Author Archives: jeremy

Opposite Day

Two pieces of recent news have my head spinning. Both are instances of technology companies acting in exactly the opposite manner from their ideals (and public statements). The first is Microsoft announcement of an open-source version of BigTable:  Instead of creating … Continue reading

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Personal Branding and Search Results Integrity

Google is an information retrieval company that prides itself on the purity of its results.  It does not allow the integrity of its ranked list ordering to be tampered with by sponsored results. It also has claimed for years that … Continue reading

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Universal Search is not Exploratory Search

In a recent response article, Danny Sullivan takes Forbes CEO Spanfeller to task on the whole Google vs. The Newspapers issue.  There are a lot of things I agree with Danny about, and an equal number of things that I … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Social Implications | Leave a comment

Search Engine Rotation: Wolfram Alpha vs. Google

Apropos to my post yesterday, Technology Review has a short comparison of Wolfram Alpha and Google.  Here are a few samples: Here’s what I entered, and what I found. SEARCH TERM: Microsoft Apple WOLFRAM ALPHA: I got side-by-side tables and … Continue reading

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Do You Rotate Your Search Engine Usage?

It is good practice to rotate the mattress on your bed, to prevent lopsided wear-and-tear from shortening its useful life.  The same thing applies to car tires; they need rotating.  Smart travelers know to rotate the airlines from which they … Continue reading

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More and Faster versus Smarter and More Effective

Last month, in reaction to the “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data” paper that made the rounds, Stephen Few from the Business Intelligence community wrote an interesting post: The notion that “we need more data” seems to have always served as a … Continue reading

Posted in Explanatory Search, Exploratory Search | 2 Comments

The Tyranny of Simplicity

One of my ongoing frustrations with modern, consumer-facing information organization and retrieval systems is the way in which functionality is often sacrificed in the name of simplicity. Full functionality under the rubric of simplicity is a laudable goal, and I … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations | 12 Comments

World Pinhole Photography Day

While the focus of this blog is the retrieval of existing information, from music to images to videos to text, every once it a while it is nice to create new information as well.  In that spirit I decided to … Continue reading

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Retrievability and Prague Cafes

A week or two ago I began writing a few thoughts about large-data based algorithms and retrievability.  It was spawned by the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data position paper by a couple of notable Googlers, which then led to a brief … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations | 4 Comments

Google Similar Images: Only 20%?!

A few days ago, Google launched “similar image search” functionality.  From TechCrunch: A new 20% time Google project has just launched called Google Similar Images. It’s pretty self-explanatory — when you search for an image and find one close to … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations | 3 Comments