Jos van den Oever writes: > 2007/1/17, Jean-Francois Dockes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > I think that the default should be to let the engine use stemming or not > > (it will be ON in most cases). Users just expect it. It would be > > inconvenient, for example, no to find plurals. Google does it, Wikipedia > > does it, is there any example of an engine that has stemming off by > > default ? > > > > The user will want to turn it off in specific cases, and a clever engine > > may turn it off sometimes (ie: when searching an author field). > > > > Jos is right that this is a tricky area, but having to search for > > (example OR examples) would come as a bit of a surprise for most > > people. > > I get the feeling that this is a point on which people will always > disagree, so I'll just say that my experience is difference. If I want > to look for both 'example' and 'examples', I use example*. You're > right that since some time Google has enabled stemming, so I have to > use '+example' quite often when I want to search. So we could vote on > having it on per default or not.
Ok, and I see that after checking, and to my surprise, neither Apple Search Kit nor MSN Search seem to use stemming, so I guess that we either need an interface to let the user set this kind of preference, or let the backend use its own default. > Because stemming can be turned on and off, the search index should not > stem the search terms stored in the index, but stem when searching. > This is an important difference if we want to have the same results > from the same queries. Well, there wouldn't be much point in having different backends if they returned the same answers ! Freedom to the free software authors ! :) jf _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
