Information Retrieval Gupf

I came across an interesting blogpost today, entitled “The Paradox of Choice is Not Robust“.  To requote their quote:
Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when [...]

A tweet by @akumar prompted me to punch up this quick blogpost:
as with all controversial issues, there’s a positive in google trying bing/image – that they’re not afraid to learn from competition
What Amit is referring to is the recent addition of gorgeous photographic images as search page background.  See for example this writeup: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2010/06/google-vs-bing-copycat-picture-on-prominent-page.html
He is [...]

What is Social Search as opposed to Social Media?  Social Search in Media?  Search in Social Media?
Next week, Gene Golovchinsky and I are moderating a pair of panels at the SSM workshop.  So we spent some time this week asking ourselves these definitional questions in preparation for the panel.  We came up with a lightweight [...]

There is a fantastic Google blog post today by Jonathan Rosenberg on the meaning (and value) of openness.  Whooo-boy.. where do we start with this can of worms?  Guess I’ll jump right in.  Warning: This is probably the longest post I’ve written, so if you are easily bored, understand that this is not required reading.  [...]

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 we construct interactive information seeking systems.  The document is short enough that I think I [...]

Jeff Dalton recently wrote about why he doesn’t want your search log data.  It is an interesting read, and I recommend going through the whole article and comments.  But I want to call attention to one thought in particular:

Academia should be building solutions for tomorrow’s data, not yesterday’s. What will the queries and documents look [...]

I’ve added a couple of updates to my previous post about the “Google Discover Music” service that is launching today.  See also Paul’s writeup.
But I have been reading Danny’s Sullivan’s liveblog of the release event, and came across a quote that made me chuckle out loud:
Bill talking about how this will let people hear more [...]

I split my blogging between this and the FXPAL blog.  This morning I have a post on the latter site that asks an (imho) important question about data ownership and data liberation with respect to one’s web search history.. not just the queries, but the results produce by a mashup between those queries and the [...]

…via Ask and SearchMe, that is?  Let me explain.  Google announced a new bit of interface design into its News search results today: Fast Flip:
Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users…”flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine…We capture images of the articles on our partners’ websites and then [...]

A few days ago there was a Techcrunch interview of Google’s Eric Schmidt. Here’s the bit that struck me:
[TC] The long term goal of Google search, he says, is to give the user one exactly right answer to a query:
[Schmidt] So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that [...]