Blog Archive: 2009

Search is not Magic

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A discussion among commenters on a post about PubMed search strategies raised the issue of how people need to make sense of the results that a search engine provides. For precision-oriented searches a “black box” approach may make sense because as long as the system manages to identify a useful document, it doesn’t matter much how it does that. For exploratory search, which may be more recall-oriented, having a comprehensible representation of the system’s computations is important to assess coverage of your results. This suggests the need to foster useful mental models, rather than relying on the system to divine your intent and magically produce the “right” result.

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Have queries, want answers

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Sarah Vogel’s comment on yesterday’s post got me thinking about recall-oriented search. She wrote about preferring Boolean queries for complex searches because they gave her a sense for when she really had exhausted a particular topic, something that’s often required for medical literature reviews. But we really have multiple problems here, that it may be useful to decouple: one is the issue of coverage (did we find all there was to find?) and the other is ranking (the order in which documents are shown).

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Open-source queries

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Every once in a while a Twitter query turns up something completely unexpected. I suppose that’s one reason for having them.  My query on all things PubMed recently turned up the following gem: a blog entitled PubMed Search Strategies. What is it? A list of queries. What? PubMed Queries, in all the Boolean glory. The latest pair of posts are pharmacoepidemiology — keywords, and its paternal twin, pharmacoepidemiology — MeSH.  The queries run for 39 and 13 terms, respectively. No average 2.3 word Web searches these.

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