A FIGURE-OF-MERIT ORDERING SYSTEM FOR A SEARCH OUTPUT.

The article presents the author's suggestion regarding the manner in which the use of a particular style of information search request could increase the efficiency with which the search results would serve the person making the request. To some extent conferences between searcher and search requester are used to frame the search definition in relation to the expected bulk of material it will yield. In most document systems, there are many headings that have some bearing on any typical search request. As the simplest example of a "figure-of-merit" search system, each of these headings could be scored as one point.