Re: Support for boolean queries in apropos

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 05:55:16PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
 > >> The FTS engine of Sqlite supports Boolean queries.  [...]
 > 
 > > I think that general boolean queries are known now to be less
 > > powerful and useful than everyone supposed that they were 20 or 30
 > > years ago, so search engines either omit support for boolean
 > > operators or else do not encourage the use of such operators.
 > 
 > Those are not necessarily related to one another.
 > 
 > I suspect the truth is more like, general Boolean queries are something
 > most end users are not capable of getting the full benefit from, so
 > search engines - to the extent that it is fair to consider "search
 > engines" as a single class - have dumbed down their interface to
 > something their mass audience _can_ make effective use of.

While that's probably part of it, I'm not convinced it's all of it.
I'm hardly an expert on text retrieval but it seems to me that complex
boolean logic (beyond "cirrus +logic -cloud") isn't really a good fit
for natural language.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost