Arnon Mishkin wrote a post last Thursday on paidContent called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” that has been generating a lot of discussion, so I figured I’d join in the free-for-all. First, let me try to reduce each person’s argument to a direct quote that best sums up his position. Arnon Mishkin: The vast [...]

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Sometimes the response to a comment is worthy of an entire post, and this is one of those times. In response to my recent post about Able Grape, a wine search engine developed by Doug Cook (now Director of Twitter Search), Lee asked: Let’s say I know almost nothing about wines/digital cameras/cars and a search [...]

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In an interview with CNET’s Tom Krazit, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian made a nice argument regarding the relative advantages of scale to a search engine: On this data issue, people keep talking about how more data gives you a bigger advantage. But when you look at data, there’s a small statistical point that the [...]

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My colleague, Endeca co-founder Pete Bell, and I are giving a virtual seminar on faceted search next week for User Interface Engineering (UIE). It’s on Thursday, August 20th at 1:30PM EST. The regular price is $129, but Noisy Channel readers who are interested in attending can get a $30 discount by using TUNKELANG (yes, all [...]

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While I am an avid Twitter user (and apparently a tradeable commodity in a “Fantasy Twitter” game that some friends are playing), regular readers know that I’ve offered mixed reviews of Twitter Search. I’ve link-baited Summize founder and Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury here once or twice, but I understand that he’s no longer running [...]

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I try not to write posts that are just cut-and-paste from Techmeme, but it’s hard to resist a trio like this: Facebook rolls out new version of search Facebook acquires FriendFeed Google testing new “caffeine” web search infrastructure OK, perhaps that last item isn’t strictly search news, but it may as well be, given that [...]

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The other day, I was talking with Paul Thompson about the challenges of evaluating interactive information retrieval (IIR) systems, and he mentioned a paper that came up in discussion at the SIGIR 2009 workshop on Understanding the User: “A probability ranking principle for interactive information retrieval” by Norbert Fuhr–an update to the decades-old probability ranking [...]

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A colleague just sent me a link to a story about a Twitter user being sued for a tweet. At least he’s not being sued in London. I’m strongly if not absolutely in favor of freedom of expression, so it’s hard not to find such cases depressing. Nonetheless, I don’t think  the legal landscape hasn’t [...]

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A while ago, I wrote a post entitled “Think Evil” in which I mused that: A few years ago, when it became clear that Microsoft was losing the search wars to Google–but when they hadn’t lost much browser market share to Firefox–I thought they should have used a scorched earth strategy of including an ad-blocker [...]

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The following is a guest post by Rich Marr. Rich is the Director of Engineering at Pixsta, where he’s been working on Empora.com, a consumer-facing site that enables browsing of fashion products  according to image similarity (much like Modista).  Pixsta is a growing start-up focused on turning our R&D team’s ongoing search and image processing [...]

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