On Dec 21, 2007, at Dec 21, 4:44 AM, Stephens, Owen wrote:
> With AquaBrowser I do have an issue that what it calls 'relevance'
> sort
> order in the facets seems to be based on the number of times the
> heading
> appears in the result set rather than any other criteria (I'd be
> glad to
> be corrected if I've misread this).
The results themselves are presented in relevance ranking order, but
the facets are, as you observe, ordered by number of occurrences in
the result set.
> It would be nice to see something more sophisticated here - so if I've
> searched for 'Emerson' and drop into the 'Author' facet, perhaps it
> would be fair to make the assumption that authors called Emerson are
> more 'relevant' to me than others. However, I can see weaknesses to
> this
> approach - and it just goes to show we are some way off good relevance
> ranking for this type of search. I suspect this is why I would
> prefer to
> drop into an Alphabetical sort at this stage - the 'relevance' just
> doesn't work well enough at the level of facet browsing. I think that
> the s/w ought to be able to make some intelligent decisions here - if
> I've entered a single word, then go to facet browsing, the
> likelihood it
> can do good 'relevance' is very low, so alphabetical could be default.
> If I've entered multiple words, some of which appear in author
> headings,
> and some in subject headings and some in title, then the chances of
> combining this data to give me a good relevance match increases, and
> perhaps relevance ranking for facets is going to turn up trumps
> (this is
> assuming that it gets more sophisticated than just 'number of hits')
For authors in particular, you can search "emerson", the go over to
the left-hand panel, click the "Author" tab, and get a list of all
Emersons. Of course, this is not perfect, and you can also see some
data artifacts that have to be worked out.
How to present it effectively is an open question. You don't want to
hide it because it may be useful, but you don't want to presume that
just because there is an author hit that the user is looking for an
author. So far, it at least seems to be learnable with brief
instruction.
-Tod
Tod Olson <tod_at_uchicago.edu>
Systems Librarian
University of Chicago Library
Received on Fri Dec 21 2007 - 10:37:28 EST