2007/2/16, Liam R E Quin <<a href="mailto:liam@holoweb.net">liam@holoweb.net</a>>:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Wed, 2007-14-02 at 14:29 +0100, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote: [...] > > Also, I must say that I've got cold feet with regards to let OR have > precedence over AND. Is it not safe to assume that people that use > logical operators (which I'm willing to bet is a minority) knows that > AND usually takes precedence over OR? No, not safe. The most effective interpretation of (a AND b) I have seen is to use quorum ranking -- first list things containing both, then list things containing either, and for (a AND b AND c) sort results by the number of terms matched.  And this is what some of the Web search engines do, too. There's no good answer, though, I think.  You have to do user testing.</blockquote><div> The sorting would be up to the to the search engine backend. It is mainly the interpretation of the language we should be focusing on. But I agree - it is nice include terms also matched by either term. On the other hand this rules out automated usages of the languages from other apps (they might want exact matches only) - but the xml language is more suitable for that anyway... Perhaps we should allow "fuzziness" like this in the results from a user query... It might have unwanted consequences though, so it should take some consideration. It might be better to advise end-user-apps to expand a "A AND B" query to something more forgiving... Cheers, Mikkel </div></div>