Re: Index

["Elisa R. Sawyer" <elisawyer -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On a technical note, one reason Google became popular is that its algorithm
for indexing search results works pretty well. In addition, they hire
humans who contribute to the indexing effort.

So, Google might accurately be called a search-and-indexing engine...

-Elisa

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 8:57 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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-- 
Elisa Rood Sawyer
~~~~~^~~~~~
Technical and Creative Writer
"Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." Mark Twain
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