Finding things... why is it so hard?Mar 20 '04 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line It's the search, stupid. Well, I see from spinning through this category (Which I didn't even know existed until I chased a link though a positive rating by Hadassahchana; thanks, hon) that there's a lot more fracas than I knew about. But *my* major complaint about Epinions still doesn't seem to have been fixed, after 4 years or so of my unevenly complaining about it, even to Peterme when he was still working here... It's impossible to find anything. When I enter "Bad Business", for example, to find the new Spenser novel and file a review on it... I get 53 hits, and Parker is waaaaay down at the bottom of the pile. Why is this? It's because the search algorithm is broken. It looks for items which contain *any* of the terms used in the search (OR), instead of items which contain *all* those terms (AND) -- which means that people's instinct to tighten up a search (add more keywords) actually makes things *worse*. I guarantee that this scares people off. It did me: look how few reviews I've written. I've been a weblogger, at http://baylink.pitas.com, for 4 years; clearly, I have stuff to write about. Switching from OR to AND searches, and sorting in ascending order by the number of non-hit words in the title; that's the key to fixing find. And for those of us who are inveterate back-catalog reviewers (useful, at least, in books, music and movies), providing a screamingly obvious way to submit titles not already in file wold be nice, too. Those are my two dreams. Maybe they'll actually happen. I have over 2000 books in my personal library; certainly those reviews would be helpful to *someone*...  |
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