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When Searching With Google

  • To: xml-dev@l...
  • Subject: When Searching With Google
  • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 14:32:47 -0600

google gui
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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