Searching and Advertising

One of my interests in the information retrieval arena is the relationship between search and advertising.  Over on the FXPAL blog I posted a thought, and a quick experiment, related to this topic.  Here is an excerpt:

The search engine summarily ignored that user request and served the advertiser page anyway.  So even though ad result pages are separated from the organic result pages,  it is quite clear that there is an ongoing, unresolved conflict between the searcher and the advertiser.  And the search engine, rather than focusing on the user’s needs, placed the needs of the advertiser on top.  Quite literally.

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And just like that..

..I’ve changed my domain.  I liked Jeff Dalton’s suggestions, to switch from wiakli.net to irgupf.com.  So if you’ve got me in your feed reader, please make the switch, and apologies for the sudden change.  wiakli.net as a domain should remain active for a few more days, until I figure out how to set up 301 redirects.

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Empty Calories

A couple of days ago I made reference to a KQED Forum show on the 40th anniversary of the Personal Computer.  In listening closer to that program, a couple of the guests made comments about the “empty calories” applications and devices that we in the computer field like to create.  The following is a transcript from that dialogue:

Michael Krasny: Just something that came up…Brian Cooley mentioned…and that is how a lot of the calories are going into things like Twitter and Flickr now.

Brian Cooley: Yeah, we’re spending the effort — you know we talked about the vision Doug had for this being a platform for greater collaborative reasoning and problem solving. We are using the connectivity and…the power of the PC in enormous ways of (quote) “thinking” and communicating. But they’re much more self-obsessed. We’re spending so much time on social networking and all kinds of relatively unimportant stuff like YouTube videos and Yelp restaurant reviews. There is an enormous bulk of calories being spent on this kind of problem solving of a very tiny, irrelevant nature.

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Music and Exploratory Search

One of my early, longstanding information retrieval passions is Music Information Retrieval — especially content-based music IR.  I began research in MIR back in 1998 as a graduate student at UMass Amherst.  In 2000, we organized the very first ISMIR conference, in Plymouth Massachusetts.

Music IR hits a sweet spot between information retrieval, information seeking, pattern recognition, data mining and information extraction, and user information needs.  It is a field that is full of rich but solvable problems.  And it’s music.. who doesn’t like that?

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What is a “Gupf”?

The title of this blog is “Information Retrieval Gupf”.  I’ll wager that more than a few of you are wondering what a Gupf is.

Gupf is an Austrian slang/dialect form of the high German word “Gipfel”, which means “peak” or “summit”, as on a mountain.  My idea for naming the blog “Information Retrieval Gupf” was to have a place where interested researchers and search observers can gather, survey, and discuss information retrieval from a useful vantage point: somewhere tall where you can get a good overview of what is happening.

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One Click Away

Daniel Tunkelang pointed me to a NYT article on the growing power, and therefore growing public unwariness, of Google.  The article makes a number of points, but what struck me most was the pseudo-repartee between Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, and long-time search watcher Danny Sullivan:

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The 10-speed and the Tricycle

Over the next few weeks I would like to begin laying out the theme of this blog. I’ve been thinking about exactly what it is I would like to say, and what would be of value to discuss with the online community. At its core, this blog is about information retrieval in its myriad forms and applications: Text, Music, Images, Web, Video, and so forth. But the way in which these systems are designed, whose information needs they are trying to meet, and by what metrics they are evaluated, are extremely important considerations. One thing that I would like to do is investigate the assumptions underlying the retrieval systems that we are all creating and using.

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Jumping in

Over the years, Greg Linden, Jeff Dalton, and Daniel Tunkelang have asked me to stop reduce commenting on their blogs, get out there and start one myself. While I am still not convinced that the world needs yet another blog, I hope this can contribute to the ongoing discussion in even a small way. Consider the radius of the blogo-sphere now ɛ larger.

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