On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Brion Vibber vibber@aludra.usc.edu): Still doesn't help with "vitamin E" or "C sharp"...
Any reason we can't take it down to 1?
Two problems I can see: first, "A" and "I" clearly can't have meaningful indexes, so even if we make "Vitamin C" searchable, it won't work for "Vitamin A", causing confusion.
24/26ths less confusion than none of them working, I'd wager.
Also, single letters often appear in articles as links (see list of diseases, for example) or at outline labels, etc., and would further make single-letter searches less meaningful.
In most cases they'd be meaningful _enough_ though, for two reasons:
a) alphabetical lists, "I", and "a" are very rare in article titles, which we search separately from body text. Yes, there's going to be the occasional spurious "Biographical index -- C through G", but does that negate the utilitity of returning "C programming language" (and a few other pages) instead of nothing to the hapless kid searching for that hip programming language?
b) in most cases such searches will be in conjunction with other words. "Vitamin C" or "Malcom X" will appear more often in conjunction when they are in fact mentioned together than in random unrelated lists. There will be some false positives, but that's better than many many false negatives.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)