Re: AVS NOT searches-- the "Bud Not Buddy" fix

[Bob Duncan <duncanr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:28 PM 09/03/2003 -0500, Elizabeth Thomsen wrote:
>We're looking at the Phase 3 enhancements to AVS searching, and I have 
>mixed feelings about the option "AVS automatic quote insertion."  If you 
>turn this on, the system will not interpret the word "NOT" as a Boolean 
>operator, but will search it as part of a phrase.  This does fix the 
>infamous "Bud Not Buddy" problem, in which people doing a keyword search 
>for this award-winning (and excellent) children's book would get results 
>for anything with the word BUD except for records that had the word Buddy, 
>obviously a problem.
>
>With this fix, to add an exclusion to a search, you would use the operator 
>AND NOT instead of NOT.  This is an improvement, in my opinion, but not a 
>real fix.  Now we can search for "Bud Not Buddy" but not for any records 
>that have the phrase "and not" in them.  There are certainly fewer of 
>those, but they do exist-- in our database I see books called "The Same 
>and Not the Same," "On being a superpower :|band not knowing what to do 
>about it," and "Too old, too ugly, and not deferential to men," among many 
>others.
>
>I'd like to see a different approach to this problem.  I'd like the rare 
>searcher who is intentionally trying to use the Boolean operator NOT need 
>to enter this in some format not likely to be confused with words in 
>titles.  For example, if the Alta Vista style minus sign were supported 
>for use in the catalog, there would be no confusion.  It's frustrating 
>that this exists in our system, but only with the Alta Vista search which 
>III doesn't recommend for the public catalog, and which doesn't honor 
>record suppression.
>
>Am I missing something here?



Since any Boolean search operator can be overridden by surrounding it with 
double-quotes, the "Bud Not Buddy" fix doesn't preclude being able to 
search for "and not".  Either of the following search strings will work:
         On being a superpower "and not" knowing
         "On being a superpower and not knowing"

It's a toss up.  If you set "AVS automatic quote insertion" to YES, you 
need to use double-quotes to search for "and not".  If you set "AVS 
automatic quote insertion" to NO, then you need to use double-quotes to 
search for "not" as well as "and not".  (And I don't know if this a bug or 
not, but I just experimented with setting the option to NO, and NOT didn't 
behave as a search operator or a search term;  hmm...)

I don't think the Phase 3 approach is necessarily a bad one.  Using quotes 
to turn search operators into search terms is a single convention that 
works for all search operators (it's how we can make and, or, and near 
search terms).  I'm not sure going to a symbol-based scheme is any more 
clear---plus and minus signs are pretty good for expressing AND and NOT, 
but I've never found symbolic expressions for OR, NEAR, etc. to be terribly 
intuitive.

Bob Duncan


~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
David Bishop Skillman Library
Lafayette College
Easton, PA  18042
duncanr@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.library.lafayette.edu/