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

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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcplantdb <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] new comments on 0.2.3 - advanced search
  • Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 10:05:18 +0100

Chad Knepp wrote:
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.


Yes this is a tricky and important question. What I've tended to do on the pfaf site is use OR for terms which are in the same catagory
(say plant uses or habitats) and AND for terms in different categories.

"Plants found will match at least one of the selected items in each category. I.E. if Chocolate and Coffee are chosen for the Edible Use and Biennial and Perennial are chosen for the Habit then plants where one of the edible use is either Chocolate OR Coffee AND the habit is either Biennial OR Perennial will be found. If no item is selected in any category then that category will be ignored when finding plant. If SHOW is selected than the value for that category will be displayed in the list of selected plants."

A way to think about this is by using filters. First the plants are filtered just to give those which have a use of
Use: Chocolate or Coffee
and then filtered by
Habit: Biennial or Perennial.
This could lead to an interesting interface where in the plants listing
its posible add or subtract new filters.

For the google style ranking solution, I don't know how the scoring works, but it would seem sensible for plants which match a higher number of terms to be ranked higher.

Rich




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