Jack Hall schrieb:
> I agree with Alex that relevance to users is a slippery slope, in terms of
> how we can predict or ascertain it.
Let's face it - we cannot. Relevance is tied to meaning, and no
software has access to that, which would be to the user's actual
thinking and intentions. From the two or three words someone puts
into the slot, no software (and no human either) can reliably guess
what they wanted.
Relevance ranking is something alien, soberly looking at it, since
it is strictly formal and algorithmically derived - software to this
day can do nothing better, they are all sequential machines
manipulating character strings. One may distinguish between the
purely algorithmical and the dictionary based procedures, but the latter
still don't make a "thinking machine" out of a computer.
Corollary:
A good catalog will avoid misleading vocabulary like "relevance"!
At least, avoid the use of such terms without providing an explanation.
Another example would be "dialog".
Regards, B. Eversberg
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 10:22:45 EDT