Alex Chitu at the unofficial Google Operating System blog reports that: Gmail’s code reveals an upcoming feature called “magic inbox” or “icebox inbox”, which is likely to prioritize the messages sent by your friends and other contacts you email frequently. That wouldn’t be hard to implement for Google or any other email service / application [...]

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I haven’t seen this in my own browser yet, but MG Siegler at TechCrunch reports that Google Suggest has added advertising (see Google’s official post here). It also talks about personalization, but I’ve been seeing that for a while, so I don’t know that there’s anything new on that front. In any case, here’s an [...]

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At long last, SIGIR 2009 has posted the program for the Industry Track! It will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 during the regular conference program (in parallel with the technical tracks). There is no additional registration fee for full conference attendees, but there is a one-day registration option for people who only want [...]

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Back on my 30th birthday, my wife gave me a copy of Logan’s Run, with a card ensuring me that I’d found sanctuary. The joke is probably lost on those who haven’t seen this wonderful sci-fi B-movie, as is the title of this post, but you can crib from the script here. But I’ll get [...]

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Harry McCracken at Technologizer just posted “A Brief History of Google Killers“, in which he enumerates fourteen companies that “were supposed to do away with the Web’s biggest brand”. He forgot a few–I’d love to see a a more comprehensive list (e.g., where’s Dipsie?). Still, it’s an informative and entertaining analysis, and would be Google executioners [...]

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One of the things I love about being in the enterprise search /  information access business is that there is always new blood keeping us old-timers on our toes and maintaining the pressure to innovate. While the competitive landscape is brutal (ask any analyst who has covered it over the past decade!), it apparently doesn’t [...]

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Otis just wrote a post in which he cited the Open Relevance Project, an embryonic effort by the Lucene project to build a free, public information retrieval evaluation framework analogous to the TREC conference. Not surprisingly, he sees this as an opportunity for Lucene to prove that it is just as good as the commercial [...]

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Curt Monash has a nice post that turns around the question of innovating business models for online publishing . He considers the reasons that people consume information, and uses that as the basis for evaluating the potential of the various business models (e.g., freemium, metered) available to the companies that produce it. It’s a long [...]

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Wolfram Alpha is live, though it is experiencing some strain under load. Lots of reactions on Techmeme, both commenting on the brief launch delay and expressing mixed reactions to the service itself. I encourage you all to try it, at least when it recovers from the initial load. If nothing else, I need for everyone [...]

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I just read in The Observer that the New York Times is considering two plans to charge online users: One includes a “meter system,” in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is [...]

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