Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> What if the UI supported the power-user but summarized things just
> outside. If a subject search failed, something like "there are 400
> books with foo in the description" might help.
>
What's a failure? Zero hits? One or two hits?
'fraid it's more difficult.
In Google, you easily have the situation where you get a few hits just
accidentally, say when your spelling is wrong, but you then need
to become aware of a failure, and what type. Then, you may actually
learn something.
Failure becomes more difficult to detect by software the larger
the database is, but software can always judge only approximately,
just as "relevance". The software may go utterly wrong, but to the
amusement of only the savvy user.
And: Software that bends over backwards to be helpful may also keep you
from learning something...
B. Eversberg
Received on Fri Jun 09 2006 - 06:33:49 EDT