If you’re curious about Wolfram Alpha but tired of reading second-hand reports and third-hand hysteria about it, then be assured that your wait for first-hand access is almost over. Their blog reports that they will launch today. UPDATE: The Wolfram Alpha site says: Watch a live webcast of the Wolfram|Alpha system being brought online for [...]

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‘Tis the season of search conferences, at least for me, and I spent the last couple of days attending the Enterprise Search Summit in New York. I enjoyed it immensely–it’s one of the better networking events in the industry. It was great to catch up with analysts, consultants, information architects, and even competitors–or, as Nate [...]

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I’ve been at the Enterprise Search Summit all day, so I didn’t have the chance to pore through the buzz about Google’s Searchology announcements. But I did see a snippet that struck me as very unusual language for Google: Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which [...]

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Last week, I stopped by the Hunch office to learn more about what they’re doing, as well as to contribute my own thoughts about socially enhanced decision making. I consider Hunch, like Aardvark, to be an example of social search, but I recognize that I use the term in a broad sense. Perhaps, as Jeremy [...]

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While I was inundated with conferences a couple of weeks ago, I missed s a nice article by Stephanie Lemieux at User Interface Engineering (a site I recommend in general) entitled “Designing for Faceted Search“. It briefly explains faceted search and offers some usability tips. It’s not quite as comprehensive as my upcoming book, but [...]

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There has been a flurry of reports about Twitter search–whether about Twitter’s plans to improve their search functionality or about alternative ways to search Twitter. But Danny Sullivan makes a great point in a recent post about Google: Ironically, Google gets a taste of its own medicine with Twitter. It still can’t access the “firehose” [...]

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I’ll be at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York next week, participating on a panel Tuesday morning to discuss “Emergent Social Search Experience”. Our game plan as a panel is to discuss what social search is, why it matters, and how to implement it. Obviously these are broad questions, but here are my rough [...]

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After my recent posts about Google’s similarity browsing for images, a colleague reached out to me to educate me about some of the recent advances in image retrieval. This colleague is involved with an image retrieval startup and felt uncomfortable posting comments publicly, so we agreed that I would paraphrase them in a post under [...]

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Woo hoo, I have preview access to Wolfram Alpha! I’ve only had a short time to play with it, but I can already report that my experience confirms my previously expressed expectations: the NLP is very brittle, but there’s great potential for structured queries on quantitative data. Here is an example use case that, in [...]

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I had the novel experience today of discovering that someone set up a Twitter account for the sole purpose of harassing me personally. I’m not sure what exactly I did to deserve this honor, but I’m amused by the personal attention, since I’m hardly a Twitter celebrity. Perhaps it’s someone I know, conducting a social [...]

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