Oh my, I wish I knew how to define "better" and "more reliable" when we
talk about a limited list of alternative search terms. I don't.
I believe that Google succeeds for two reasons: (1) they are either very
good or very lucky in choosing their advertising model and (2) they protect
users from the process o knowing exactly how they produce their product.
Google treats search like, to use a cliche, companies making sausage.
Google knows they shouldn't tell the user what the exact ingredients are.
We'll worry and we'll find fault.
Considering Google - not sausage - what are the lines of code that
normalize the feminine and the masculine; the singular and the plural; the
past, present and future tense; capital letters and lower case characters;
silly punctuation like an apostrophe to indicate ownership; parts of
speech as simple as nouns and verbs? And then of course, how does Google
get the differing language versions of the same universally used word?
It is important to note that they often do. And they do it in the
background.
I'm inclined to think that, intellectually, the biggest problem with Google
is that a learner can't check Google's work. We don't know how close they
are to a "right" interpretation of our query or how all-inclusive they
are. In a discipline where there is no competition, how do we know
Google gives us everything that might be useful when we do a word search?
I don't know how to find appropriate search terms, but I submit that this
is the challenge for people who care about good search. If the solution is
not a commercial one, it probably rests with people who care about content
and knowledge - librarians. Someone needs to offer up an alternative so
users can compare alternatives. Coming full circle, and with an apology
for my abruptness, I just don't think Aquabrowser is on the right track.
Nancy Cochran
nancy.cochran_at_earthlink.net
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_ND.EDU>
> To: <NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu>
> Date: 12/22/2007 4:15:54 PM
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Aqua Browser in beta at U. Chicago
>
> On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:47 PM, Nancy Cochran wrote:
>
> >> I had the same experience with my Alex Catalogue where I indexed the
> >> full text of documents. For example, the work "mississippi" was
> >> legitimately spelled in a bunch of different ways in the texts. Using
> >> something like Aspell do find similar spellings turns up very
> >> interesting results.
> >
> > Are there better, perhaps more reliable, perhaps back-end ways of
> > dealing
> > with spelling variations?
>
>
> Maybe, but you need to define more specifically what you mean by
> better and reliably. What qualities of a spelling variation tool do
> you think are desirable?
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
Received on Sat Dec 22 2007 - 16:10:06 EST