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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 the same conclusion: +1 Is Like A Button You Push For A Treat — Without The Treat. Some highlights:
I understand the concept behind the +1 Button — it’s a smart one. You get people to click it and it improves the page’s search ranking for logged-in Google users with social connections (and eventually maybe all results). At least I think that’s how it works. But I have a hard time believing that all of you actually clicking on the button really get why you’re doing it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that you’re clicking on it! I am too on some of our stories. But I can’t help but get the feeling that it’s a bit like a cruel experiment we’re running. We put up a button, you click on it because it’s there, expecting you’ll get a treat. But there is no treat.
As I was saying a few months ago, +1 allows for explicit signaling. But that signaling just isn’t a relevance feedback-type of signaling. The person doing the clicking doesn’t actually get anything “fed back” from that action to their ongoing information seeking task. TechCrunch continues: Continue reading…
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 free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”
Pichai apparently went on to explain in more detail why files are no longer needed. It has to do with the notion that, in the cloud you just have data and information. Organizing that information into files is not necessary, especially when you can just start editing that information directly in Google Docs. I’m going to ignore for a moment the “don’t be evil” ramifications of data portability and lock-in that comes through the dissolution of explicit files — how am I supposed to export my data into the Microsoft Cloud Word or into Open Office or into VisiWord whatever else I’d like to use, if files do not exist? Instead, I’m going to focus on how this decision was arrived at:
When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google’s top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, “skeptical.” [Linus] Upson had another characterization: “It was a withering assault.” But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.
This is what I find absolutely fascinating. Here is a company that A/B tests everything in a heavily data driven manner, down which of 41 shades of blue the link anchortext should be. So you would think that such a momentous decision about killing the whole GDrive project would be data driven. It was not. I quote again:
But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do.
Here is an instance where an important decision potentially very large service was made not by the data, but by a HiPPO, the highest-paid person in the room. Continue reading…
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 M. Fernández-Luna, University of Granada, Spain.
- Juan F. Huete, University of Granada, Spain.
- Julio C. Rodríguez-Cano, University of Informatics Science, Cuba.
Introduction and Goal
———————
This is the third workshop we are organizing on the topic of collaborative information retrieval. The first workshop, held in conjunction with JCDL 2008, focused on broad topics and sought to establish a vocabulary for discussion about collaborative information seeking, to identify work practices and disciplines that might benefit from collaborative information seeking, and to establish a community of researchers with related interests. The second workshop, held in conjunction with CSCW 2010, built on the previous results, and focused on issues of communication and awareness in support of collaborative information seeking.
Our goal in this third workshop is to focus on algorithmic and other software issues related to information seeking in a collaborative setting. Continue reading…
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 +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.
A discussion then ensued on Twitter about whether Google had finally introduced explicit relevance feedback to its system. For a long time, the user has been able to give implicit signals of preference to the search engine algorithm in the form of click-throughs. And conventional wisdom has held that users are too lazy or to disinterested to interact with a web search engine in any explicit manner beyond typing 2.7 keywords into the one-line search box. But now Google has introduced the +1. Does this mean that explicit relevance feedback is finally here?
My answer is no. And it is important to understand why.
First of all, Continue reading…
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 T will go to Target. That’s the probability model. If you add R to it (“Tr”), most people are looking for a translation system. It’s actually just pure mathematical modeling.” It is just math, he says, not a bias.
Oh come on, now! What kind of explanation is that? There is no such thing as “just math”. There is always a conscious decision to use math in a particular way.
Let’s take as an example the classic information retrieval ranking function: tf * idf. Continue reading…
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 the article is that Facebook has recently partnered with Bing to deliver social search and cites Google’s slowed rate of innovation as one of the primary motivators for this move. This has left Google, one source says, “miffed and confused as to how Zuckerberg figured they weren’t innovating”.
Perhaps I could be of assistance. Continue reading…
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 an alphageek would prefer the (Google) interface on the left to the (Bing) interface on the right, but that the redditor alphageek community would so heavily upvote it. The way I see it, this speaks directly to the issues of simplicity as storytelling vs. sparsity that I’ve talked about from time to time. The interface on the left is anything but sparse. In fact, it is extremely busy and filled with images, a tool belt of various verticals (news, video images), query modification tools such as timelines and recency sorting, and query reformulation tools such as narrowly related searches (top middle) and broadly related searches (lower left).
In short, everything about it is “non-Googly” Continue reading…
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 choice [...]
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 of course correct; Google is learning from the competition. But there is another issue at play here, one that I don’t want to overlook because I feel it is very important. It is the issue of simplicity. What is simplicity? How is it defined? How is it measured? Conversely, what is complexity? What is clutter? Continue reading…
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 rediscover your favorite web content — stars. With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].
So it sounds to me like this is a sort of bookmarking. What it not as obviously, however, is what this sentence means: Continue reading…
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