On 9/14/07, Patrick Durusau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > BTW, I am still curious about the "relevance" algorithm that returned > jazz music for the search term (without quotes) np-completeness. Or does > the system not react well to hyphens in names unless surrounded by > quotes? Not real sure why it would parse a hyphen but I have seen odder > things. (Noting that when I surrounded it with quotes "np-completeness" > I got zero hits, not jazz.)
Hi Patrick, I believe when you quote a search term, it searches for that "exact" string, with no stemming or other interpretation. Without the quotes, I believe EG will strip out punctuation, so you'd basically be doing a search for np and completeness, or some stemmed variants. So your first hit there found a "np" in a 300 field, and "complete" in the 245. Hrmm, is that a valid record? For the cases where we do encounter messed up records, I imagine we could codify some cataloger sanity checking and not index certain things that look like garbage, but I don't think it'll ever be perfect. Here's a wiki document explaining some relevance ranking stuff, though I don't know if it's still accurate: http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:opac_demo The "metarecords" it talks about is the FRBR-like groupings you can get it if you choose Group Formats and Editions in the Advanced Search. > PS: One more question: Are there plans to add synonym support to further > confuse users with search results? ;-) I would think it would be an > advanced search option. I know they're planning multiple thesaurus support, but I think that might manifest in the "Did you mean/Are you looking for/spellcheck" feature (another kettle of fish that needs work), and/or in the authority-based sidebars. I can't imagine "loosening" search results just to inflate the number of hits. I'd rather get zero hits and then a lot of suggestions. -- Jason http://esilibrary.com/
