Search Destination Design: Further Examples - Page 28
June 8, 2001
Natural language search engines get much attention but are rarely
great for usability. It is extra work for the user to formulate
an entire question, and people prefer typing in a small number of
keywords. Also, the search engines are not truly capable of
understanding human language, so it is misleading to pretend that
they do. In this example, asking the natural language question
"Who wrote the Gettysburg Address?" on AskJeeves results in many
hits that are relevant to the document but not to the authorship.
It would almost certainly be possible to find the answer to the
question through one of the links, but it is easier to simply
type the relevant keywords "Gettysburg Address" into Google
because the answer is right on the results page in the title of
two of the hits. Google places the full text of the Address as
the first hit because it doesn't know that we were interested
specifically in authorship.
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Sun's AnswerBook2 web-based online documentation highlights the
user's query terms (here "install" and "printer") to make it
easier for users to scan the rather long pages to find the
sections that are of interest to them. The bottom of the page has
an outline of related topics in the same region of the
information space. Red circles are used to indicate the estimated
relevance of each page relative to the user's current search
query.
Search Destination Design - Page 27
Designing Web Usability
URL Design - Page 29
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