Conal Tuohy wrote:
> The Google Toolbar also provides a similar UI, Bernard. Have you used it?
>
> As you type into the search box, it shows a list of words beginning with the text you've typed. It's nice in that the list of keywords is updated as you type each character (well, asynchronously, actually, but pretty fast). It's quite different to the experience of searching and getting "did you mean X"? Or just having the search engine ASSUME that you meant X.
>
I'm afraid that's not the same concept at all. What it does is present a
few suggestions of highly used keywords. This is not what would help a
scholar who is precisely not after what everybody and their sister
have already been searching for all the time. What I was getting at is
the neutral, unbiased, plain word index. Showing everything there
actually _is_, not a selection done intransparently by an algorithm. And
don't talk of relevancy unless you explain to the user that the word is
meant as a metaphor! True relevance can only be judged by the person,
not by the machine, and the machine's "idea" of it can be wildly
erratic.
B. Eversberg
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 03:43:55 EDT