Information Retrieval Gupf

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 want to point out that it supports a position that I’ve been taking on this [...]

The Edge has published their annual question for 2010:
HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?
As an Information Retrieval research scientist, I of course was quite interested in what search folks had to say.  I found this blurb from Marissa Mayer intriguing:
It’s not what you know, it’s what you can find out. The Internet [...]

Greg Linden has an interesting post on Search on a domain like YouTube.  I reproduce it here because I would like to elaborate on it:
The article focuses on YouTube’s “plans to rely more heavily on personalization and ties between users to refine recommendations” and “suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on what [...]

Chris Dixon has a post yesterday about search and the social graph.  An interesting read, but what struck me the most was a tangent about how current search engines make money:
Lost amid this discussion, however, is that the links people tend to share on social networks – news, blog posts, videos – are in categories [...]

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 [...]

TechCrunch is reporting a new Google Music service, purportedly to be released in about a week here in the U.S.:
Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google, has been one of the people talking to the big four music labels about the new service, we’ve heard from one of our sources. And he has supposedly [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

On Wednesday I attended the Executive Round Table on Semantic Search, at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference.  Researchers from Ask, Hakia, Yahoo, Google, Powerset/Bing, and True Knowledge were on the panel.  In the next few days I hope to give a longer write-up of the session over on the FXPAL blog.  In the meantime I [...]

I came across an interesting article today in the New Scientist on the topic of mass-scale food annotation.  The idea is that we can instrument our food, so that we know much more about its origin and manner of production:

WHERE does your food come from? A few years ago, most consumers were satisfied with a [...]