The advantage of a computer and flexible web page designs are to make search results easy to view and understand. In the 2'x4' piece of birch plywood example above, I saw a mix of results and only items 2 & 3 on the first row and item 2 on the second row matched what I expected. I stopped looking at the results after the second row.
"People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches". Yes, because it usually is. Non-matching results should always be indicated separately and secondarily from perfect matches.
"...without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches...". Um, I can decide if zero or more perfect matches are good enough for me. If I am looking for a specific item, related results are almost never wanted and are a waste of time. On the other hand, if I don't have something exact in mind, then browsing is OK (since I'm choosing to go broad -> narrow).
If you are old enough, remember searching for a particular word in a printed dictionary? If I didn't find the word I wanted (ie an exact search), then I knew that my spelling (ie my exact search term) was wrong. At that point I could be be finished or I could choose to do more searching. With a printed dictionary I could laboriously expand the search using alternate spellings or synonyms (ie a fuzzy search). The exact match is required for crossword puzzles. The fuzzy search is good when writing poetry and articles.
A while ago I was researching and pricing generators. I had a set of specific parameters in mind and my friend's generator that I was using at the time to compare against. Home Depot's website was partially helpful. It gave me a good overview of what Home Depot has to offer. But, there were far too many extra results and I couldn't tell if my specific item would be included without wasting a lot of time scrolling around. After a little bit of scrolling I moved on to other sites. I didn't buy a generator from Home Depot. During my searches at other sites I stopped as soon as I got an exact match.
In my generator search, the broad results were OK to get a general idea of generator price ranges for the type I wanted. It was too time consuming when I had an exact generator I wanted to compare against and couldn't limit the search. Now that I am writing this, I can honestly say I have never used Home Depot's website again.
I read the article. If I could specify some kind of specificity or weighting to control the amount of vectorization (is that the right way to say this?), I'd think this was good news. This article just confirmed I won't bother to try. Reading the article just makes the Home Depot's website sound like another Amazon search site.
"People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches". Yes, because it usually is. Non-matching results should always be indicated separately and secondarily from perfect matches.
"...without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches...". Um, I can decide if zero or more perfect matches are good enough for me. If I am looking for a specific item, related results are almost never wanted and are a waste of time. On the other hand, if I don't have something exact in mind, then browsing is OK (since I'm choosing to go broad -> narrow).
If you are old enough, remember searching for a particular word in a printed dictionary? If I didn't find the word I wanted (ie an exact search), then I knew that my spelling (ie my exact search term) was wrong. At that point I could be be finished or I could choose to do more searching. With a printed dictionary I could laboriously expand the search using alternate spellings or synonyms (ie a fuzzy search). The exact match is required for crossword puzzles. The fuzzy search is good when writing poetry and articles.
A while ago I was researching and pricing generators. I had a set of specific parameters in mind and my friend's generator that I was using at the time to compare against. Home Depot's website was partially helpful. It gave me a good overview of what Home Depot has to offer. But, there were far too many extra results and I couldn't tell if my specific item would be included without wasting a lot of time scrolling around. After a little bit of scrolling I moved on to other sites. I didn't buy a generator from Home Depot. During my searches at other sites I stopped as soon as I got an exact match.
In my generator search, the broad results were OK to get a general idea of generator price ranges for the type I wanted. It was too time consuming when I had an exact generator I wanted to compare against and couldn't limit the search. Now that I am writing this, I can honestly say I have never used Home Depot's website again.
I read the article. If I could specify some kind of specificity or weighting to control the amount of vectorization (is that the right way to say this?), I'd think this was good news. This article just confirmed I won't bother to try. Reading the article just makes the Home Depot's website sound like another Amazon search site.