Ross Singer wrote:
> What do you think is more appropriate (and intuitive) for a search
> engine if the user gives no boolean, "and" or "or"?

As a user, I'd expect for both to happen.  But the hits that include all
my search terms should be more relevant and show up first.  In fact,
what I'd want would be even more fun for the programmer.

Set of hits:
1) Exact phrase matches listed first
2) Boolean AND'ed matches second
3) Fuzzy/misspelled exact/AND'ed matches third
4) Boolean OR'ed matches fourth
5) Fuzzy/misspelled OR'ed matches fifth

Maybe stop at any point if you have more than enough hits.

I'd also want spelling correction suggestions if relevant and maybe
related or authoritative subject terms/authors in a sidebar.

As someone other than a user, I think their should be some metric for
how "successful" a user is in finding what they want, and the ability to
somehow manually tweak the search results for any given set of search
terms so that in the future those terms will be more successful.

Fun stuff, eh? :D

But if the choice is just between AND and OR, I'd pick AND.

-- Jason
http://open-ils.org/