On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Brion Vibber
<vibber(a)aludra.usc.edu>)u>):
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)