Fewer words = better search?
Tue 22 Nov 2005, 9:36 pm
The post, eBay’s “fewer words” search from Jason on Signal vs. Noise struck a chord with me.
He points out that when searching multiple words on eBay, if your search isn’t successful, eBay will show you how many hits you might get if you removed one or more words from your search (see my whimsical example).
I have been thinking lately about some of the bad search strategies I see (mostly from students). Instead of choosing one or two keywords, they type a complete sentence or they ignore the fact that the catalog or database treats multiple words as a phrase. And when they get zero hits, they aren’t sure why.
Now, I’m not trying to blame the searcher here, especially when it comes to trying to figure out whether multiple terms are ANDed together or searched as a phrase (can’t we all just bow to Google and agree that multiple words get the AND treatment, and if you want a phrase search, put it in quotes? No? I didn’t think so.). I just think they could use some help, and showing them variations on their search seems like a great idea.
So wouldn’t it be great to help them out this way? I’m sure it’s just a pipe dream for the catalog, as I don’t think I have ever used an online catalog that even suggests spelling changes (though EBSCO Academic Search Premier seems to do that). But this is how I would love to see the catalog evolve, by adding these kinds of help right at the point of need, during the search.
[btw, the one hit on eBay for "college librarian" is pretty cool]
- License:
- File under: Digital libraries,Web design
- Comments? 3
Steve, there are in fact some catalogs that do use Google’s “did you mean” API. Not quite the same thing as the eBay example, but similar. This is (unfortunately) not something provided by the ILS vendor(s) that I know of, but rather something that is tacked on on the front end by enterprising technogeek librarians. See, e.g. http://www.jaunter.com/ which bills itself as the first service to utilize this. There is nothing technologically keeping someone from doing this on his or her own rather than paying a commercial entity. See an example live site at http://catalog.dbrl.org/
Steve
Comment by Steve Oberg — November 23, 2005 @ 11:25 am
Thanks, Steve–I figured someone had to be doing it, and I just hadn’t seen it. Nice to see it in action.
Jaunter looks like an interesting and fairly elegant service. Seeing that it uses the Google API to do the spellchecking, my first thought was “hey, maybe I could do this!” Then I remembered that (1) I know just enough JavaScript to break stuff and (2) Jaunter must have some commercial-level agreement with Google, as we’d run through the 1,000 queries per day limit in a hurry on our catalog (some days I feel like I do 1,000 searches myself).
(Also, Steve, I added your blog to my aggregator. Looking forward to reading some of the archives.)
Comment by Steve Lawson — November 23, 2005 @ 4:49 pm
Checking spelling in the catalog
From the ask-and-ye-shall-receive department: So just the other day I was griping in this space that our online catalog won’t even do spelling suggestions, let alone the nifty “get more results with fewer keywords” suggestion from eBay. Today in my…
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