RE: Infocenter searches (Not!)

Ya' know, I read your post, Buck, nodded my head in semi-agreement
(thinking, "stop being an old fart, and get on with the new stuff"), deleted
it, and moved on to the next post.

After reading several more posts, I couldn't get your post out of my mind.
Here's why.

JMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., BUT... Searching on InfoCenter is harder and less
intuitive than in Softcopy, plain & simple.

In Rob's example of searching for WRKOBJPDM, doing the same thing in
Softcopy, the PDM manual shows up at the top of the list of hits.  And there
are no duplicate listings.  Somehow, dumb ole' Softcopy was able to
determine that the PDM manual had the highest relevance and had the smarts
to eliminate duplicate hits.  Why can't IBM make InfoCenter at least that
smart?

BTW, I checked the duplicate links that infocenter listed for "1.0 Part 1 -
Reference for AS/400 ASCII Work Station Reference V3R1"; they both point to
exactly the same point in the document!  I'd at least thought that it would
have found different references to it.  Same thing for the "2.0 ILE
Application Example for ILE Application Development Example V4R1"!  I dunno,
but I personally find it hard to put faith into a search engine that turns
up duplicate links like that.

In a later post, Rob mentioned the customized bookshelves.  I *live* by my
customized bookshelf.  In fact, I created a little 400 app that takes the
"All books" bookshelf file from the cd-rom and I can pick & choose from that
list to create my own bookshelves.  (Personally, I never liked the function
within Softcopy to create a customized bookshelf.)

Hopefully, by the time I find myself actually using a post-v4r4 box,
infocenter will have matured to the point that it is easier to use than the
softcopy I use now.

Dan Bale
SAMSA, Inc.
989-790-0507
DBale@SAMSA.com <mailto:DBale@SAMSA.com>
  Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.
  (Whatever is said in Latin seems profound.)


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
[mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:44 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Infocenter searches (Not!)


>We've been talking about how bad the
>Infocenter is, especially searches.
>So I decided to try a search from
>the Infocenter page for V5R1
>(note that says V5R1).
>
>I decided to search on "WRKOBJPDM"
>and see what I got.
>
>I got the following 7 hits:

-snip undesirable hits-

And the single word WRKOBJPDM occurs in every single one of those hits.
Read on to see where I'm going with this...

>Only the 4th one has anything to do
>with the WRKOBJPDM command, the 7th
>one marginally.

I offer the following only to explain what has helped me.  Having had to
live with web searches that return millions of hits, I've learnt the hard
way not to search for a single word; it's exasperating.  They have a program
that runs and picks 'likely' words to stuff in the machine index.  If
WRKOBJPDM occurs a thousand times, it gets stuffed in the index a thousand
times.  It's up to the search engine to filter that stuff out of the raw
index, and I have taken to the notion that *I* am an integral part of that
filtering.  Is that a bright idea?  Beats me, but it's how I've got it to
work _for me_.

If you are looking for the WRKOBJPDM command description, try "wrkobjpdm
command" including the quotes.  Or "work with objects using PDM".  Note that
the various PDM commands are NOT in the CL manual because they belong to a
separately licensed program.

If you _know_ where in the manual hierarchy to look, don't search -
navigate.

I went through the 'Man I HATE this!' phase several times.  I thought the
book manager was... well, what I thought is unprintable.  I am never really
comfortable with any form of soft copy, but I deal with it.  It's incredibly
unlikely that IBM is going to abandon the concept, so instead of fighting it
I have worked as hard as possible to learn the new system's limitations and
work around them.  I've clicked and sent in suggestions and I've struggled
to become more proficient.  Until I 'let go' of my old ideas of how to get
at information I was a consistent failure and I guess I'm not smart enough
to do anything other than abandon my old ways and try to work with the new.

I only relate this in the hopes that someone else will be able to benefit
from my mistakes.
  --buck