[sugar] notes from the field - Mongolia

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
> I am concerned that focusing on such systems is breaking simple use
> cases and causing problems for users in the field.  I believe that this
> functionality is important, but do not agree that it should comprise the
> base layer of data access on a real-world system.
>
> Search is extremely powerful, but technically complicated to implement,
> and equivalently complex to learn how to use.  Remember that almost all
> of us involved in this discussion have been using search on the web for
> at least the past decade, and while we now understand it as an intuitive
> process I contend this is not the case for new users.  (I can remember,
> but not locate, at least one study which noted that uninitated users
> used search engines in extremely strange ways, for instance, running all
> their search terms together because it mirrored the typical format of
> DNS names.)
>
> Fully qualified names (file names) are simple.  They are misused to the
> extent that users give things strange or confusing names.  But, the
> names are qualified and the users can encounter their work simply by
> remembering most components of the name.  The concept is
> straightforward: given this key I will always find the data I need, and
> only that data.

No one said that search would replace names.

Marco