WEEK 1 READING NOTES

"The first step is initiated by people who (anticipating our interest in building a search engine) we'll call "users," and their questions. We don't know a lot about these people, but we do know they are in a particular frame of mind, a special cognitive state - they may be aware of a specific gap in their knowledge (or they be only vaguely puzzled), and they're motivated to fill it. They want to FOA ... some topic.
Supposing for a moment that we were there to ask, the users may not even be able to characterize the topic, i.e., their knowladge gap. More precisely, they may not be able to fully define characteristics of the "answer" they seek. A paradoxical feature of the FOA problem is that if users knew their question, they might not even need the search engine we are designing - forming a clearly posed question is often the hardest part of answering it. "


There are lots of related results through search engines. It is impossible for users to look through all these results. Some of them may have professional training before, thus they can identify useful information. But most of them have no professional training, they might find it is difficult to choose through all these information. In the end, lacking of professional training or lacking of the ability to identify information becomes one of the barriers which users face in getting information. 
Thus, to have proper training is very necessary for users. Once they can express what information they really want  as accurate as possible, the most useful information results will be on the surface through IR system. 
Also, IR system can be a learning machine such as Google, as long as it is developed well enough. By using as a learning machine, IR system could identify much more terms in the future.