Category Archives: Explanatory Search

Seeing Stars

There is an interesting blogpost on the Official Google blog today, about seeing stars: We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a … Continue reading

Posted in Explanatory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations | 3 Comments

Kasparov and Good Interaction Design

A NYT books article about Kasparov and chess, and the relationship between humans, machines, and decision processes is making the Twitter rounds today.  I don’t have time at the moment to write a long comment about it, but I do … Continue reading

Posted in Explanatory Search, Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations | 2 Comments

More Information Is Positive

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 … Continue reading

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The Craft of Storytelling

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 … 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

Music Explaura: Exploration and Discovery in Action

Music Information Retrieval continues to be an excellent place to play around with the intersection of search, recommendation, user-guided exploration, and explanatory (transparent) algorithms. First, check out the announcement of Music Explaura from Stephen Green at Sun Research.  Stephen writes:

Posted in Explanatory Search, Exploratory Search, Music IR | 1 Comment

Is the Ad-Sponsored Web Search Market a Conversation?

It has now officially been ten years since Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, rekindling and reminding us of the centuries-old notion that markets are conversations between people, buyers and sellers. The following are a few … Continue reading

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Media Gatekeepers and Transparency

PBS has an interesting article on the new media gatekeepers and the need for transparency in the process by which they promote media.  Here is an excerpt: The problem for these new gatekeepers is that they are providing the old … Continue reading

Posted in Explanatory Search, Exploratory Search, Social Implications | 1 Comment

Music Retrieval: Algorithms or Explanatory Context?

At SXSW this year, Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest and Anthony Volodkin of Hype Machine engaged in a head-to-head panel about the utility of: Using computer algorithms (e.g. collaborative filtering, tag-based, content-based, etc.) to automatically recommend music, versus Using … Continue reading

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