Ranganathan and the Net: using facet analysis to search and organise the World Wide Web

This paper documents the continuing relevance of facet analysis as a technique for searching and organising World Wide Web based materials. The two approaches underlying WWW searching and indexing – word and concept based indexing – are outlined. It is argued that facet analysis as an a posteori approach to classification using words from the subject field as the concept terms in the classification derived represents an excellent approach to searching and organising the results of WWW searches using either search engines or search directories. Finally, it is argued that the underlying philosophy of facet analysis is better suited to the disparate nature of WWW resources and searchers than the assumptions of contemporary IR research.