Category Archives: Information Retrieval Foundations

A Button Without The Treat

A few months ago I wrote a post entitled +1 is Explicit, but is not Relevance Feedback.  I am often personally concerned that, with many of the posts I write, I am being pedantic.  However, last week TechCrunch came to … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 4 Comments

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

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations | Leave a comment

Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR 2011)

Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR 2011) CIKM’2011, Glasgow, UK, October 28th. http://cir2011.fxpal.com/ Organizers ———- – Gene Golovchinsky, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc, USA. – Jeremy Pickens, Catalyst Repository Systems, USA. – Meredith Ringel Morris, Microsoft Research, USA. – Juan … Continue reading

Posted in Collaborative Information Seeking, Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations | Leave a comment

+1 is Explicit, but is not Relevance Feedback

A week or so ago, Google introduced it’s answer to the Facebook “Like”.  It is called “+1”.  Here is a quote from the official announcement: The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”  Click … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations | 5 Comments

Search Algorithms versus Asimov’s First Law of Robotics

Search Engine Land has a short article on bias versus brands.  The issue at hand is whether Google Instant has a brand bias.  Google says it does not: Singhal explains that when someone types in T, mathematically “most people typing … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations | 4 Comments

Miffed and Confused

Have been on a six month blogging hiatus, and wouldn’t you know it.. it took another fun Google article to pull me back.  It is a recent FastCompany piece, entitled Google to Zuckerberg, Bing: We Still Innovate.  The premise of … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 5 Comments

The Search User Wants a Story

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations | 19 Comments

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

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations | 4 Comments

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

Seeing Stars

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Explanatory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations | 3 Comments