A recent lecture at the New York CTO club inspired a heated discussion on what is wrong with enterprise search solutions. Specifically, Jon Williams asked why search can’t be a utility. It’s unfortunate when such a simple question calls for a complicated answer, but I’ll try to tackle it. On the web, almost all attempts [...]

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As Nick Belkin pointed out in his recent ECIR 2008 keynote, a grand challenge for the IR community is to figure out how to bring the user into the evaluation process. A key aspect of this challenge is rethinking system evaluation in terms of sessions rather than queries. Some recent work in the IR community [...]

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Amit Singhal, who is head of search quality at Google, gave a very entertaining keynote at ECIR ’08 that focused on the adversarial aspects of Web IR. Specifically, he discussed some of the techniques used in the arms race to game Google’s ranking algorithms. Perhaps he revealed more than he intended! During the question and [...]

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Last week, I had the pleasure to attend the 30th European Conference on Information Retrieval, chaired by Iadh Ounis at the University of Glasgow. The conference was outstanding in several respects, not least of which was a keynote address by Nick Belkin, one the world’s leading researchers on interactive information retrieval. Nick’s keynote, entitled “Some(what) [...]

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