[Zope-dev] Comment on CVS change

[Casey Duncan]

Chris McDonough wrote:
> 
> > I've gotta weigh in here, too;  the breakage induced by this change
> > will be large.  Give that what *real* users expect is *neither* a
> > Boolean "AND" *nor* a Boolean "OR", but instead a DWIM/Googlesque
> > "affinity" search, I don't think the win is clear enough to warrant
> > the breakage:
> >

I think long term, the Catalog machinery should support such "affinity"
searching.

> >   * "AND" searches return *small* result sets;  non-programmers
> >     will be surprised by the often-empty lists they get back,
> >     and won't have any clue how to broaden their search.  False
> >     negatives suck.
> 
> I think most people are getting used to narrowing their search by adding
> terms.  Google, Yahoo, Lycos and the like have trained them to do this.  I
> think the idea that folks, even nonprogrammers, don't know to do this in the
> post-1995 world may be a little flawed.
> 

I rarely find myself using any explicit boolean operators when I use
Google. And even when it returns 657,340,269 pages, the ones I wanted
tend to be in the top 30. I think "OR" searching is fine if the result
scoring can be done intelligently somehow.

> > Given that any site manager can override the policy trivially, using
> > only two lines of DTML, should we really be switching the (admittedly
> > arbitrary) existing polciy embedded in the core?
> 
> No, I suppose not.  I'll change it back.  :-(  Not happy about it.
> 

I still say a toggle in the Catalog management interface is the best
solution.

-- 
| Casey Duncan
| Kaivo, Inc.
| cduncan@kaivo.com
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