Information Retrieval Gupf

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 [...]

I have more questions than I have answers.  One of the topics that I know very little about, and on which I often seek clarification and wisdom, is A/B testing in the context of rapid iteration, rapid deployment online systems.  So I’d like to ask a question of my readership (all four of you [...]

What sort of information retrieval system would you build if you knew that all the users of your system would be expert or highly-motivated amateur searchers?  What sort of system would you build when you have a very large collection of unstructured information, and the goal in searching that information is not to find one [...]

Via Xavier Amatriain: The Dirty Little Secret About the “Wisdom of the Crowds” – There is No Crowd:
This is hardly the first time that the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” has been called into question. The term, which implies that a diverse collection of individuals makes more accurate decisions and predications than individuals or even [...]

…via Ask and SearchMe, that is?  Let me explain.  Google announced a new bit of interface design into its News search results today: Fast Flip:
Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users…”flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine…We capture images of the articles on our partners’ websites and then [...]

Half a year ago I wrote a blogpost about an easy change that Google could make to its interface, one that would both sacrifice only the least bit of simplicity as well as entice and encourage the user to enter longer queries, thus improving retrieval effectiveness.  In particular, I wrote:
So even though research has found [...]

A few days ago I posted a question about why modern web retrieval systems offer no explicit relevance feedback mechanisms.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the following attitude, explained by one of my favorite bloggers, Nick Carr:
The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its [...]