Back when I was an undergraduate (yes, a long long time ago), there was a lot of excitement about software agents, also called intelligent agents. The general idea was that a software agent would be able to pursue goal-directed behavior on a person’s behalf. Of course, what that meant ran the gamut from the mundane [...]

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According to the generally accepted history of Google, the company’s name originated from a common misspelling of the word “googol“, which refers to 10100. But, for folks who spend their nights worrying whether Google is evil, you might want to explore the possibility that its name comes from the horrid monster depicted in V. C. Vickers’s [...]

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Already missing your Noisy Channel fix? Why don’t you check out some of the blogs I read: Daniel Lemire’s Blog Geeking with Greg Jeff’s Search Engine Caffe The Mark Logic CEO Blog

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I’m spending a week in Akumal without network connectivity. Yes, a real family vacation. No working, no blogging, no reading Techmeme. But have no fear. I’ve scheduled daily posts in my absence. The Noisy Channel will not go silent! Obviously I won’t be able to participate in the comment threads, and I can only hope [...]

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In the United States, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival in which we express gratitude for our bounty and turn our thoughts towards altruism–at least while we’re not stuffing ourselves with turkey and pumpkin pie. And that got me thinking to the mother of online altruistic endeavors, Wikipedia. Specifically, I thought about the bounty of information [...]

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Omar Alonso recently pointed me to work he and his colleagues at A9 did on relevance evaluation using Mechanical Turk. Perhaps anticipating my predilection for wordplay, the authors showed off some of their own: Relevance evaluation is an essential part of the development and maintenance of information retrieval systems. Yet traditional evaluation approaches have several [...]

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One of my recurring themes has been that we need to get over our loss of privacy. But today, as I was reading Jeff Atwood “Is Email = Efail?” post about the inevitability of email bankruptcy, I clicked through to a post of his from April 2007 entitled “When In Doubt, Make It Public” and [...]

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Lauren Weinstein wrote an interesting post today, suggestng that Google’s new SearchWiki feature “provides an interesting platform for the global distribution of secret messages“. This practice, known as steganography, has been a concern for centuries, but most recently has come up in the context of alleged use by terrorists. No, I don’t think Google is [...]

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I haven’t written a community post in a while, but I thought that, with everyone getting into the Thanksgiving spirit, perhaps someone might be inspired to give to a Wikipedia entry in need. I’m talking about the semantic search entry, which–as the talk page notes–needs work. As I told Ron Miller in my recent one-on-one [...]

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OK, it’s not quite Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier or even David vs. Goliath. But, hey, it’s personal, and this is my blog! A few months ago, I was quoted in a Forbes JargonSpy column, helping to explain why Google isn’t enough for the enterprise. Apparently that hit a nerve, since, shortly afterward, Google Enterprise Search [...]

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