From owner-freebsd-database Mon Mar 30 16:18:28 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA06954 for freebsd-database-outgoing; Mon, 30 Mar 1998 16:18:28 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from phoenix.welearn.com.au (suebla.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.44.81]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA06932 for ; Mon, 30 Mar 1998 16:18:13 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from sue@phoenix.welearn.com.au) Received: (from sue@localhost) by phoenix.welearn.com.au (8.8.5/8.8.5) id KAA13231; Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:15:40 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <19980331101537.35326@welearn.com.au> Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:15:37 +1000 From: Sue Blake To: John Fieber Cc: freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mailing list search interface References: <19980331082700.52299@welearn.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.88e In-Reply-To: ; from John Fieber on Mon, Mar 30, 1998 at 06:13:05PM -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-database" in the body of the message