IEEE’s Xplore service is an important source of papers for electrical and computer engineers. However, its search feature is frustratingly poor.

Here is an example of how poorly the search works. In advanced search, I initiated a query for “speech analysis by homomorphic prediction” and I specified that I want the query to look at all data fields (this is the default). I wanted to find a paper by Kopec et al. that appeared in the IEEE Transactions in Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing. IEEE Xplore informed me that “no results were found.” I copied and pasted my search into Google, and I got this link as the first result. Note that when you click on the link you get to the IEEE Xplore page that lists the paper as “Speech analysis homomorphic prediction” without the “by” in the title. The paper title includes the “by” however, it was transcribed incorrectly by IEEE, but this would have been difficult for me to guess correctly. Xplore can’t deal with this difference. Google can. Clearly, we have the technology. So, IEEE, please fix the search feature in Xplore. In the meantime, I guess I’ll log in to Xplore but search in Google.

Andrew Kun

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