Exercise 3.8 -- Information Retrieval

An understanding of techniques used to retrieve unstructured information is vital for meeting information needs as methods are vastly different from those used to search structured data. I frequently perform searches to meet both my own and my customers' research needs, but had given little thought to formulating research zones and content components (Morville and Rosenfeld, 2006, p.151) and the models mentioned by Wilson (1999).

"Problem solving is the underlying motivation for information searching." (Wilson, 1999, p.265) When met with a specific problem, such as, 'When was JavaScript invented?' a known approach is useful but cannot help with vague queries. Exhaustive approaches are useful for narrow topics, but a search for "simple SQL queries" on Bing returns 67.5 million results. I have found the exploratory technique most useful for this module. For example, "javascript tutorial" AND "for beginners" gives 13,000 results. Reading the first few results, I was interested in learning about while loops and alert boxes, so used the following query to retrieve a manageable and relevant set of results:

("while loop" OR "alert box") NEAR "javascript tutorial"

Other considerations include using proper nouns. HTML or html would make little difference, but case-sensitive searching would aid us when, for example, searching for information on Apple or Adobe. Boolean searches can aid us, for example users looking for information on the democratisation of information may find information on the Democratic political party if they do not employ effective search techniques.

Information retrieval is much more difficult than data retrieval, as we must use our information-seeking skills to transform data into information. Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) assert, "...search is there for users," (p. 150) and we must look at information seeking from a user's perspective if we are to meet their information needs.