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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] new comments on 0.2.3 - advanced search

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  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: pcplantdb <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] new comments on 0.2.3 - advanced search
  • Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:31:18 -0500

John Schinnerer writes:
> Hej,
>
> >> ...until I remembered that it brought up all results that
> >> matched ANY (vs. ALL) of my criteria
>
> Haven't had time/bandwidth to try the advanced search (looked at the page
> very quickly) but had I done so I would have put this in as an issue for
> sure.
>
> Default for advanced search should be AND, not OR.
>
> That is IMO the point of providing user with fine-grained individually
> selectable options in a search form like this. OR makes it bass-ackwards
> - the more specific I try to be in my search specification, the less
> specific my results!
>
> I would say Stephanie did what most users would do, expected behavior most
> users would expect, and got something very different, due to the default
> being OR. Should be AND.

I completely and insistently disagree. Lets say you do a search query
that specifies 10 different terms. If an object or objects match all
10 then the AND displays the object[s]... so does the OR followed by
other items that didn't match all 10. If no objects matched all 10,
but some matched 9 out of 10 the AND query displays NOTHING. The OR
query display the object[s] matching 9/10 followed by 8/10, etc. It
seems obvious to me that the OR query is the more useful of the two in
that it gets as close to the query as possible but doesn't choke on
highly specific queries. Also, the default for every internet search
engine I've ever used is OR not AND.

IMO, what I think would make a nice post 1.0 feature is having AND
(google +word), OR, and NOT (google -word) for every query item as
well as refining search results via filters which would primarily ANDs
and NOTs. This sort of thing would be an advanced advanced search
and probably beyond most casual users... this is getting into the
search grammar subject again.

> > I did an advanced search for 'tamarind' (just common name) and got
> > nine results with Dipploglottis australis 'native tamarind' outscoring
> > 4 to 1 the second place result. Sometimes less is more ;-)
>
> Which is what the 'regular' one-box text string search is for IMO - the
> 'less' search input.
>
> The advanced is for when the user wants to do more.
>
> Why would I go to a complex 'advanced search' form just to enter a single
> common name to search on? I wouldn't, that's not what that kine form is
> for.
> It is what the one-box search form is for.

I agree, but the basic search box searches for what ever you enter all
over the dataset, not just name or descriptions or some such. The
ability to specify in the advanced form that you are looking
specifically for the common name will give you much better results.
In that sense it is advanced even if you still use only one query
option in the whole form... and this is a good thing.

> mer senare,
> John S.


Cheers,
Chad

--
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'




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