Information Retrieval Gupf

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 Daniel Tunkelang, discussing the topic of Search and Advertising.  Please come join in the conversation [...]

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 of HCI and IR.  I see this area as only continuing to grow over the [...]

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 between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from [...]

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:

WHERE does your food come from? A few years ago, most consumers were satisfied with a [...]

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 shortest route between two cities. But progressively more sophisticated analysis could be applied to richer information [...]

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 papers (see my earlier post).  And this current, informal study continues to confirm what all [...]

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 a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene [...]

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 it does not engage in hand-coding (aka hand-crafting or hard-coding) of results. Everything that it [...]

In a recent response article, Danny Sullivan takes Forbes CEO Spanfeller to task on the whole Google vs. The Newspapers issue.  There are a lot of things I agree with Danny about, and an equal number of things that I disagree with.  But I feel compelled to propagate one nugget from Spanfeller:
Spanfeller: Search is not [...]

Apropos to my post yesterday, Technology Review has a short comparison of Wolfram Alpha and Google.  Here are a few samples:
Here’s what I entered, and what I found.
SEARCH TERM: Microsoft Apple
WOLFRAM ALPHA: I got side-by-side tables and graphics on the stock prices and data on the two companies, plus a chart plotting the price of [...]