There is a general perception that search engines such as Google have eliminated the need for taxonomies. To address this misconception Heather Hedden, a taxonomist at Cengage Learning, an education and technology company, surmises the multiple ways by which taxonomies support search.
In search, there is a trade-off between precision and recall. For instance, web search engines focus on precision, whereas enterprise search engines focus on recall. However, there is no need for this trade-off. A taxonomy that brings together the different wordings for a concept, including synonyms and other variations in user search strings, with the varied terms, words, or phrases in a text, can achieve both high precision and high recall.
Additionally, taxonomies offer both experts and non-experts better control over their searches and the ability to filter results as desired. For instance, faceted taxonomies enable users to select terms from each of different facets as filters, which represent different types of terms or aspects relevant to the content. These distinct facets reduce the ambiguity of terms.
In addition, taxonomies support search by facilitating accurate indexing and retrieval of non-text content and enabling accurate multi-lingual searches. In sum, search engines have not obliterated the use of taxonomies. In fact, taxonomies are enriching search engines.
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