[Tagdb] vertical search, strong typing amd multi-field queries

[Richard Cunningham]

I built an aircraft search site (www.ASO.com) that's had a multi-field
search since 1995. See http://www.aso.com/i.aso3/powersearch.jsp

The user first chooses an aircraft type, which dynamically populates
the next selection with the makes and models in the chosen type.
 From there, they can further narrow their search by price,
model year, airframe time, etc. The default values in the form
will return all aircraft in the chosen type.

We have discussed having a "free text" search with a single box
on several occasions, but have not done it for a variety of reasons.
It has some use cases where the entered search terms match more than
the user intended. For example, if the user enters "Citation I",
and the search simply looks for models containing "Citation I",
it will return Citation II's and III's as well as Citation I's,
which is more than the user wanted. Of course this is technically
solvable. However, there's several other domain specific features
I'd like to put in a free text search that add up to a cost that's
difficult to justify.


Nitin Borwankar wrote:
> Slightly unrelated to tags/folksonomy but only slightly.
> 
> In my current consulting a recurring issue is that of search.
> (A tag bundle can be used as a filter to reduce search scope and then we 
> can do raw text or other searches.  But that is a separate topic .... )
> 
> I'd like to ask the list about the current dogma about providing a 
> single search field with the belief that non-technical users find 
> multiple fields too complicated and they will "leave" -  this belief is 
> predominant in the major search engine companies.  There is also a UI 
> dogma that simplicity is better and this dogma often dominates common 
> sense approaches driven by the structure of underlying data.
> 
> See www.simplyhired.com for an example of a site that has moved away ( 
> slightly ) from the single field dogma.
> I find the single query field appropriate for horizontal search engines 
> like Google etc. where the query could be about anything.
> But what if I am at a site that has say book information - does it make 
> sense to provide a single field or does a set of fields 
> title/author/publisher/....
> make more sense?  When we have domain specialization for search i.e. 
> vertical search, is it automatic that we also have strong typing of 
> underlying data and hence multi-field search? Does a single field ( 
> typeless query ) make sense for a vertical search engine.
> 
> 
> Nitin Borwankar.
> 
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-- 
Richard Cunningham                      E-Mail: richardc at ASO.com