#Encyclopedias?
2 messages in this thread
The paper I read said the grad schoolers (3rd and 5th grade?) had trouble
with the Booleans. Another paper suggested a real nice non-boolean way to
get similar effects:
Accept a Natural Language string, strip out stop words, stem the remaining
and do search for each – effectivly a boolean OR. Then use a weighting
scheme to rank the results.
They claimed good results and great feedback from users. Some professional
librarians, etc wanted full boolean too, just cause they were familiar with
it. It wasnt that much more effective than the ranking system, and then
only for those real familiar with boolean on-line searches.
I've got code to implement the ranking system, but havent found a client
willing to pay me to make it a decent usable CD system yet. (any takers?
<Grin>
Jerry.
There is 1 Reply.
Jerry:
I do not dispute your research. I agree the boolean search would be likely
to overwhelm the grade school researcher. However they seem to do real well
with the regular single or multiple word search that all of these
encyclopedias have.
When they get to high school it is real nice to be able to let them play
with the boolean searching capability of these things without having to pay
for on-line time.
It is fun to play with. Even for me.
RP