Last year, I wrote about the woes of using findmypast for newspaper searches at When
the Digital Age Hinders. I now want to follow that up with an evaluation of
another newspaper search engine — it’s starting to look like reliable searches
are a thing of all ours pasts.
In the findmypast
case, there was no visible attempt to address my issues. I made the company
aware of the article but there was no comment and no requests for more
information, merely a half-hearted attempt to blame the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) for some of the issues. Having tried to use it today (22 Apr 2016), the
problems are still there, and even seem to be more intrusive than before.
Figure 1 - Punishment of Sisyphus.[1]
Also today, I needed to perform some searches of The Gazette (UK). Although I had used
this for previous research, I recalled that they had redesigned some aspect of their
interface; maybe it had been improved.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my searches to yield anything
resembling what I asked for. I clicked on the little link entitled “Help with
search”, just above the text-search field. Rather than giving some textual
instructions, though, this directed me to a private — and hence inaccessible — YouTube video called "searching the
Gazette" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJI--4jBhyM.
Being part-way through your research, and then being expected to stop and watch
some video, is not a helpful plan. After meandering around the site, I found a
different link for the same video at https://www.thegazette.co.uk/videos/searching-the-gazette.
This was nearly 3 minutes long and eventually informed me that putting a phrase
in quotation marks would return only notices containing that exact
phrase. But that’s what I had been doing!
I was actually searching for the phrase “Kirk of Nottingham”
in all notice types between 1840 and 1860, and it gave me 17 hits. However —
yes, you’ve guessed — I couldn’t find my exact phrase in any of them. It took
me a while but I did find that each of them contained “Kirk of” but not “Kirk
of Nottingham”. Now I wouldn’t insult the designers of this system by
suggesting that they only honour the first two words in any exact search
phrase, so it must be some inbuilt relaxation of the search terms.
The problem is that it doesn’t deliver what they said it
would. They said it would only deliver notices that contain the exact phrase. I
have seen several form-fill search engines that describe a field as “exact
phrase” and which is probably being relaxed later by some component of the
search software. I did notice that the BNA search fields have an “Exact search”
tick-box but I couldn’t tell whether it did precisely that from the textual
synopses of the hits, and I wasn’t going to take a subscription just on the
off-chance.
So what gives here? If product managers are adding support
for exact phrases then why are they not working? Why isn’t their absence being
picked up during testing? Are the testers listening to software designers
rather than reading functional specifications? A possible explanation is that
the guts of the search engine is being brought in from some other company, and
the testers test only the software developed in-house (well, ignoring the
aforementioned help link) rather than testing that the whole system functions
correctly as far as an end-user is concerned.
Why am I complaining? Well, the odd thing in The Gazette case is that none of the
textual synopses correctly showed the context of the hit it was delivering to
me. The following is just the first four of those 17 hits, so see for yourself:
Publication Date 18 June
1858
The
London Gazette, Issue 22154, Page 2989
woo3, of Dewsbury, in the said
county, Share Broker, and John Worsnop, of Oleckheaton aforesaid. Painter, all
the real and personal estate and effects, whatsoever and wheresoever, of them,
the said Wi…
View The London Gazette, Issue
22154, Page 2989 page
Publication Date 3 April
1849
The
London Gazette, Issue 20964, Page 1093
awarded and issued forth against
William Wood, of Wad- dington, in the county of Lincoln, Licensed Victualler, will
sit on the 27th day of April instant, at eleven of the clock in the forenoon,
at the…
View The London Gazette, Issue
20964, Page 1093 page
Publication Date 9
November 1849
The
London Gazette, Issue 21036, Page 3371
at the Birmingham District
:Cour.t of Bankruptcy, at Nottingham, in order .to Audit ,the Accounts of .the
Assignees of the estate and effects qf the said""bankrupt under the
said Fiat, "pursuant to th…
View The London Gazette, Issue
21036, Page 3371 page
Publication Date 17
November 1848
The
London Gazette, Issue 20916, Page 4152
NATHANIEL ELLISON, Esq. Her
Majesty's Com- missitfrter of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne District Court of Bankruptcy,
the Commissioner authorized to act under a Fiat in of Bankruptcy, bearing date
the 25th
There isn’t even a single instance of “Kirk” visible, and so
the only option is to load each page image and perform a local search via
Ctrl+F. This is just not good enough!
[1] Titian (1490–1576), “Sisyphus”,
painting (between 1548 and 1549); attribution: [Public
domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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