10.23.05
Information Retrieval
I share a friend’s frustration with information retrieval. What good is it to go to a nifty site like Gutenberg Project and type in human sacrifice or “human sacrifice” or human + sacrifice and get results that say things like “your search returned more than x books, please narrow your search” without telling me, specifically what the problem is? It was looking for anything that had human, sacrifice or human sacrifice; not human sacrifice only! I spent a lot of time tweaking it and finally got some results I could live with, sort of.
San Jose Library’s ebook system is equally horrible. Once I found a book I wanted to peruse, I had to enter the search string into the reader and then navigation was horrible, and not very accurate I might add. It would say things like, “There are 49 hits on 45 pages” but I would have to navigate through each page. So if I wanted to navigate away from the book for a bit to look up something else, I would have to start all over again, no real way to tell it I was on hit 27, plus tabbed browsing or opening a link in new a new window not a choice! Bad way to present information, really hard to research.
Search strings on book topics were bad too. Again, human sacrifice got me loads of books that had human but not many on human sacrifice. Latin American Religion got a book about African Religions in Cuba and Panama, which are part of Latin America but there were no other books. Nothing on Incas, Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs or Catholicism, even. Stupid, stupid, stupid.