From: Jon G. <jon...@gm...> - 2008-04-14 17:32:57
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On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Andrew Nagy <and...@vi...> wrote: > For example: > > 1. You are changing the default operator from "OR" to "AND" which will have severe effects on vufind. > What is your reasoning for changing this? I don't know why Alan is using AND, but I can tell you why I've recommended in the past to use AND. I've suggested we change the operator to default to AND for the local implementation our consortium is experimenting as well. The short and sweet answer is all of our informal user testing seem to indicate this is what people expect. Although I haven't studied this closely, I suspect there's several reasons. The best examples I've seen are ones that probably really should be phrase searches but people simply fail to use parentheses. "Black history" or people's name for example. People seem confused by the facets that come up or when only part of the search matches. The facets are particularly skewed by this in many cases. People also are confused when they search for an author and see people with partial matches on the name. In the case of our library and our consortium OR also has a tendency to skew just for the fact our collection is so large that if there's only a few items that are at the intersection of the words, there's still a huge result set in the union of all the query words. Better solutions might be to weigh phrase matches much higher than they are now. Then just some tweaking for multiple word searches. Even for an experienced user it can be a bit tricky to decide if a particular word might need to be changed. If you use three terms you'll have to guess from the result screens what words are not being matched on. I realize you don't need to identify these since you could just add variant terms. However, that runs contrary to most people's expectation and most search engines I'd be really interested to see how your users reacted to the default AND and why you decided to keep that as the default. (I'm pretty sure it's the solr default, but was it a decision to stick to it?) Jon Gorman |