hakukysymys

Hakukysymys is a term used in information retrieval to describe the question or query a user submits to a search system. It consists of one or more words or phrases that represent the user's information need. In practice, hakukysymys can be a single keyword such as "sää" or a longer phrase like "sääennuste Helsingissä ensi viikolla." It is used across search engines, databases, digital libraries, and other information systems.

When a hakukysymys is entered, the system analyzes the query, searches an index of documents, and returns items that match the terms. Processing often involves tokenization, normalization, stemming or lemmatization, and handling of stopwords. Some systems apply query expansion, synonyms, or user intent inference to improve results. Users can refine the hakukysymys by adding terms, using quotes for exact phrases, or applying filters and advanced search operators.

The effectiveness of a hakukysymys is commonly evaluated in terms of precision and recall, as well as user satisfaction and interaction metrics. Good search systems aim to interpret user intent, support natural language queries, and provide helpful guidance for refining searches.

In a Finnish context, hakukysymys is closely related to concepts such as hakusana (keyword) and haku (search); the terminology reflects how information-seeking processes are described in Finnish.