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Learning About Full-text Search

Posted by michael on from the looks-easy-but-isn't dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Tim Bray who's known for XML and has been /.'ed once or twice for that kind of stuff, actually seems to be a search geek and has been writing this endless series of essays on search technology since summer. He says he's finished now - it's like a textbook on searching."

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:poor guy by martingunnarsson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Google can cache pages and put them online, so should Slashdot. People say copyright issues would be a problem, but in that case, why is Google's online cache any better?

    --
    Martin
  2. Re:Anti-XML by anomalous+cohort · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the google cache...

    searching for words isn't really what you want to do. You'd like to search for ideas, for concepts, for solutions, for answers.

    That is why he is going in an XML direction. The relational approach is rectilinear and requires that the information be framed in a highly normalized fashion. Generalized semantic searching is highly non-normalized because, well, humans are highly non-normalized.

    I think that he should look at some work by a different Tim, the Semantic Web.

  3. Re:poor guy by davew2040 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And they considered incorrectly.

  4. Re:re-inventing the wheel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Try reading the articles/essays. Knuth's vol 3 is about comparison search, not full-text search.