At 05:18 PM 1/5/2008, you wrote:
>there's a huge gap in your understanding that what you
>search for indeed is what you get, and "Reservoir Dogs" *is* on-topic
>for the generic search term "dogs." Or did you expect Google to read
>your friggin' mind?!?!
>
>What's wrong with you people? Google gives you exactly what you search
>for, which, to your ignorance, doesn't always mean a book or a topic.
>*grumble*
It seems to me that the discussion here was about the idea of
"concept searches". "Reservoir Dogs" has nothing to do with the
*concept* of "dogs" - and Caterpillar Inc. and Computed Axial
Tomography have nothing to do with the *concept* of "cat". They
simply happen to share the same adjacent letters. A subject search in
the typical OPAC *does* make this distinction in concepts and a
browse clearly shows that there are many subtle variations that might
(or might not) be of interest to the searcher. Google search results
are often so full of noise that it's hard to hear the signal. And
seeing comprehensive, exhaustive results just doesn't seem to be
possible. But the argument always seems to be that "it's good enough
to make most of the people happy most of the time". Well, compared to
what? How does one evaluate this? Most of the world looks at the
first 10 hits and that's it. Google's relevancy ranking serves up
what is popular. This isn't the aim of the library catalog (or ought
not to be).
BTW, Google seems to have no trouble pretending to read my mind when
it comes to "misspellings" or "did you means" even when they don't
say they are changing my search. Even if they don't know the
difference between a bibliography and a biography.
Mike
Received on Sat Jan 05 2008 - 17:41:17 EST