RE: Infocenter searches (Not!)

A friend of mine is in charge of maintaining the search engine software we
use on our web site.  It's one of the standard packages and probably doesn't
have "important" features that its competitors lack.  All of this stuff has
scoring algorithms that can be manipulated in various ways.  I've watched
him try to implement management requests.  Regardless of the configuration
capabilities, it's a lot of work to come up with something that shows much
more intelligence to the end user than a simple text search.

That said, I sure liked the search function in Book Manager better than Info
Center.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Buck Calabro [mailto:Buck.Calabro@commsoft.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 8:47 AM
> To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: Infocenter searches (Not!)
>
>
> Buck said:
>
> >> And the single word WRKOBJPDM occurs in every
> >>single one of those hits.
>
> and Jeff wrote:
>
> >So?  That's not what I'm looking for.  I'm
> >looking for details on the WRKOBJPDM command,
> >not everywhere the word WRKOBJPDM appears.
> >Those are 2 different things.
>
> They sure are.  I guess I wasn't smart enough to conceive of
> the notion that
> a machine search could impute meaning to the search arguments
> I type in.
> I'll have to re-think that notion now that I see what you mean.
>
> Buck said:
> >>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.
>
> John wrote:
>
> >With all due respect... hogwash. The problem
> >with Infocenter is not the people using it. You
> >only need to look at any number of superior efforts
> >(ie: MSDN, Sun) to see that we're suffering needlessly.
>
> Despite your excellent description of searching DIM in the VB
> documentation,
> I have had similar poor results searching at Microsoft.com
> and Sun.com.  I
> still think it's me, although I tried your example of
> advanced search for
> DIM limited to RPG and was unpleasantly surprised to find
> that of the 66
> hits, the ninth one described what DIM does and the reference to 'the
> essential array specifications' is dead last!  Time for feedback...
>
>   --buck