What if it were ‘germane’ instead of ‘relevant’?

@danielsgriffin via Twitter on Apr 27, 2022

musing to myself as I once again write “germane” instead of “relevant”¹

What if it were otherwise?
If documentation/LIS/IR used “germane”?

s/relevant/germane/
s/relevance/germaneness/ this is what OED might suggest.
I imagine it may’ve encouraged more faceted search due to association with the ‘principle of germaneness’ (in legal/legislative realms)?

Given the above and stumbling through prior relevant/germane discussion of such a naming, I find I strongly disagree with Saracevic (2016)’s claim that “relevance will be relevance by any other name”.

Some of the manifestations are referred to by a number of different names, such as pertinent, useful, utility, germane, material, applicable, appropriate, and the like. No matter what, they all connote relevance manifestations, but denote slightly different relations. As already mentioned, relevance will be relevance by any other name. (p. 20) [emphasis added]

Words cannot be so easily wrested from other uses. Would we have such little public control over general-purpose web search engines if ‘utility’, with its connotations of subsidized and regulated monopoly, was the core term?

Or would ‘utility’ have been so dismissed in 1971? Could researchers and designers have focused more on utility rather than being “restricted” to the ‘retrieval system design’? (Nolin, 2009)

May ‘appropriateness’ as the core term have helped us see “fluidity” and “signal how we are interpellated by it” well beyond the system design (de Laet & Mol, 2000)?

Or ensure that the search algorithms were never ones of oppression, but from the start there were “committed and protracted investments in repairing knowledge stores to reflect and recenter all communities” (Noble, 2018).

Or pushed earlier recognition of questions re “real-world messiness” in search engines and their pursuit of “societal relevance” (Haider & Sundin, 2019, Sundin et al., 2021).

With ‘material’ we may have earlier gotten “closer to the fact of the metal”, better asked “who makes”, and seen that “Hardware, the underlying material stuff, turns out to be full of politics and negotiations rather than crisp ontological certainty.” (Brunton & Coleman, 2014)

Or even now better address “the processes that translate spatial-temporal constraints related to material access into orientations” to information and information engines (Robinson, 2009).

Or not forget how some systems, by design, are oriented to base material concerns: “the question of information access and retrieval [] fundamentally a technical problem of connecting some set of resources to a query within the system for advertising purposes” (Hoffmann, 2016).

For each, despite all the ink from academics, the “cognitive boundaries” of the “boundary concept” would have been different as the “original processing of a core concept has an unavoidable side effect of articulating boundaries.” (Nolin, 2009)

As Buckland (1996) writes: “it is germane to draw attention to what was not done, to the road not taken.” (p. 71) [emphasis in original]