Sunday, April 14, 2002

Honest Comments from an Oracle Customer about Oracle Text Search I've long known that Oracle's text search, Context, wasn't particularly good although it has been quite a while since I analyzed it.  I was on a web site, www.photo.net, that uses Oracle Context for full text search and I found that just plain didn't work when I did query by example searches.  I sent an email to Phil, the owner of the site, about it and his response is just plain funny.  I've never before heard a text search being described as "Mysterious".  Too damn funny.  NOTE: I do think my analysis (below) of why it failed is correct. PHIL'S RESPONSE STARTS HERE: Oracle Text is a mysterious product. We'll eventually be turning over search to a volunteer programming/dba. Philip -----Original Message----- From: J. Scott Johnson [mailto:scott@fuzzygroup.com] Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2002 9:02 PM To: webmaster@photo.net Cc: philg@mit.edu Subject: Possibly Flawed Query By Example Implementation   Hi, Just a comment but your query by example doesn't seem to work very well. With the url: http://www.photo.net/search/search?search_type=rest&;sections=static_pages&sections=bboard&sections=comments&query_string=kodak+digital I looked at this entry "Comments on Choosing a Digital Camera" which had a url of: http://www.photo.net/comments/one?comment_id=189128 When I selected more like this, it gave me no results. Same for the one just above it. Same for another one. Here's the results page for that one: Themes searched for: digitalness, currentness, ownership, F3, reliance You can't tell me that you have nothing more on Nikon F3s for heavens sake. My guess is that you may be anding the themes together to resolve the QBE. When something has a multivalent categorization, this rarely works (do the math). What you should do (probably) is display something like "Well, this isn't exactly on point, but you might be interested in these" and then list the items that matched one or mor eof the themes. Just a thought from your average, every day search geek who has virtually no life (it is a saturday night, after all, and I'm finding bugs for you)... Scott J. Scott Johnson Physical * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 80 Spring Road Nahant, MA 01908 Phone: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 781 592 0262 - home 617 970 4719 - cell Virtual: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * sjohnson@fuzzygroup.com http://www.fuzzygroup.com/ http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/ Yahoo IM: fuzzygroup   comment [] 8:04:37 PM

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