Je ne résiste pas à l'envie de vous faire partager ce message d'Eric L. Morgan sur la liste ngc4lib:

"There is more to finding the "right" thing in an index (read, library catalog) than correlating search terms, concepts, and information resources. I believe it also requires a knowledge of the user's context.

A Google blog posting alludes to this idea:

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an
algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded
Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a
much larger system. Other parts include language models (the
ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling
mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language,
it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best
answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered
with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models
(not all people want the same thing).

Ironically, I think the idea of putting a user's needs/desires into context with search is an extraordinary opportunity for librarians and libraries because libraries are always a part of a larger community. Municipalities. Schools. Churches. Governments. Colleges. Universities. Companies. Hospitals. Businesses. Etc.

In order to do their job well, librarians are required to know about their users. Who are they? What are their characteristics? What are they working on? By combining the answers to these questions with the
queries they enter into our search interfaces we ought to be able to produce more relevant search results because we know more about the users than outside institutions.

Put another way, better metadata and simpler user interfaces will only go so far. I believe some of our efforts ought to be spent making our search engines "smarter"."