Terminological feedback is really a tough interface to get working well. It makes for a great demo but the effectiveness gains are hard to milk out of the user. Here’s a publication including experiments where user’s underperform automatic (non-interactive) query expansion.
In my experience, you’re better off presenting passages (what search engines now call snippets) because they provide the user more context and the engine more text.
All that said, Peter Anick published lots of nice work on the adoption and effectiveness of AltaVista‘s Prisma terminological feedback system,
Great, Daniel!
Please check the news that Quintura was named the Search of The Year today by AltSearchEngines.com on http://altsearchengines.com/2007/12/03/the-alternative-search-engine-of-the-year/
Terminological feedback is really a tough interface to get working well. It makes for a great demo but the effectiveness gains are hard to milk out of the user. Here’s a publication including experiments where user’s underperform automatic (non-interactive) query expansion.
I. Ruthven, “Re-examining the potential effectiveness of interactive query expansion,†in Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, 2003.
In my experience, you’re better off presenting passages (what search engines now call snippets) because they provide the user more context and the engine more text.
All that said, Peter Anick published lots of nice work on the adoption and effectiveness of AltaVista‘s Prisma terminological feedback system,
P. Anick, “Using terminological feedback for web search refinement: a log-based study,†in Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, pp. 88–95, ACM Press, 2003.
A lot of Prisma elements can be found in Yahoo’s new Search Assist feature. No surprise since Yahoo ate Overture who ate AltaVista.