Gospel Library Search Results

[rmrichesjr]

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As a user, I'd like the ability to narrow my search by including the author in the keyword box, rather than having to go to advanced search options. But someone do a reality check for me: is there a reason this would not be a good idea?

Finally, here's another interesting example: I wanted to find Elder Maxwell's talk, "Murmur Not." Searching for murmur not maxwell does not bring up the talk, of course. But searching for murmur not brings up the talk second, and searching for complain contagious brings up the talk first. All those words appear in the talk. So it sounds like the title is not weighted, and perhaps not even searched. On our intranet at work we weight document titles so they come up higher in the search results--something I've found very helpful. That might not be a bad idea in the Gospel Library.

Fun stuff
Kathryn

I'll second that the author and title should be indexed and searched for with at least as high a weighting (arguably a higher weighting) than words in the body of the document. My experience with conventional, non-Church search engines indicates it is standard practice to index and search for all terms in the document, including title, author, etc. For a system to effectively exclude a document because the author's name is in the list of search terms seems very counter-intuitive.

[amc79]

I wouldn't say it's counter inituitive. From the search engine's perspective it may make perfect sense. If I were giving a talk about pride and was heavily referencing back to President Benson's talk, I'd likely use the word "benson" in my text several times along with the word pride. Even if the author name were indexed simply as another word in the article body, President Benson's talk would be weighted less "heavily" since the word "benson" likely only shows up once (if at all) in the talk.

Perhaps this is what you were trying to say, and I misunderstood. Regardless, I agree that author names should be heavily weighted.

[thedqs]

What is gospellink?

Oh, GospelLink is a program published by Deseret Book which contains gospel resources (i.e. scriptures, talks, books written by both LDS and non-LDS authors, etc) Anyway this is a commercial product which BYU has access given to the Students. Similiar products are LDS Library (except no non-LDS authors and also a comercial product), and the free Gospel Library at www.lds.org.

Again I am just answering the question and not advertising any product.