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Ferris Research Blog: Commentary on news and trends in the fields of messaging, content control, archiving, compliance, e-discovery, and data leak prevention.
 
 

Courts Will Tolerate Search InaccuraciesRSS Feed

Comment on this (2 comments) Jul 22, 2008
David Ferris

Today, courts sometimes ask parties to a suit to justify the relevance and accuracy of their search algorithms. That’s a problem:

  • You can’t explain the algorithm, because the search vendor doesn’t reveal its proprietary secrets.
  • Even if the vendor were to explain its algorithms, chances are a cocktail of approaches are used with varying weightings assigned to different filter criteria. Explanations of such algorithms are of questionable value.

Long term, this will be a less pressing issue. Search engines aren’t perfect. They often list material that’s irrelevant, and they often miss material that is relevant. There’s a trade-off: The less information that’s overlooked, the more irrelevant material you’ll have to sift through.

However, human beings have similar problems. They are subject to not understanding, or having slept poorly the night before and thus doing a slipshod job.

As time goes by, courts will get more and more comfortable with the fact that search technology isn’t perfect–in just the same way as they recognize that humans can make errors.

… David Ferris
    1. 1 Quick Bites: E-Discovery and Transparency Pingback on Sep 19th, 2008 at 8:01 am
    2. 2 How good does e-discovery search need to be? | Text Technologies Pingback on Aug 31st, 2008 at 8:58 pm

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