ...
If, on the other hand, 'smartness' means outguessing the user at what the
user wants, a 'smart' query technique may be rather effective, up to the
point that the user feels a need to understand what it is doing.
-- Reinier Post reinpost@win.tue.nl a.k.a. <A HREF="http://www.win.tue.nl/win/cs/is/reinpost/">me</A> [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]