[Wasabi Proposal] End user search language

[Liam R E Quin]

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.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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