Keyword searches and forms vs. full-text search? (was: Designing a Very Specific Web Interface)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Arlen Walker wondered:

<<though it's cheap and easy you say you don't want full text searches
(though I'm dying to understand why a good boolean full-text
relevance-ranked search is worse than a keyword search I'll accept that it
isn't wanted)>>

Different tools for different purposes. (I also had the impression that the
original questioner was using documents that weren't available in searchable
format because they'd been provided by third parties.)

The overwhelming disadvantage of a full-text search is that the technology
remains primitive:
- it generally does a poor job of stemming (e.g., finding both "computer"
and "computers")
- it rarely handles synonyms (e.g., finding "Mac" if you specify "computer"
as the search term)
- if you pick the wrong keyword, you find nothing (e.g., if you pick a
perfectly reasonable synonym that the authors didn't happen to use in any of
the documents)

Moreover, searches (particulary boolean searches) remain unfamiliar and
intimidating to many Web users. The problem's compounded by the fact that
every search engine uses different syntax (e.g., quotes vs. no quotes around
phrases, + vs. "and" for narrowing the search, and so on), thus we really
can't rely on user familiarity with search technology to help them use any
given search engine. Don't forget: given the toys we play with at work,
we're all geeks compared to the majority of any general audience. Since the
library described in the original question already uses defined categories
and keywords, then an approach based on these definitions seems most logical
to me since it leverages the effort that went into creating that structure.
Full-text searches are best for situations (such as searching the net as a
whole) in which no effort has gone into categorizing the information. The
success of portals such as Yahoo bears ample witness to the fact that most
surfers want someone to do the initial sorting work for them.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer

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