Permaculture Information Web

[Robyn Williamson <rz.williamson AT optusnet.com.au>]

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