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There is an an interesting comment thread happening over on the FXPAL blog, about the differences between social search and collaborative search:
http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=350#comments
Continued from Part 1.
Now that I’ve fully (perhaps too much so) explained the analogy that I will be using, I’d like to ground this discussion in the subject of information retrieval. And I’ll start with an example that O’Reilly used in his talk: Google. (This is an Information Retrieval blog, after all, and Google was the example that Tim used.) The company, he says, successfully exhibits both long term and evolutionary thinking. It takes the long term view through its very mission statement: “To organize the world’s information”. What could be more long term, more global, than that? At the same time, Google has a very evolutionary approach in that it starts with simple, elegant solutions and couples them with ongoing user measurements. If and when changes to Google’s engine are made, they are made based on small evolutionary steps that become apparent through the actions of the user. It’s a point of pride within the Google organization that every change to the engine is scrupulously measured and A/B tested so as to be able to tell whether the change was better or worse. The user provides the fitness function, the arrow that points in the uphill direction, toward which the search engine evolves.
So the question is, does Google suffer from this conflict between long term and evolutionary thinking? My contention is that they do.
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Last week I attended the O’Reilly eTech conference. The first night, Tim O’Reilly gave his annual Radar talk, in which he surveys the technology landscape and comments on upcoming and interesting trends. I have heard this Radar talk for years, via the IT Conversations podcast network, but this was the first time I’d seen it in person. O’Reilly always has challenging, thought-provoking things to say, and this year was no different. He did, however, mention two emerging trends or patterns that I thought contradicted each other, and I want to specifically comment on those.
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Over on the FXPAL blog, Gene and I added the 2nd of a series of posts mapping out the collaborative information seeking systems domain. Here is an excerpt:
When we view collaboration from the IR perspective, it becomes clear that collaboration does not merely refer to a decision to work together. Rather, it refers [...]
Daniel makes a provocative statement:
“One of the recurring objections to exploratory search is that it can’t work for the web.”
While I suspect that he is correct about this being the common wisdom, I find myself wondering about the sources of that conception. Why is this a commonly held belief? I can think of five possible objections to exploratory search on the web, five reasons why companies might say that exploratory search can’t work:
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I just want to announce that over on the FXPAL blog, Gene Golovchinsky and I are starting a series of posts about what we think it means to collaborate during the information seeking process. There are many different dimensions and scenarios, and many other researchers that have looked at this problem as well. We [...]
I first became fascinated with the relationship between computers, information, language, and emotion back in 1984 when I read an Analog article about a computer than had been used to automatically generate poetry. A week later, I was on my father’s IBM PC, writing a Basic program on (if memory serves me correctly) Dos [...]
I was listening recently to a podcast on IT Conversations, published 1/17/2009, entitled “Creating Passionate Users”. It is a conversation between Tim O’Reilly and Kathy Sierra.
Tim O’Reilly: You talk about creating passionate users. What are some of the things that make people passionate?
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Google has had somewhat of an odd relationship over the years to music information, and music information retrieval. They’ve never really had a consistent policy, research, or product agenda around music. The specifics of that history is too rich to recount in its entirety here; if readers are interested, perhaps that can be the subject of future blog entries. Instead, I’ll pass along this little tidbid from the Read/Write Web blog. It seems that a clever teenager had written a media player application that streams music directly from Google’s YouTube service, bypassing Google’s web pages. Here is the jist of the controversy:
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Sometimes, the story is as good as the moral. Sometimes, the journey is as good as the destination. So in Information Retrieval, why are we too often satisfied with producing results, but not with explaining how the results were arrived at?
Daniel Tunkelang talks a lot about the need for transparency in search, in [...]
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