From: Mark T. <mt...@nl...> - 2008-04-15 01:59:09
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Hi James, James Farrugia <jfa...@dr...> writes: > Hi Mark, > > This is an interesting example. > > I'm curious: why wouldn't/doesn't/shouldn't VuFind return more than > zero hits with the AND search? > > You have all the words in the title (except "The", "to," and assuming > that "DH" is good for "D.H."), so wouldn't it make sense for an AND > search to pull up at least the first item? In this case it's because D.H. is tokenised differently to DH, so you fail on the match for DH. You're quite right that you could modify the tokeniser to fix this, but this is only one example. Should a search for 'Steven King black house' (instead of "Stephen King") give you any hits? What if you searched for 'Where the wild things were' but you really wanted 'Where the wild things are'? I guess my feeling is that "AND" searches require a lot from the user: they need to make sure that their terms are accurate and need to be careful not to "throw off" the search by including terms that don't appear in their records of interest. Generally I've found that the results you get from an "AND" search (if you do get some) are highly relevant, but often at the expense of things that are perhaps less relevant. I just think that's a shame because 95% relevance is good too! Cheers, Mark -- Mark Triggs Systems Administrator Business Systems Support, The National Library of Australia <mt...@nl...> |