Negative Search

Negative Search involves the elimination of irrelevant pieces of information from a mass of content in order to present to a user a range of relevant and less relevant items of content from which the user makes a selection.
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Negative Search is different to both Positive Search and Discovery Search. Positive Search uses the selection of relevance as its primary mechanism. Discovery uses calculation of relatedness (between both user intent and content)to present to users relevant alternatives of which they may not have been aware.

Negative Search has application to those forms of searches where the user has the intention of finding a specific actionable piece information but lacks the knowledge of what that specific information is or might be.


Negative Search can also apply to those forms of searching where the user has a clear understanding of Negative Intent (what they don't want) rather than what they do.


Examples of Negative Intent are:

- job searching: someone knows they want a new job but they have no idea what it might be. They just know what they don't want.

- dating searching: someone is looking for a dating partner, but cannot identify what criteria they are looking for. They just know what they don't want

- an investigator is looking for a car but has no other car-related information criteria on which to base a search.