Am 11.01.2015 um 18:30 schrieb Jack Krupansky:

> It's still not quite clear to me what your specific goal is. From your
> vague description it seems somewhat different from the blog post that you
> originally cited. So, let's try one more time... explain in plain English
> what use case you are trying to satisfy.

I think it is the use case from the blog entry. I got the complaint that
users didn't find (at least not on the first result page) titles they
entered exactly -- and I wanted to fix this by boosting exact matches.
The example given to me was the title "Anatomie". So I tried it:
title:anatomie and got lots of hits all of which contained the word in
the title but among the first 10 hits there was none with the (exact)
title "Anatomie" the user was looking for.
As next step I did a web search, found the blog entry, implemented it,
was happy with the simple case but couldn't make it work with fielded
queries (which we have to support, see below).

At the moment we even have only fielded queries since the Application
makes the default search field explicit -- which I could change but
would like to keep if possible. But even if I change this case I still
have to cope with fielded queries that are not just targeting the
default search field.

> You mention fielded queries, but in my experience very few end-users would
> know about let alone use them. So, either you are giving your end-users
> specific guidance for writing queries - in which case you can give them
> more specific guidance that achieves your goals, or if these fielded
> queries are in fact generated by the client or app layer code, then maybe
> you just need to put more intelligence into that query-generation code in
> the client.

It is the old library search problem: most users don't use it but we
also have various kinds of experts amoung our users (few but important)
who really use all the bells and whistles.

And I have to somehow satisfy both groups: those who only do a
one-word-search within the default search field and those with complex
fielded queries -- and both should find titles they enter exactly at the
top, even if combined with dozens of other criteria.

And it doesn't really help to question the demand since the demand is
there and somewhat external. The point is how to best meet it.

--Michael

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