Quote: early comparison of full-text, computerized search with a manual index

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A collection of 100 articles was chosen [from nuclear physics] as an experimental "library," and each article … was studied in the light of its possible … [Each question was written from one of the ("source") articles. The full text was keypunched. On average, five subject headings were assigned per 1000-word document. They developed a thesaurus for nuclear physics words and phrases. The seven searchers include nuclear physicists supported by technical librarians.] … [p. 1102] the proportion of relevant information under any … is rather low. Though wide variation of success … material … retrieved (taken over 50 questions) exceed 42 percent … library. … [Each document had a weighted relevance score for each question.] … [p. 1103] [Thesaurus-aided, full-text searchers scored almost 0.3 out of 1.0, while full-text and subject heading search scored almost 0.2. Full-text retrieval w/o thesaurus returned the fewest irrelevant articles.] … [p. 1104] In terms of these measures, the effectiveness … search by computer was, however, significantly better than …   Google-1   Google-2

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Quote: in a 100 article collection, manual and full-text search retrieved less than half of the relevant documents on average

Quote: full-text search retrieved more relevant documents than a manual index

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