The kind of mixed AND/OR search is apparently what Google does, since
the more words from your search that are in a particular result, the
higher it tends to be in the ranking. It has been interesting, for
someone introduced to searching with command-line Dialog searches to
see where we are at this point, with searches that would have failed
miserably in Dialog working pretty darn well by using strategies such
as those described below, and others.
Roy

On Nov 24, 2004, at 6:55 AM, Jason Etheridge wrote:

> 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/
>