Blog: Effective Search Terms Yield the Right Information

Effective Search Terms Yield the Right Information
University of Gothenburg (Sweden) (02/04/11)

Information retrieval is a multidisciplinary subject that needs greater contributions from linguists to improve the effectiveness of searches, says the University of Gothenburg's Karin Friberg Heppin. Much of the work in the field involves the development of search algorithms and engines, but Friberg Heppin says asking for information in the right way also can make a difference. She has written a doctoral thesis on natural language processing that shows the importance of looking at the terms people type into a search box. She used a database of medical texts written in Swedish to examine what makes search terms effective or ineffective. Heppin says the language used can determine the usefulness of the documents to a person, noting that the use of the word "flu" would result in documents that would be of interest to patients, while the word "influenza" would be a better choice for doctors. "Users usually know what kind of information they are looking for, but they don't know what question to ask," she says. "The problem these days is not for the search engine to locate the right documents, but to make the most relevant texts end up towards the top of the list."

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