Hey, Robert--

What language seems most natural to me? Why, English! ;)

The trouble is, natural language searching only looks simpler to people unacquainted with how these things work. I am only vaguely aware of the depth of the coding involved, but I do know that so-called natural language gets rewritten in a kind of Boolean structure that puts "AND" between everything in the phrase unless it's in quotes, and will eliminate words in the phrase that appear on the program's list of untouchables, even if one of those words is vital to the searcher's meaning.

I would love it if there were a way to get a search engine to understand nuance, but until such time as that comes to be, I prefer search language to be a little more precise, even if it becomes more complicated to use. At least then I will have some idea what I've really asked for.

The trouble with AND and OR is that the search results are counterintuitive to our actual experience. With AND, in the physical world, we get more (burger AND fries), whereas OR gives us less (salad OR soup). Searching with those terms in the virtual worlds produces the opposite effect in the results: AND gives fewer results than OR. So the hope of reducing confusion by using common words is, I fear, an illusory one, unless the instructions come equipped with those Venn diagrams of union and intersecting sets that I remember from the New Math in elementary school.

Personally, my experience instructing regular people in searching tells me that Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT (with the little Venn diagrams, which is why I carry blue and pink hi-liters in my pocket), a phrase search with the phrase in quotes, and a simple truncation symbol like * is about all that people want to deal with. When we get to fine points like "w/5" and "wom?n" their eyes start to glaze over. So I gives 'em whats they wants.

Recently I visited a site for teens that apparently assumed no one could spell. Its search structure applied trucation without my asking it to. Looking for rap, I got 4 hits, and 21 for rape. So it's also possible to make things difficult by making them too easy.

Why can't I ever be brief? Good night, folks.

Regards--
Mary Anne