Accessibility

This is going to be more difficult than I thought. So I’ll start with the obvious stuff.

Say, if I visit a blog, I’m only interested in whatever has most recently been posted. I’ll read that, and if I like it, I’ll come back whenever I remember. If I forget to visit, no matter. I can read as much or as little as I want.

It shouldn’t have done, but it took me by surprise that using a knowledge database is rather different. All of a sudden I’ll need to know- now!- the correct interpretation of paragraph 3 in the subsection 4a of the guiding text. And how that impacts when the moon is in the fourth house. Woops. I think that might have been a post I forgot to read. Now, there are a bunch of ways that I could find the answer. A search engine, perhaps. But it had better be a smart search engine. I’m pressed for time. Now, I don’t know about you, but clicking “I’m feeling lucky,” normally doesn’t work for me on Google.

What I’m wondering is if it’s even in-theory possible to have a general-purpose search engine that you can just drop in to a knowledge-rich environment and, hey-presto, get the answers you’re looking for? Or is it rather the case that, even with an excellent search engine, you still need to do a lot of work teaching it about the knowledge it’s searching through, and the type of questions it’s going to get?

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