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Geoff Hart wrote:
> Al Geist noted: <<Indexes may be helpful to those who use them, but
> for online work, I always go to the search function.>>
>
> <<If I don't know the term, the index won't help me; however, if I
> know the concept, the search function will.>>
>
> That's actually backwards to how it works. The example I like to use
> to illustrate how this works was learning how to type accented
> characters in an old word processor I once used (possibly WordPerfect
> 5?): you could search for accents, foreign letters, special
> characters, and a few other likely terms using full-text search, but
> only if you knew that the authors had used "overstrike mode" (which
> was how you told the software to insert the correct accent) could you
> possibly find what you were looking for. However, a good index would
> have included all these synonyms, and possibly more, thereby ensuring
> that if you didn't know "overstrike mode", you could still find what
> you were looking for.
>
> That's the difference: Full-text search only lets you find the words
> the authors used, and if you don't know those words, you're SOL. An
> index provides you with alternatives. Somewhere in between lies the
> idea of full-text search supplemented with meta tags that serve the
> same role as the index's synonyms. But if you're creating those meta
> tags, there's no additional cost to extract them and create an index
> too.
> >
ideally, of course, the search engine would look at synonyms and offer
alternative search terms...
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