Surely this part of the discussion is trying too hard to relate concepts
to words.
I've searched google a few times for 'cat' (the unix command) and indeed
it is the 6th result returned.
Searching for 'man cat' finds what I wanted at number three, behind
"Manchester College of Arts and Technology" and later gives results for
a differnet concept - the super hero "cat-man'.
The relationship between words and concepts is many to many. For a
general search term google does a pretty good job of presenting the most
popular concepts related to the search term.
My local library returns 14 hits for 'man cat' but none related to the
concept I intended, an unfair comparison I know (a library indexing TOC
or indexes might have returned something). A search in the library for
'unix' finds plenty of resources that contain my intended 'concept', one
level of concept indirection required.
Dan.
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Alexander Johannesen
Sent: 06 January 2008 00:14
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Relevance ranking: was Aqua Brow
Hi Julia,
On Jan 6, 2008 10:22 AM, Julia Bauder <julia.bauder_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> So can we possibly try moving this discussion towards the kinds of
> information that people actually search for and not for impossibly
> broad concepts like "cat"?
Indeed, however we were also talking about searching for the concept of
"dogs", but what seems to escape some people is that the concept of
"dogs" indeed is what popularity and consensus (try the etymology for
the word concept :) is all about *except* for the individual. No system
we ever create can do what conceptually makes sense to one individual,
we can only try to do it for the consensus.
Alex
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Received on Sun Jan 06 2008 - 13:04:49 EST