Search is not Magic
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.