Information Retrieval Gupf

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 [...]

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 papers (see my earlier post).  And this current, informal study continues to confirm what all [...]

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 online e-mail was just fine and more or less converged on the same specific set of [...]

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 of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand [...]

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 disagree with.  But I feel compelled to propagate one nugget from Spanfeller:
Spanfeller: Search is not [...]

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 fundamental assumption and driver of the data warehousing and business intelligence industries. It is true that [...]

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:

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:

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 editorial functions, but there’s a key difference between the way they operate and the way that [...]

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 computers to (a) connect people who can directly recommend music to each other and (b) provide contextually [...]