Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:15:37 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mailing list search interface Message-ID: <19980331101537.35326@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330173718.8294D-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>; from John Fieber on Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 06:13:05PM -0500 References: <19980331082700.52299@welearn.com.au> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330173718.8294D-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
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On Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 06:13:05PM -0500, John Fieber wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Sue Blake wrote:
> > Example 2: In December I posted a question and received about 6 good replies,
> > which I promptly lost. In January I tried to search for them, over and over,
> > and could only find my original and one reply. Often searches reveal the
> > question but no answers can be found by any method, answers that I know have
> > been posted to -questions and contain the searched words.
>
> This is a deep problem in IR: by definition you cannot accurately
> describe what you are looking for. If you could, then you
> wouldn't need to look for it! Thus, a system based on
> calculating similarity between query and document is doomed. As
> you experienced, you can describe and thus retrieve what you
> already know, but what you want is to describe the perimeter that
> surrounds what you don't know and have the system find what is in
> the middle that is missing from your query.
>
> For this *particular* application, a thread index is exactly what
> you needed: you could find your original posting because you knew
> what was in it, then you trace the followups which you couldn't
> find by a keyword search.
The problem you describe is the one I met in the first example when trying
to use the man pages: I didn't know what it was about so I couldn't look for
it. With threading I would still need to know the unknown to find an entry
point to the thread, then from that point on it might be easier. But usually
I can't get that far, unless there's an error message to search. You can't
do much about that. In addition I would need to know damn well that what I
search for will be found if it is there. You can do a lot about that.
For the second problem (above) that was not the case at all. My post to
-questions had one or two uncommon words in the subject, as did the replies.
The replies quoted, at minimum, a particular couple of lines of my original
post. Searching for words appearing in either of these places should have
produced some result, I thought. Searching for all or part of my own name
failed too.
The problem in the second example is quite different to the one you mention.
I don't think it's my problem, and even if threads were available I would
have expected the techniques I had used to have worked in this case. If
something is in there and I can name it, I do expect to get it. Whether
that's a problem of design, lost data, bugs, or education makes not a scrap
of difference out here. If the basic search part cannot be made to work
nothing else will help much.
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
find / -name "*.conf" |more
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