BUG, or "When did this change?" PG Commentaries now shows section name.

MJ. Smith said:

I'd like to see a glossary in which Logos declares how it intends to use the term in help and training materials.

[Y] [Y] [Y]  As a user, not an abuser, I too want total clarity and usefulness. Remember Vista and Win8.

So, in summary,

Logos is using two synonyms to describe retrieving requested information but they do two totally different unrelated functions within L5.  One of these two synonyms uses prioritisation while the other does not.  The results of the one synonym that does not use prioritisation has been called "not very intelligent" by one user, and I say the displayed results of this one synonym is basically worthless.

It has been suggested that items should be sorted by book (http://community.logos.com/forums/t/6962.aspx) for this synonym that doesn't use prioritisation.  

I agree, and I will add that that the books should also be sorted by our prioritized list.  For me, things like author and publisher are more important than how often a word appears within an article.

tom said:

Logos is using two synonyms to describe retrieving requested information but they do two totally different unrelated functions within L5.

How can "look up" be a synonym for "search"? They're two different words, with two different meanings that have two different functions. "Look up" I don't see any place in Logos where they're used as synonyms.

"Look up" suggests you know where to look - you look up names in a telephone directory, or words in a dictionary, because you know that "Barnes" will after "Barlow" and before "Barnett". "Search" suggests you don't know where to look, but you're going to hunt until you find something. That's just what it means in Logos.

What could be confusing is that certain sections of Guides don't tell you whether they're searches or look-ups. But once you understand the concept, it's very easy to determine the difference.

tom said:

I agree, and I will add that that the books should also be sorted by our prioritized list.  For me, things like author and publisher are more important than how often a word appears within an article.

This would break most users workflows. Most of us (probably yourself included) group together our prioritisation lists, and that certainly is the recommendation. So English Bibles are grouped at the top, Greek texts are grouped lower down, perhaps Greek lexicons then Hebrew lexicons, then English dictionaries, then commentaries and so on. Does that mean English Bibles are "more important" than lexicons, or that lexicons are more important than commentaries? Of course not. Almost at the bottom of my prioritisation list is McNeil's translation of Calvin's Institutes (it's above other translations of the institutes, but below everything else). If I'm searching for systematic theological concept that's prevalent in the Instituties, should that be right at the bottom of the search results even though it's mentioned 100 times in a few pages, whilst some lexicon that happens to mention it once gets pushed to the top? Of course not.

We can both agree that ranked searches are fairly useless, because the ranking is far too simplistic. But ordering search results by prioritisation is not the answer. Now if you suggested using rating as one of the factors in ranking, and prioritization as another, weaker, factor, in addition to search frequency, then I think we could be getting somewhere.

tom said:

Just because it is a basic search for bible~ref does not imply that it should not be sorted by my priority.  I am more interested in reading something if the reference is in one of my references that I have also prioritized than not.

tom said:

I will add that that the books should also be sorted by our prioritized list.  For me, things like author and publisher are more important than how often a word appears within an article.

Tom, I share your intention, but I don't think you want this quite as much as you believe you do.

Let's say you're working on some well-known passage in the early part of Isaiah. Let's also say that only 3 of your 10 highest prioritized commentary series actually have a volume on the early part of Isaiah. What then would you get if a reference search was sorted by priority?

Well, first you'd get every prioritized Bible that happens to refer to your passage somewhere in the notes or cross references. Then, depending on how you've organized your Priority list, you might get every prioritized lexicon, dictionary, grammar or whatever that happens to mention one of your verses. Then you'd get all the volumes of your highest prioritized commentary series that list your reference in a footnote somewhere. Then you might finally get your first actual Isaiah commentary. Then you'd get another couple of dozen of completely irrelevant commentary volumes before the second Isaiah commentary turned up. And so on. -- And if you happened to be so lucky as to have an entire book devoted to that particular chapter or pericope, it would almost certainly show up well after you stopped looking.

I don't think you'd be happy to find the first commentary on the book you're studying on page 5 or 15 of the search results... If you're studying Isaiah, even a third rate commentary on Isaiah is going to be of more help to you than three dozen excellent commentaries on other books of the Bible that have nothing to offer you other than that Jesus quoted one of your verses somewhere or that something else took place at the same location (which you probably already knew anyway). 

And as for monographs, you can't possibly prioritize every book that might interest you at some point -- and even if you could, you're going to want different prioritizations for different searches. Since you're not Catholic, you'd probably put most Catholic books fairly far down. But let's say you suddenly want to research Mariology. Then your normal prioritization would be a huge disadvantage in a prioritized search. 

So you see, the number of hits is important. That's generally what separates a text on the right subject from a mention in a footnote.

tom said:

Since we are talking about search (index), A user will complain if the index is not sorted alphabetically, but was listed by how often the word appears within the book.

Since Logos does the search for you, it doesn't matter if the index is sorted alphabetically or not; you will be taken to the right word anyway. The book equivalent to Logos search result list isn't the alphabetical index list; it's the page numbers listed after each word. You wouldn't mind if an index listed the book's main entry on that word first, would you?

Surely you've looked up something in an index only to find 30 page numbers without any bold or italics to indicate where the important entries are? I fear that that's what a prioritized search result list would be like most of the time. The ranked search is supposed to be like getting those page numbers in order of importance, which would be a huge help if it actually worked.

But I certainly agree with you and Mark that the current ranked searches are fairly useless. In fact, they are so useless that when I added an Entire Library Collection to a PG, I ended up with results that were uncomfortably close to my horror story above: dozens upon dozens of entries from CHALOT, TWOT and various lectionaries. The last resources I would have wanted to see. And switching to an All Commentaries Collection instead hid my few Isaiah commentaries among many times more commentaries on other books. So improvements are certainly sorely needed.

SteveF said:

I've not really seen "convincing" practical reasons/explanations? versus "philosophical" defenses? so...puzzled, etc

The change in 5.1 was unintentional and will be reversed in the next beta. The philosophical debate was launched because of a misunderstanding about how various sections were designed to work.

Just get the "old " passage guide back- this setup for the commentaries is awful.

Thank you