Information Retrieval Gupf

I have more questions than I have answers.  One of the topics that I know very little about, and on which I often seek clarification and wisdom, is A/B testing in the context of rapid iteration, rapid deployment online systems.  So I’d like to ask a question of my readership (all four of you [...]

What sort of information retrieval system would you build if you knew that all the users of your system would be expert or highly-motivated amateur searchers?  What sort of system would you build when you have a very large collection of unstructured information, and the goal in searching that information is not to find one [...]

There is an interesting recent post about the history of Google Music in China from an article by Michael Zhang in Global Entrepreneur Magazine.  Some excerpts:
“It will play the right music without you having to give it any thought.” You get the music you want at the right time, for the right environment, and in [...]

I split my blogging between this and the FXPAL blog.  This morning I have a post on the latter site that asks an (imho) important question about data ownership and data liberation with respect to one’s web search history.. not just the queries, but the results produce by a mashup between those queries and the [...]

Via Xavier Amatriain: The Dirty Little Secret About the “Wisdom of the Crowds” – There is No Crowd:
This is hardly the first time that the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” has been called into question. The term, which implies that a diverse collection of individuals makes more accurate decisions and predications than individuals or even [...]

…via Ask and SearchMe, that is?  Let me explain.  Google announced a new bit of interface design into its News search results today: Fast Flip:
Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users…”flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine…We capture images of the articles on our partners’ websites and then [...]

Half a year ago I wrote a blogpost about an easy change that Google could make to its interface, one that would both sacrifice only the least bit of simplicity as well as entice and encourage the user to enter longer queries, thus improving retrieval effectiveness.  In particular, I wrote:
So even though research has found [...]

If you haven’t heard (probably not likely), Apple announced a number of upgrades to its iPod/iTunes product line today.  It is interesting to me because I see more and more Music Information Retrieval making it into consumer products. Genius added smart playlisting a year or two ago (though from the reviews it doesn’t perform too [...]

A few days ago there was a Techcrunch interview of Google’s Eric Schmidt. Here’s the bit that struck me:
[TC] The long term goal of Google search, he says, is to give the user one exactly right answer to a query:
[Schmidt] So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that [...]