[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] When Searching With Google
I've been enjoying Tim Bray's articles on searching at his Ongoing site (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing). While walking the dog in the rain last night, I realized I don't understand how some of the popular search engines handle topicality, that is, do they understand it at all? My thoughts were drifting between the attractors of user interfaces and search mechanisms, my main noodle being how GUIs and presentation of results affect search. Of all the different GUI interfaces, Google is the simplest. Type in a list of words and hit submit at a minimum. Others do that, but Google is spectacularly unbaubled. Is that a good thing or a bad thing (good for using it, possibly bad for interpreting results). 1. If a list without qualifiers of any kind is put in, how does Google know, or does Google know which one represents the topic, the dominant search term? It can't, but does it try to guess and how? 2. Is Google searching for all occurrences or only referenced occurrences (eg, PageRank)? See Question 1. 3. Are topics (dominant terms) and PageRank related? 4. Should ranking filters be reflected in the user interface so the user can adjust their strategies to meet their expectations, in other words, how much should they come to understand the filtering effects of page ranking? (Should they interpret Google Numbers to in terms of the algorithm? How would a GUI help them do that? Visualization of clusters?) len
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