Information Retrieval Gupf

Via Greg Linden, I came across the following experimental result from Google as to the importance of quickly returning results to users.  The gist of the experiment is summed up in the abstract:
Experiments demonstrate that increasing web search latency 100 to 400 ms reduces the daily number of searches per user by 0.2% to 0.6%. [...]

On Wednesday I attended the Executive Round Table on Semantic Search, at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference.  Researchers from Ask, Hakia, Yahoo, Google, Powerset/Bing, and True Knowledge were on the panel.  In the next few days I hope to give a longer write-up of the session over on the FXPAL blog.  In the meantime I [...]

I came across an interesting article today in the New Scientist on the topic of mass-scale food annotation.  The idea is that we can instrument our food, so that we know much more about its origin and manner of production:

WHERE does your food come from? A few years ago, most consumers were satisfied with a [...]

Via Paul Lamere, I came across this recent Google blogpost on large scale graph computing.  I started reading, and quickly became excited by what I was hearing:
A relatively simple analysis of a standard map (a graph!) can provide the shortest route between two cities. But progressively more sophisticated analysis could be applied to richer information [...]

I would like to point to a post worth reading, over at Blogoscoped, about personal, blind side-by-side comparisons of the various contending search engines.  I have seen studies like this for years, both on the web and in published, academic papers (see my earlier post).  And this current, informal study continues to confirm what all [...]