Stephens, Owen writes:
>
> Firstly, when I clicked through to the 'more' on the Author facets, I
> found it frustrating that the default sort order was relevance rather
> than alphabetical.
The use of the word "relevance" is misleading. No software can guess,
from the few words the user feeds it in every instance, whether
something that matches the character strings is actually relevant
to what the user had in mind.
True relevance is always subjective - the machine _cannot_ know anything
about the user's motivations and intentions (in fact, it cannot _know_
anything at all), it can only match character strings in more or less
clever ways. There may be a _correlation_ between this and relevance,
but a correlation is not the same as an approximation. Only the latter
would justify the use of the word.
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri Dec 21 2007 - 05:22:49 EST