Adding Boolean-quality control to best-match searching via an improved user interface

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. This material is based on work supported in part by the National Science Foundation, Library of Congress and Department of Commerce under cooperative agreement number EEC-9209623, and also supported in part by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/ITO under ARPA order number D468, issued by ESC/AXS contract number F19628-95-C-0235. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are the author(s)’ and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsor(s).