stop words
If you’ve ever searched for anything, you’ve probably run into 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 terms, the search engine will ignore that word (if
information retrieval
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
search engines
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