Please be aware that the Hekman Library SmartSearch project is currently a work-in-progress. We encourage you to provide any feedback you may have.
Thank you.
An Analogy: Information Hunting Made Smarter
Until recently, people tracking down titles in the catalog had their choice of just two weapons; a basic search bomb or an advanced search sniper rifle.
Both work fine for certain targets, but not everyone wants to sort through rubble or bother with highly-skilled sharpshooting. Well, the same technology advances which gave us the heat-seeking missile have now added another tool to our arsenal, SmartSearch.
As a basic search with relevance ranking, you can now achieve maximum results with minimum fuss. Fire away!
Evidence of Need
Based on experience with Google and other popular commercial search engines, users have become accustomed to search results being sorted according to their relevance. When given a clear enough set of search terms, commercial search providers can almost always return something close to what one is seeking within the first page of results, and quite often users find precisely what they wanted in the very first result. An engine’s ability to intelligently determine relevancy within a large set of results directly affects the success of that search engine in the common market.
Our current search engine, WebCat, falls far short of these expectations.
What SmartSearch Is
A basic search PLUS relevance ranking
Like Google
Looks like it
Single search box with two buttons for its interface
Simple results listing (not tables/rows, but rather more clustered/compact)
Acts like it
Similar paging controls
No sorting mechanism (“smart” relevance is all you get)
“I’m Feeling Smart” button to go directly to the first result
Sessionless – Copying/pasting/bookmarking the URL will always work
What SmartSearch Is NOT
Super Fast – typically takes 3-9 seconds to search
An exhaustive search – result sets are truncated at 500 hits and words of two letters or less are not indexed, both in order to keep search times at least reasonable
A replacement for WebCat – instead it is presented as a new tab to work alongside our current search types (Basic, Advanced, and Browse)
100% current
Item status and other basic information is “live,” that is, retrieved from the catalog for every search
New records and record updates are only indexed periodically (currently once per hour)
SmartSearch Introduction 
