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  • From: Robyn Williamson <rz.williamson AT optusnet.com.au>
  • To: piw AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [piw] Re: teething problems?
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:36:18 +1100

On Tuesday, January 25, 2005, at 07:30 am, Chad Knepp wrote:

the results tend to be fairly generalized. Additionally
part of the reason for so many results is that the search strings
themselves are broken into substrings in order to accommodate
incorrect spellings. For example a search for the string 'grevillea
robusta' actually looks through the database for 'gre', 'vil', 'lea',
'robu', and 'sta'. As you can imagine this results in many more
matches than the only one possible, but it also allows for people to
spell as poorly as I do and still find what they are looking for.

My question is are the top results the ones you where looking for or
not?

True, yes. I should have been more explicit, but not knowing what to expect, and seeing they weren't sorted alphabetically, I scrolled through all of them to see what was there and whether I could make a connection between them.

If you have to page through several pages to find what you are
looking for then I think we do have a problem. Most commercial search
engines return many more results than one would have time to page
through, but a good search engine will [hopefully] have the most
relevant material near the top. Is receiving more results than you
expected for a query really problematic?

Not really, now that I know what to expect. So the full match comes up first and the rest are variations on that?

For fun, try doing some searches with deliberate misspelling.

Ok, I'll try that next time I have some spare internet time to play with.

Currently, it may not perform as well as it can, because the number of
substrings a word is sperated into is deliberately low in order to
increase performance in general searches. If/when we seperate out
search queries into ones that look only at names and ones that look
only at descriptions (or other criteria), we can increase the
granularity significantly and have an effective tool even for people
who spell like I do ;-)

Creative spelling is fine when it doesn't matter, but surely even computer technologists have to spell things correctly when they give the machine a command, otherwise it doesn't work, n'est-ce pas? Also, would it be possible that if we enter a species name for example, we get all the plants in the family? Many may be compatible with each other and it could be a first step to making a guild, especially if it's only physical characteristics we are combining into the guild (height/width etc) e.g. ground cover, with shrub, tree and vine.


Also when/how can we start adding our own species? Are we going to be
able to upload any photos?

Ack... Well, I fully hoped to have collaborative capabilities at least
in the form of comments by Jan 1st, but it looks as if Feb 1st is the
new realistic target. Relationships and guild information will
follow, and I hope to have something quite usable by April 1st.

Sounds good to me, I admit that I'm not quite computer literate and probably have higher expectations of technology than are warranted. I also have a library of about 4000 photos that I'd like to do something with. Are we going to be able to add our own species? for example there are 29 Grevilleas in the Sydney region alone, not sure how many have gone extinct since the list was created, but this would be handy for people working in Australia where there is a big emphasis on putting in natives, especially endemic species.

Thanks again for the feedback.

No worries Chad, many thanks once again to the piw team and to PFAF for all your great work.

Robyn

CONTACT DETAILS:

Robyn Williamson
PDC, Urban Horticulturist
Hon Sec, Fagan Park Community Eco Garden Committee
Local Seed Network Coordinator
NORTH WESTERN SYDNEY COMMUNITY SEED SAVERS
ph/fx: (612) 9629 3560
email: rz.williamson AT optusnet.com.au
http://www.communityfoods.com.au
http://www.au.gardenweb.com/directory/fpceg
http://www.seedsavers.net/lsn/32.html
http://www.sydney.foe.org.au/water





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