Adding Boolean-Quality Control to Best-Match Searching via an Improved User Interface

Abstract

While end users these days seem happy with best-match text-retrieval systems, it appears that expert searchers still prefer exact-match (Boolean) text-retrieval systems by an overwhelming margin. This is somewhat surprising. Most expert searchers were probably trained with Boolean systems, and an obvious factor is simply preferring the familiar, but we argue that a second major factor is that these experts feel a much greater sense of control with Boolean than with best-match systems. We have designed a best-match system, MIRV, incorporating user-interface features that we believe will give experts a sense of control comparable to that of Boolean systems and that we believe end users will also be happy with. We implemented MIRV's document viewer and did a controlled user study, with encouraging results.

A functionality taxonomy for document search engines

“…The study in [BP00] has shown that most common searchers seem to have a preference for best-match systems, while expert searchers seem to prefer exact-match by an overwhelming margin. This seemed to be the case since it is easier to explain searchers why a Boolean system did or did not retrieve a given document, regardless of its actual relevance.…”