The Search Ninja

A primary obstacle faced by search engines is poorly formed searches. Poorly formed queries fall under the auspices of the
Three I’s; which describe (problematic) features of a query that will hinder any search engine. They are:

Imprecision
Incompleteness
Inaccuracy

Imprecise queries are inexact or ill-defined searches in that they do not effectively describe the specificity of an informational need.

For example let’s say that I had to find an annotated diagram of the supramarginal scutes of the Chelydra serpentina osceola; and I approached this by searching Google Images for “Turtle Shells”. The search results returned would be imprecise (in regards to my informational need). Therefore imprecise queries will return results that are technically correct, however their lack of granularity makes them useless.

Incomplete queries are lacking key terms that describe the informational need. This is easy to confuse with Imprecision, however it is very much its own unique devil.
Returning to our turtle example: If I needed to find a good synopsis about turtle shells; their structure, general appearance, sizes common to major species, etc. and I approached this by going to Wikipedia, ha ha… just kidding I would never go to Wikipedia if I needed reliable information. So I go to Google or possibly Google Scholar and type in “Shells”. Here the topical-realm of shells is so vast and diverse that it does nothing to represent an informational need for turtle shells.

Inaccurate queries lack contextual elements of word sense that are essential to proper classification and association with relevant documents. Polysemes and homonyms are a significant obstacle in information retrieval and word sense disambiguation (WSD) represents a large piece of the IR/WebIR puzzle.

Help the search engines (and yourself) out a little! If you want to do a little fly-fishing and need to find a listing of prime spots to cast your line; DON’T search for “Local Banks” (bank could be a financial institution, a stockpile; such as a blood bank or yes even a shoreline as in river bank).