Influence of unlimited ranking on practical online search strategy

Abstract

Ranking of retrieved documents in the descending order of their association with the inquiry has been known in theory for a very long time, but so far it has found only limited use in operational online systems, Because of the ranking, the documents that are probably relevant are concentrated at the top of the set of documents retrieved and submitted for display. This affects the practical strategy of online retrieval that differs essentially from the search strategy in the traditional Boolean‐oriented systems: the inquirer does not need to reformulate his inquiry if it yields too many documents nor to be too anxious at the selection of inquiry terms. Consequently, types of inquiry can be used that are inadmissible in Boolean‐oriented systems or in systems that rank only a limited number of documents.

Citation

Stibic, V. (1980), "Influence of unlimited ranking on practical online search strategy", Online Review, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 273-279. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb024034