http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=40668


in reply to I have a dream ...

As I read your proposal I kept fluctuating between thinking "that's a great idea" and "people should check out as many different keywords in their search as possible anyway; this isn't the search engine's job". Since the purpose of most searches is to answer a question that you lack knowledge on, it's not unreasonable to suppose that you might not know / think of all of the keywords that might turn up the answer to your question, so your suggestion definitely does have merit.

As to exactly what form this should take, I'd question whether anything more complex than a "smart synonym" type search / recommendation system would be worth the trouble. Even having the search mention that "related keywords to try would be..." would seem to settle into a fairly comfortable place when considering the law of diminishing returns. I think that implementing some of the changes mentioned on this node and adding this "smart synonym" feature to the existing search facilities would provide the best return for the time investment.

But then again, what do I know?

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RE: RE: I have a dream ...
by jptxs (Curate) on Nov 09, 2000 at 07:01 UTC

    Well, if someone went through the trouble of adding the support for "smart synonyms" to the search why not then just use all this wonderful, portable Perl(the only kind vroom writes :) to then take the step further and do the check as one's posting in SOPW? It strikes me that getting the 'synonym' stuff right would be the hard part and parsing through the text of a new entry to stip out junk (non-keyword prepositions, proper nouns, monk names, etc.) would be the easy(ier) part.

    I'd also like to add that the way to display this info might be something like a sliding scale of matching. (this is oddly enough inspired by the 'what to expect' seiries of books that all parents in the monastery should be all too familiar with). The strongest matches could be listed as 'most possible', followed by 'probably relevant', 'possibly relevant' and 'shot in the dark'. And, if we're to consider Considering Super Search, maybe we could allow people to choose only strong matches, etc. etc. I would think that posts for SOPW would actually be parsed for the weakest matches, though.

    my $0.02

    "sometimes when you make a request for the head you don't
    want the big, fat body...don't you go snickering."
                                             -- Nathan Torkington UoP2K a.k.a gnat

      If I'm getting this (and I'm not sure that I am) there was a a module/article in the last but one or two TPJ about the perl frontend to somebody's extensive language dictionary/thesaurus (sp?) project.

      The idea was you could ask for, say, red monkey info and get baboon, great ape, etc. as the 'database' was able to know that each is a monkey. It was far better than that and, the perl part made it extendable (the linquist researchers who created the original didn't appear to want any help extending their db). If only I could remember a detail ...

      a