IR publications database, Fall 2006

Please enter comments, bugs, etc., about the IR publications database.

At the moment, only comment on functionality, not aesthetics. The look of the database will (we hope) be quite different than this. The question is whether the search is functioning as you expect and never giving errors.

Please click the "release edit lock" option before you save your edits.

Bugs

List things that are unquestionably wrong. The data is known to have errors and that will be patched up later. But if something happens that is not consistent with the data, please report it.

• Fixed (it reorders now) - A year query of "2000-1998" returns a blank page. Presumably it should return an error. Or just reorder what was typed and treat it as "1998-2000".

• Fixed A text query of "don't" returns no documents, but instead of the "no results found" message, there is a heading and nothing under it.
• Fixed Publications that are hidden are not being kept hidden, i.e. all the security bits are being ignored.
• Fixed -- The query "good similar" returns a result at rank one with a snippet but no title or other metadata.
• Fixed -- The author query "krovetz" returns nothing, even though we know that Bob Krovetz has publications in the lab. This may be a data error, of course.

Suggestions

Anything that you'd like to suggest is fine. Even aesthetic stuff can go here since they're just suggestions, but functionality issues are more important right now.

• When no results are found, it would be nice if the page had its own "back" button. The browser's back button is certainly usable, but having a button on the page would make it obvious that's what should be done.
• It'd be even nicer if the error was displayed and the query entry stuff was displayed right under it, so the back button wasn't even necessary.
• There should be a button that gives all publications in the last six months (say).
• I'd really like to read abstracts for results instead of or in addition to the snippets.
• Please number the ranked results.
• When using text search, I would like to sort each page by relevance and by date. I wonder how difficult it is to implement sort by author.

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