Information Retrieval Gupf

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 to stay [...]

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 [...]

“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. [...]

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 [...]

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 tool [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 conversation [...]