Karen Coyle wrote:
> At 01:14 PM 4/28/99 +0200, Frank A. Roos wrote:
> >
> >Search engines on the Web do not sort, they rank (mostly in an odd manner,
> to me at
> >least), whereas OPACs sort.
>
> That's because there's a great deal of difference between the data being
> searched on the web and the data being searched in a file of metadata
> records. Full text is very rich, semantically, and allows for the
> possibility of distinctions between items that you cannot make in a file of
> metadata records that contain few topical terms. When you attempt to rank
> bibliographic records your ranking is much less meaningful than a ranking
> of full text; to begin with you may have no words that are repeated, yet
> all are very important. So we can't assume that we can apply Web-type
> ranking to metadata - it will need a different treatment and I have yet to
> see a successful implementation of ranked metadata retrievals. Anyone?
>
> ----------------------------------------------
> Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
> University of California Digital Library
> http://www.kcoyle.net 510/987-0567
> ----------------------------------------------
Actually search engines are using metadata, albeit not the DC metadata.
Ranking is performed in some way by some search engines, so it seems, by
determining the matching of the search term vector with the index term vector
of the "document", thus yielding a measure of relevance.
BTW, sorting is a special case of ranking.
--
Frank A. Roos
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