Presenting “Intelligent” Search Results

Lars Marius Garshol has written an interesting piece about Search in Topic Maps Portals. I also want to point out a comment by Svein Ølnes, that refers to a very important issue:

I think the reason for Topic Maps based portals generally having better search is obvious: the search leans on an underlying semantic structure.
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The problem with some Topic Maps based search facilities is the tempting “let’s show them all we know”. The key to good searching is to restrict the features to the most useful and not try to show all the information in the Topic Map.

Without doubt, this is a major problem at some Topic Maps based portals. It might be tempting to think that users care about being served all the nicely structured information simply because you can, but too much information may be confusing to users whose prerequisites are not the same as the Topic Maps experts’.

After all, when you search Google - something most user’s are familiar with - the result is fairly easy to interpret - the most relevant result is presented at the top of the list. And that’s it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 12:19 and is filed under Topic Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.