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I came across an interesting post today entitled “My Luddite Summer” by NYT blogger Timothy Egan. Just wanted to share this tidbit:
Came back to the city. Took part in a three-day experiment with other writers to see who was better informed — readers of newspapers only, or readers of the Web who had [...]
A few days ago I posted a question about why modern web retrieval systems offer no explicit relevance feedback mechanisms. I wonder if it has anything to do with the following attitude, explained by one of my favorite bloggers, Nick Carr:
The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the “ecstatic surfing” behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience (not just for how we listen to music, but for how we interact with all media once they’ve been digitized). In the pre-Web world, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the overnight sensation – the 45 that became the center of your waking hours for a week only to be replaced by the new song – but also the deeper thrill of the favorite band in whose work we deeply immersed ourselves, often following its progression over many records and many years. Continue reading…
“The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine” is the title of a new Wired article. In it, Robert Capps makes the following point:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.” And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip [video camera]. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.
Capps goes on to make his point using a number of examples: The Flip video camera (easy). Web apps (no installation). Mp3s (small file size). Even healthcare. Quality, he says, is no longer measured by fidelity and richness of experience. It is measured by convenience.
I suppose I cannot argue with empiricism. What is is what is, and the article as a whole seems fairly descriptively accurate. But let me wax normative for a moment. Continue reading…
As a researcher, I have more questions than answers. And one of the questions that I have is in regards to the widely-accepted maxim that users are too lazy to give explicit relevance feedback to the search engine. See Danny Sullivan’s take, here.
Perhaps I am stuck back in a view of Information Retrieval that is 10-15 years old, but I tend to find my views heavily shaped or influenced by things like the following bit from Marti Hearst’s chapter in Modern Information Retrieval:
An important part of the information access process is query reformulation, and a proven effective technique for query reformulation is relevance feedback. In its original form, relevance feedback refers to an interaction cycle in which the user selects a small set of documents that appear to be relevant to the query, and the system then uses features derived from these selected relevant documents to revise the original query. This revised query is then executed and a new set of documents is returned. Documents from the original set can appear in the new results list, although they are likely to appear in a different rank order. Relevance feedback in its original form has been shown to be an effective mechanism for improving retrieval results in a variety of studies and settings [salton90a][harman92c][buckley94b]. In recent years the scope of ideas that can be classified under this term has widened greatly.
Given that explicit relevance feedback works, why is it essentially non-existent on the web? A bird in the hand (an explicit relevance judgment) is worth two in the bush (two implied or inferred relevance judgments). Continue reading…
On my drive to work this morning, as I mentally began preparing for all the research I wanted to accomplish today, I started thinking about the relationship between information retrieval, machine learning, probability, and statistics. And I found myself wondering how most of us think about machine learning when we use it as a [...]
I just got back from a PARC open forum, in which Marissa Mayer gave a talk about the Physics of Data, and Innovation at Google. All in all, it was fine. Maybe a third of the talk was about new possibilities enabled by large quantities of data (Google Flu Trends, better search, etc.) The other two-thirds were dedicated to introducing the audience to some longer-tail Google products that many folks might not have known about. So I’m not going to go into detail about the talk as a whole, but I will point out two tidbits that were the most interesting to me. One is positive, one is negative. Continue reading…
If it wasn’t official before, it is now. Google self-advertises:
In the latest shot fired in Google Inc.’s ongoing battle with Microsoft Corp., Google announced today that it’s taking this fight to the streets.
Literally.
Google is kicking off a month-long ad campaign for its online suite of enterprise office applications. The campaign will have the search giant leasing billboard space in four major U.S. cities — New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. Each work day will have a different message for commuters to take in.
Each day there will be a different message. Each day! This is no small self-advertising undertaking.
Does anyone remember when the lack of self-advertisement was one of the primary points of pride for the company? We’re not talking 10 years ago. Even as recently as SIGIR 2008, Kai Fu Lee stated in front of an audience of 500+ people that Google categorically does not self-advertise. Just a few months before that, Google’s VP of Marketing was interviewed by Business Week: Continue reading…
I have been quiet lately on the blogpost front. Am still looking for a free moment to write up my reactions to the recent SIGIR 2009 conference. In the meantime, I am having a good time with Neal Richter and Daniel Tunkelang, discussing the topic of Search and Advertising. Please come join in the [...]
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