My apologies for the sparsity of posts lately; it’s been a busy week!
I just came back from the Information Seeking Support Systems Workshop, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and hosted at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. An excerpt from the workshop home page nicely summarizes its purpose:
The general goal [...]

[Read more →]

One of the recurring topics at The Noisy Channel is exploratory search. Indeed, one of our readers recently took the initiative to upgrade the Wikipedia entry on exploratory search.
In the information retrieval literature. exploratory search comes across as a niche topic consigned to specialty workshops. A cursory reading of papers from the major information retrieval [...]

[Read more →]

A recent study from AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management, also known as the Enterprise Content Management Association) reports that enterprise search frustrates and disappoints users. Specifically, 49% of survey respondents “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do [...]

[Read more →]

My colleague and Endeca co-founder Pete Bell just pointed me to a great post by Kevin Kelly about what may be the earliest implementation of a faceted navigation system. Like every good Endecan, I’m familiar with Ranganathan’s struggle to sell the library world on colon classification. But it is still striking to see this struggle [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve mused a fair amount about to apply the concept of the Phetch human computation game to evaluate browsing-based information retrieval interfaces. I’d love to be able to better evaluate faceted navigation and clustering approaches, relative to conventional search as well as relative to one another.
Here is the sort of co-operative game I have in [...]

[Read more →]

Max Wilson, a colleague of mine at the University of Southampton who has contributed frequently to the conversation here at the Noisy Channel, just started a blog of his own. Check out Max’s blog here.
His post on exhibiting exploratory behaviour (that’s the Queen’s English to you!) raises an issue at the heart of many of [...]

[Read more →]

Thanks to Jon Elsas for calling my attention to a great post at Datawocky today on how Google measures search quality, written by Anand Rajaraman based on his conversation with Google Director of Research Peter Norvig.
The executive summary: rather than relying on click-through data to judge quality, Google employs armies of raters who manually rate [...]

[Read more →]

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be participating in an invitational workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation on Information Seeking Support Systems at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. The participants are an impressive bunch–I feel like I’m the only person attending whom I’ve never heard of!
So, what I’d love to know [...]

[Read more →]

After seeing what the Noisy channel readership has done to improve the HCIR and Relevance Wikipedia entries, I was thinking we might take on one or two more. Specifically, the Exploratory Search and Exploratory Search Systems entries are, quite frankly, in sad shape.
Between the readership here, the folks involved in HCIR ‘08, and the participants [...]

[Read more →]

It’s my pleasure to announce…
HCIR ‘08: Second Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
October 23, 2008
Redmond, Washington, USA
http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/hcir2008
About this Workshop
As our lives become ever more digital, we face the difficult task of navigating the complex information spaces we create. The fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Retrieval (IR) have both developed innovative techniques to [...]

[Read more →]