information retrieval

stop words

Stop Me If You Think You've Seen This Word Before

If you've ever searched for anything, you've probably run into stop words [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words]. Stop words are words so common they are typically ignored for search purposes. That is, if you type in a stop word as one of your search

By Jeff Atwood ·
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information retrieval

Designing for Informavores, or, Why Users Behave Like Animals Online

I’m currently reading through Peter Morville’s excellent book Ambient Findability. It cites some papers that attempt to explain the search behavior of web users, starting with the berrypicking model: In a 1989 article entitled “The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface,” Marcia Bates

By Jeff Atwood ·
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search engines

Disambiguating Search with Quasi-Evil Hierarchies

Let’s say I was to search Google for the word Jaguar: There’s an immediate problem. The semantics of Jaguar only exist in my head, not in any search box. Did I mean... * Jaguar the car? * OSX Jaguar? * Jaguar the animal? * The Atari Jaguar? * Austin Power’s Shaguar? Whichever

By Jeff Atwood ·
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