I'm going to guess I'm delving into sufficiently esoteric areas that nobody will have an answer, but we are smarter than me, so here goes:
I'm trying to improve one of our key search interfaces. The use cases involve people making searches against a large (hundreds of thousands of records) data set. To make matters more complicated, the data set changes very rapidly, to the point where any set of search results we can return may well be inaccurate or incomplete by the time it's returned. (*) Right now we allow unbounded searches, but truncate the result set at an arbitrary size. Result sets are timestamped so that people know the data were accurate as of the timestamp. My intuition and informal user research tells me that people don't really want these large data sets. They want more focused results. The typical interaction patterns I know to accomplish this are search-within-search, and faceted search. However, both patterns are confounded by the rapid pace of data change: - Search-within-search would result in increasingly inaccurate results as searches were performed against outdated information or might confuse people if we re-ran the search against the updated data, since the second result wouldn't be a true subset of the first result, but rather an updated subset. - faceted search interfaces typically give people a size for their too-large query, and then give actual results when the query parameters have been narrowed down to the point where the result set size is "reasonable." (for whatever definition of reasonable fits the problem domain). In my domain, the rapid change in the data confounds this process because the sizeof() queries are only accurate at the time they're performed and while we might tell the person that he'd get back 100 records based on the data now by the time the query has run he might get back 1000 records. Or 10,000. So it's not inherently clear to me that faceted search would help either. Has anyone tried anything like this or have any thoughts/insights to share about this problem? Best regards, --Alan (*) There's a different problem here of people wanting to monitor the changes, rather than perform static searches, but that's not what this song is about. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
