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Richard Shrout
Founding Partner
Potomac Indexing, LLC
On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Rick Stone <rstone75 -at- kc -dot- rr -dot- com> wrote:
> +1 on the reply!
>
> In addition to what Elissa said, I'll add that the very existence of a
> well constructed Index helps in the way it operates.
>
> With Search, not only do you have to know the right key words, but you
> have to fully type them out, then click some button to carry out the action
> to see the candidate topics that are found.
>
> Generally with an Index, the list of terms automatically scrolls to match
> what is being typed. So the end user often doesn't have to fully type what
> they are looking for in order to find the term.
>
> Cheers... Rick :)
>
>
> On 10/22/2015 10:37 AM, Elissa K. Miller wrote:
>
>> Assuming budget and time are available, I almost always fight to include a
>> human-generated index.
>>
>> Unless the user knows how to enter their search query with Boolean
>> operators
>> and/or they already have a good idea what they're looking for, a full-text
>> search can return so many hits from so many parts of the product that they
>> have to scroll through dozens of pages to (maybe) find what they're
>> looking
>> for. And an unsophisticated user will not know how to structure good
>> queries. (I remember giving a talk about the Internet at a Book Stop in
>> the
>> early 1990s where a guy wanted to look up Wells Fargo and didn't
>> understand
>> why "bank" wasn't the search term most likely to give him the answer he
>> wanted.) For example, where I work now, there are many different ways that
>> you would issue a refund. If you are an unsophisticated user and you just
>> do
>> a full-text keywords search on "refund," you'll get more than four dozen
>> instances of the word "refund" throughout the online help and it places a
>> lot of cognitive load on an already-frustrated user to figure out which of
>> the 50 instances of the word is the kind of refund that he's looking for.
>>
>> Meanwhile, a high-quality index (generated by a thinking human familiar
>> with
>> the content instead of automatically generated by software) helps people
>> find what they need quickly because they don't have to construct a perfect
>> query that includes knowing product terminology--they can just scroll
>> through the topics until they see what they're looking for.
>>
>> --Elissa
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: techwr-l-bounces+emiller=doubleknot -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+emiller=doubleknot -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
>> Behalf Of Kari Gulbrandsen
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2015 7:23 PM
>> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>> Subject: Index
>>
>> Hello, all --
>>
>> Are there any reasons to have an index for an online help system with full
>> text search capability?
>>
>> Thanks all!
>>
>> Kari.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from Gmail Mobile
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