Is Boolean searching suited only for the professional researcher and/or librarian? That's the "The Boolean Debate", much of which has taken place on TVC Alert at The Virtual Chase.
Stephen Abram threw down the gauntlet at a recent panel presentation at Internet Librarian. I always find Abram to be an interesting speaker because he challenges librarians to re-think our commonly-held beliefs. He's done it again by asking whether we need to teach Boolean to the average researcher.
There's much more to the discussion, but I'll leave you to read it for yourselves. I just have a couple of thoughts to add to the mix.
First, I'll admit that I generally agree with Abram. But legal research may be a bit different than other subject areas. Because of the nature of legal research, and the emphasis on exact language, many legal researchers like to be precise about what they're looking for, retain control over their search terms, and understand exactly why they're seeing the search results that are delivered to them. So attorneys who do a lot of research probably fall more into the category of professional searcher. And Abram agrees that librarians and professional searchers still need Boolean.
On the other hand, I think most librarians and as many attorneys vastly underestimate the value of natural language searching. It can be an extremely powerful tool and can often provide better results than Boolean seaching. (Note that I said often, not always!) When sifting through large results sets, viewing the search results in relevancy ranked order alone is definitely worth the price of admission!
I don't know what percentage of Lexis and Westlaw searches are natural language, but I suspect it's a small percentage of the whole. When was the last time you used it, and when was the last time you SHOWED someone how to use it?
Perhaps it's not time yet to discard Boolean. But I suggest it IS a good time to pay more attention to natural language searching.
I occasionally use natural language when I have pretty general terms and then I focus down. It is sometimes helpful; althought, on the whole I would prefer to use boolean and be as specific as possible.