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Date:      Tue, 19 Nov 1996 19:56:04 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To:        Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Cc:        mark@quickweb.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Announce: Alternative Mail Archive
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.95.961119194954.281D-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199611192207.QAA05968@brasil.moneng.mei.com>

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On Tue, 19 Nov 1996, Joe Greco wrote:

> That is probably true, but (at least when I am searching the lists)
> I usually have some idea what time frame I am interested in.  I am
> usually looking to quote something back at somebody, etc.  It is
> very frustrating to type in a bunch of terms and still have it hit
> a hundred messages, half of which are from 1995.

Precicely, and there is no reason why your time frame shouldn't
be part of the query along with the terms.  The more dimensions you
can describe, the more accurate the retrieved set will be.  The
problem with hypermail is the timeframes are pre-set, and not
necessairly in a very useful fashion.

The fact that the current arcihves on www.freebsd.org do not allow
retrieval by date is, in my mind, a catastrophic failing.

> Write a good free IR system?  :-)

Its hard!  IR is theoretically bankrupt.  What to do?  Go flip through
the proceedings and papers from TREC and you will see.  People are
spending lots of time and money and the improvements they achieve are
miniscule.


-john

== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================




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