Category Archives: General

They Won People Over By A Logical Argument

Via @glinden, I enjoyed this article on why GDrive (an early cloud document/file store) was never launched by Google: At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a … Continue reading

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Top Posts of 2010

Here are the five top posts on this blog for 2010, in order: Kasparov and Good Interaction Design Search Versus Recommendation: Not the Only Tension More on Simplicity and the Paradox of Choice What You Can Find Out Don’t Forget … Continue reading

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More on Simplicity and the Paradox of Choice

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, … Continue reading

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Simplicity: Sparsity or Storytelling?

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 … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 15 Comments

Search in Social Media

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 … Continue reading

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Google and the Meaning of Open

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 … 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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Tomorrow’s Data

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 … Continue reading

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Doing to Music What They Did to the Web

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 … Continue reading

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Data Liberation and Ownership

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 … Continue reading

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