Category Archives: Social Implications

Is Good Enough Good Enough?

Posted on August 25, 2009 by jeremy

“The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine” is the title of a new Wired article.  In it, Robert Capps makes the following point: The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Music IR, Social Implications | 13 Comments

Google not very Googly

Posted on August 4, 2009 by jeremy

If it wasn’t official before, it is now.  Google self-advertises: In the latest shot fired in Google Inc.’s ongoing battle with Microsoft Corp., Google announced today that it’s taking this fight to the streets. Literally. Google is kicking off a … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Social Implications | 11 Comments

Comments: Search Engines and Advertising

Posted on August 3, 2009 by jeremy

I have been quiet lately on the blogpost front. Am still looking for a free moment to write up my reactions to the recent SIGIR 2009 conference.  In the meantime, I am having a good time with Neal Richter and … Continue reading →

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Web Search at 15: Vibrant Content, Stagnant Interface

Posted on July 21, 2009 by jeremy

A number of people have already written about the Sue Dumais “Salton Award” talk at SIGIR.  I encourage you to read their posts, and in particular pay attention to the emphasis that she put on her work at the intersection … Continue reading →

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Is All Relevance “Googly” Relevance? Aka Google’s `Microsoft Moment’

Posted on July 13, 2009 by jeremy

I just finished reading a though provoking post from Anil Dash, about how Google’s recent Chrome OS announcement signifies an important moment:  This is, for lack of a better term, Google’s “Microsoft Moment”. This is the point when the difference … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 2 Comments

Exploratory Food Search

Posted on June 17, 2009 by jeremy

I came across an interesting article today in the New Scientist on the topic of mass-scale food annotation.  The idea is that we can instrument our food, so that we know much more about its origin and manner of production: … Continue reading →

Posted in Exploratory Search, Social Implications | 3 Comments

200 Signals, Still Only One Route

Posted on June 16, 2009 by jeremy

Via Paul Lamere, I came across this recent Google blogpost on large scale graph computing.  I started reading, and quickly became excited by what I was hearing: A relatively simple analysis of a standard map (a graph!) can provide the … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 6 Comments

Compare Google Yahoo Bing

Posted on June 8, 2009 by jeremy

I would like to point to a post worth reading, over at Blogoscoped, about personal, blind side-by-side comparisons of the various contending search engines.  I have seen studies like this for years, both on the web and in published, academic … Continue reading →

Posted in Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 1 Comment

Opposite Day

Posted on May 11, 2009 by jeremy

Two pieces of recent news have my head spinning. Both are instances of technology companies acting in exactly the opposite manner from their ideals (and public statements). The first is Microsoft announcement of an open-source version of BigTable:  Instead of creating … Continue reading →

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Personal Branding and Search Results Integrity

Posted on May 8, 2009 by jeremy

Google is an information retrieval company that prides itself on the purity of its results.  It does not allow the integrity of its ranked list ordering to be tampered with by sponsored results. It also has claimed for years that … Continue reading →

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