Information Retrieval Quotes

“Thus, an index built for vector space retrieval cannot, in general, be used for phrase queries. Moreover, there is no way of demanding a vector space score for a phrase query—we only know the relative weights of each term in a document.”
― Prabhakar Raghavan, Introduction to Information Retrieval

“The key utility measure is user happiness. Speed of response and the size of the index are factors in user happiness. It seems reasonable to assume that relevance of results is the most important factor: blindingly fast, useless answers do not make a user happy. However, user perceptions do not always coincide with system designers' notions of quality. For example, user happiness commonly depends very strongly on user interface design issues, including the layout, clarity, and responsiveness of the user interface, which are independent of the quality of the results returned.”
― Christopher D. Manning, Introduction to Information Retrieval