Category Archives: Exploratory Search

Breadth Destroys Depth

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 2 Comments

Semantic Technology Search Panel

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search | 7 Comments

Exploratory Food Search

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: … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Social Implications | 3 Comments

Compare Google Yahoo Bing

I would like to point to a post worth reading, over at Blogoscoped, about personal, blind side-by-side comparisons of the various contending search engines.  I have seen studies like this for years, both on the web and in published, academic … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 1 Comment

Wired Article on Bing

I just came across a Wired article today on a new search push from Microsoft, which will supposedly be named Bing. It touches on some of the issues that we were discussing in yesterday’s comment thread, in particular:  People thought … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, General | 2 Comments

Google Search Options and the Paradox of Choice

Google finally acquiesces, and starts exposing more advanced, user-controllable search result refactorization options.  See here, here, and here: But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search | 1 Comment

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

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

“Improving Findability” Falls Short of the Mark

Via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, I came across this article by Vanessa Fox on how government can improve the findability of their web pages, and thereby allow citizens to become better informed and government to be more transparent.  Fox writes:

Posted in Exploratory Search, Social Implications | 3 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