Information Retrieval Gupf

Daniel T. has an interesting bipartite use-case model for exploratory search:

I know what I want, but I don’t know how to describe it.
I don’t know what I want, but I hope to figure it out once I see what’s out there.

Perhaps this is a silly analogy, but framing the problem in this way reminded me [...]

One of my ongoing research interest areas is in retrieval interfaces that allow more expressive and powerful statements of a user information need.  In that spirit, I wrote a minor rant last April about how the Apple iTunes smart playlist creation interface sacrifices functionality in the interest of simplicity.  One could only create smart playlists [...]

Via Greg Linden, I came across this interesting quote from Eric Schmidt about the obligation to help newspapers succeed:
Finally, Eric claimed Google has a moral duty to help newspapers succeed:
Google sees itself as trying to make the world a better place. And our values are that more information is positive — transparency. And the [...]

I’ve been playing around with some old TREC data over the past few days and completely by chance I came across this document.  I find it interesting because storytelling is a good metaphor for what we as researchers do when we construct interactive information seeking systems.  The document is short enough that I think I [...]

Last March I pointed out a short piece by Tessa Lau about how good interaction design trumps smart algorithms.  Today I have a followup.  In particular, Xavier Amatriain has a good writeup of the recently concluded Netflix contest.  Some of the lessons learned by going through the process are related to the importance of good [...]

Jeff Dalton recently wrote about why he doesn’t want your search log data.  It is an interesting read, and I recommend going through the whole article and comments.  But I want to call attention to one thought in particular:

Academia should be building solutions for tomorrow’s data, not yesterday’s. What will the queries and documents look [...]