Searching vs. Finding

ABSTRACT

Finding information and organizing it so that it can be found are two key aspects of any company's knowledge management strategy. Nearly everyone is familiar with the experience of searching with a Web search engine and using a search interface to search a particular Web site once you get there. (You may have even noticed that the latter often doesn't work as well as the former.) After you have a list of hits, you typically spend a significant amount of time following links, waiting for pages to download, reading through a page to see if it has what you want, deciding that it doesn't, backing up to try another link, deciding to try another way to phrase your request, et cetera. Eventually you may find what you want, or you may ultimately give up and decide that you cant find it. Why is this so difficult?

REFERENCES

• 1: Robert Krovetz, Viewing morphology as an inference process, Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.191-202, June 27-July 01, 1993, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/160688.160718]
• 2: William A. Woods, Aggressive morphology for robust lexical coverage, Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing, p.218-223, April 29-May 04, 2000, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.3115/974147.974177]
• 3: 3. Woods, W. A. Understanding subsumption and taxonomy: a framework for progress. In Sowa, J. (Ed.), Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo: CA, 1991, 45-94.
• 4: William A. Woods , Lawrence A. Bookman , Ann Houston , Robert J. Kuhns , Paul Martin , Stephen Green, Linguistic knowledge can improve information retrieval, Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing, p.262-267, April 29-May 04, 2000, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.3115/974147.974183]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models; Relevance feedback

General Terms:
Design