[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Introduction and Question

[Jason Etheridge]

On 9/14/07, Patrick Durusau <patrick at durusau.net> wrote:
> BTW, I am still curious about the "relevance" algorithm that returned
> jazz music for the search term (without quotes) np-completeness. Or does
> the system not react well to hyphens in names unless surrounded by
> quotes? Not real sure why it would parse a hyphen but I have seen odder
> things. (Noting that when I surrounded it with quotes "np-completeness"
> I got zero hits, not jazz.)

Hi Patrick,

I believe when you quote a search term, it searches for that "exact"
string, with no stemming or other interpretation.  Without the quotes,
I believe EG will strip out punctuation, so you'd basically be doing a
search for np and completeness, or some stemmed variants.  So your
first hit there found a "np" in a 300 field, and "complete" in the
245.  Hrmm, is that a valid record?  For the cases where we do
encounter messed up records, I imagine we could codify some cataloger
sanity checking and not index certain things that look like garbage,
but I don't think it'll ever be perfect.

Here's a wiki document explaining some relevance ranking stuff, though
I don't know if it's still accurate:
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:opac_demo

The "metarecords" it talks about is the FRBR-like groupings you can
get it if you choose Group Formats and Editions in the Advanced
Search.

> PS: One more question: Are there plans to add synonym support to further
> confuse users with search results? ;-) I would think it would be an
> advanced search option.

I know they're planning multiple thesaurus support, but I think that
might manifest in the "Did you mean/Are you looking for/spellcheck"
feature (another kettle of fish that needs work), and/or in the
authority-based sidebars.

I can't imagine "loosening" search results just to inflate the number
of hits.  I'd rather get zero hits and then a lot of suggestions.

-- Jason
http://esilibrary.com/