Information Retrieval Gupf

I fired up reddit this morning and was completely flabbergasted by one of the top posts.  The title of the post was “This is Why I Use Google, Not Bing”.  And it linked straight to this screenshot (which I reproduce here, in case the target disappears at some point):

This blew my mind, not only that [...]

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 [...]

There is an interesting blogpost on the Official Google blog today, about seeing stars:
We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

On Twitter today, Josh Young made an interesting observation to which I would like to call attention:
Ya, @jerepick, with “fauxpen” attached, google’s “nav. search as the top of the stack” is a fragile local maximum for the web.
This observation is a followup to the web-wide discussion that Google kicked off about 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 I’ve written, so if you are easily bored, understand that this is not required reading.  [...]