The Search Continues: Three Publishers' Site Search Solutions

摘要

Put an infinite number of journalists at an infinite number of keyboards and, sooner or later, they'll generate something that you need to read. But how will you find it? Your local search engine may work well enough for tracking down a Web site. But suppose you've been publishing an encyclopedia for five generations or a newspaper for 300 years―our readers want a search that avoids 5,367 off-target hits at one extreme, and a "0 Results Found" message on the other, yet lets them follow any given thread back to result 1,750 as easily as they can walk into a mall, find the right bookstore, the right department, and the right shelf. Convera's RetrievalWare brochure quite aptly defines two key criteria for a successful search―ecall, which measures how well the system can find all the relevant documents in a database. (It answers the question, "How much is out there?") and Precision, which measures the system's ability to return only relevant documents. (It answers the question, "Is what I found relevant to what I'm looking for?")