> I too have been thinking about how to incorporate "see also" type
> references from our rich bibliographic records into our search
> functions. In addition to "did you mean", it's possible that in
> some/many cases, the search should be _automatically_ expanded. For
> instance, from Eric's examples, in some cases when the user enters
> "Jive" in a keyword search, should the search be automatically expanded
> to include "OR subject: Blues (Music)"? I think maybe so. Somehow the
> user should probably be notified somewhere on screen that this happened,
> however. And have the option to _disable_ it. A facetted interface
> probably helps here--or maybe vice versa, it's me assuming a facetted
> interface that led me to think about this.
Automatic expansion is a dangerous except when the number of
retrievals is relatively small. Seems like a better way to go would be
is to give what was requested, but use something along the lines of
wikipedia's disambiguation pages to help direct the user to other
contexts. I agree in principle that a good system should automatically
adjust the search in intelligent ways.
Power users like things like facets, controls, and whatno. From what I
can tell, most people just want to type a search and get results
without messing with anything. I like faceting, but statistics I've
seen on facet use indicate that the vast majority of people either
don't notice them, don't know what they do, or don't care about them.
kyle
Received on Mon Mar 31 2008 - 11:36:01 EDT