UI issues for searching news groups

UI issues for searching news groups

[Kai Grossjohann]

  [[ Mailed copy of posted news article -- I find most people like this. ]]
Hi there,

I've been thinking about searching news groups and mail folders.  In
particular, suppose I've already got some way to search for relevant
messages, then how do I present the ranking list to the user?

I'd like this to be integrated with the mail/news reader.

One alternative would be to present to a user a list of message
summaries, sorted by relevance.  This would be the traditional IR way
of doing it.  But it interacts poorly with news groups (and mail
folders) because typically each message is part of the thread, and it
is likely that the user will want to read other messages in the same
thread after having selected a retrieved document.

A second alternative would be to use the built-in scoring mechanism of
the newsreader to do this.  By scoring I mean the following feature
that is supported by some newsreaders.  One can specify certain
criteria for messages to be more interesting or less interesting than
others, and in the overview display of all messages in the newsgroup,
these messages are indicated, by color coding, say.  This would make
it simple to read the other messages in a thread but it would provide
less of an idea of the ranking list to the user.

Does anybody have suggestions on what to do here?  Maybe somebody has
already come up with a great interface that one could look at?

kai "very naive w.r.t. UI issues"
-- 
Unix is user-friendly, it's just a little picky who to be friends with.