[Developers] topic search issue

[Faye Li]

Hi Arthur,

Since one of the two topics you'd like to merge appears in autocomplete, 
a work around is to browse to the topic you don't see in autocomplete, 
and mark it to merge with the topic that does come up in autocomplete.

Relevance logic is complex and has to take into consideration the fact 
that 1) topic names can be arbitrary in Freebase, can change, and are 
often poor indications for/summaries of the topics themselves, 2) the 
best results are not always the exact matches, 3) what may be the 
desired result for one user must be just noise for another, and so on 
and so forth. That said, relevance is relatively new and we continue to 
improve upon it. And bear with me if it sounds like canned words, but 
your feedback is valuable to us, and I mean it. This particular example 
may be a bug; I'll follow up on it.

Oh, for more tips with using search and autocomplete, check out my blog 
entry from a while back: "Tips for Finding a Needle in a Data Haystack" 
(http://blog.freebase.com/?p=52).

-- Faye


Arthur van Hoff wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I often find that the pop-up list of topics is too short (it contains 
> only 10 items). The item I want is somewhere below the bottom of the 
> list. This makes some operations impossible. Is there a work around?
>
> For example there are two topics named “audio/mpeg” of type 
> “/type/media_format”. I can’t merge one with the other because the 
> correct one is off the chart. Why does one show up and not the other?
>
> By the way, I find that when I know the exact name of a topic (as is 
> the case here) the relevance ordering is very annoying. I would argue 
> that a topic which is an exact match should be favored over topics 
> with other names.
>
> Have fun,
>
> Arthur van Hoff
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Arthur van Hoff, Dell-ZING, CTO Software and Services.
>
> W: 650-267-2413, F: 650-267-2498, M: 650-283-0842
>
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