#281: Provide more helpful messages for gibberish syntax
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Reporter: jblayloc | Owner: jblayloc
Type: defect | Status: new
Priority: minor | Milestone:
Component: WebSearch | Version:
Resolution: | Keywords: Invenio INSPIRE Syntax
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Comment (by tbrooks):
I was not aware that these are accepted now, from a logic point of view
they make little sense, and I'm not sure that many users would agree that
the most sensible thing to do in case of: (|kaon) is to return all
documents.
This is clearly someone who has missed something and made an error,
sometimes the best thing we can do is to make it //plain// that they have
made an error.
A warning message is oft-overlooked, so results that come back, especially
if they appear sensible at first glance, can be very misleading.
I digress a bit more here about the philosophy of returning "no hits" and
the fact that we are not Google, and people use our service very
differently.
Google does well by its users by returning anything that might be relevant
to the query, reinterpreting the query if needed, in an attempt to use
ranking to push the desired result to the top. Google works very well if
you are searching for a good page on a topic, or 1 particular page.
SPIRES is used in a very different way. Often people are looking for
lists and counts, witness the prevalence of author searches, not subject
searches. Someone trying to form a list of papers published by their
colleague is not particularly well-served by getting a guess at what they
might have meant. Therefore making it //obvious// that a search is
imprecise is very helpful to a user in this mode.
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Ticket URL: <http://invenio-software.org/ticket/281#comment:2>
Invenio <http://invenio-software.org>
