Applying Cognitive Psychology to System Development - Fundamentals and Assessment Tools for Occupational Ergonomics - page 526

FIGURE 24.7 (a) Search definition display for failure story 1: searching for “Wedding songs” using the defaults for
search type (title) and format (all). (b) Search results display for failure story 1: searching for “Wedding songs” using
the defaults for search type (title) and format (all).

To avoid this problem, it would be better to pick a default for search type that is more encompassing
(erring on the side of high recall at the expense of low precision). One way to accomplish this would be to
use a Keyword search as the default. The designer would have to further decide whether to require the use
of logical operators (AND; OR; NOT), and whether to allow phrases to be entered without separating
words with logical operators.
It would probably be better to not require the use of logical operators, given this is not typical in most
websites with keyword searches, and given people are known to be poor at correctly using such operators.
Instead, the search engine could:

. Run the search using the broader query Wedding AND Songs.
.

Sort the retrievals using some type of relevance ranking (e.g., ranking highest those retrievals
indexed with the controlled vocabulary term “Wedding Music” — which has “Wedding songs”
as a synonym, followed by those retrievals containing “Wedding songs” as a phrase somewhere
in the document representation (but not indexed as “Wedding music”), followed by those