I keep getting asked over and over (often by people who have asked me before already) why the search box on this page:
http://library.wlu.edu/indexsubject.php?descname=.General+(any+topic)
Often yields such wacky results. For example, try a search on "worldcat."
So, I am posting the explanation, so that I don't have to keep typing it out every few months.
Here is the condensed explanation why:
Your technology coordinator is not a professional programmer, therefore the searches he builds don't work nearly as well as those a professional programmer would build.
Here is the long, gory explanation:
The search feature takes your input string and does a very primitive pattern-match on it against both the title and the description fields. If those fields contain anything that matches the string, it's a positive. This includes text in URLs, which is why some of those funky results are coming up for worldcat...look at the description fields, and you'll see that they contain a link to the worldcat database...which, of course, contains the string "worldcat".
The program then gathers up those results, orders them alphabetically by the title of the database, and displays them. This sometimes results is a very sucky results list indeed...lots of irrelevant entires appear just because they have part of the correct title somewhere in the title or description field, and the best result sometimes appears at the bottom.
So why doesn't it do relevance ranking? Because I don't know how to write algorithms, which are required to create a program that makes sophisticated decisions, such as deciding which item in a set of results is more relevant. That's advanced programming, far beyond my ability.
So why don't we just search the title only? Because it causes problems as well as fixing them. Sometimes a database has one or more alternate names people know it by-since we can only put one name in the title field, we often put alternate names in the description field. Which means if we stop searching it, then students need to have the exact title we use in order to find the database this way. We talked about this when the search feature first went up, and decided not to restrict it to title field alone for this reason.
In short: if I could write a better search, I would. If you really want one, we need to discuss having someone else do it.