Information Retrieval Gupf

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.  [...]

Chris Dixon has a post yesterday about search and the social graph.  An interesting read, but what struck me the most was a tangent about how current search engines make money:
Lost amid this discussion, however, is that the links people tend to share on social networks – news, blog posts, videos – are in categories [...]

Daniel T. has an interesting bipartite use-case model for exploratory search:

I know what I want, but I don’t know how to describe it.
I don’t know what I want, but I hope to figure it out once I see what’s out there.

Perhaps this is a silly analogy, but framing the problem in this way reminded me [...]

One of my ongoing research interest areas is in retrieval interfaces that allow more expressive and powerful statements of a user information need.  In that spirit, I wrote a minor rant last April about how the Apple iTunes smart playlist creation interface sacrifices functionality in the interest of simplicity.  One could only create smart playlists [...]

Last March I pointed out a short piece by Tessa Lau about how good interaction design trumps smart algorithms.  Today I have a followup.  In particular, Xavier Amatriain has a good writeup of the recently concluded Netflix contest.  Some of the lessons learned by going through the process are related to the importance of good [...]