Comments on: Is Bing Optimizing for the Short Snout?

By: T2: Judgment Day for Twine? | The Noisy Channel

T2: Judgment Day for Twine? | The Noisy Channel — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:43:49 +0000

[...] Yelp. Twine doesn’t necessarily have to cover all domains to be useful–perhaps a “short snout” approach like Bing’s will be good enough to drive [...]

By: T2: Judgment Day for Twine? | The Noisy Channel

T2: Judgment Day for Twine? | The Noisy Channel — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:43:49 +0000

[...] Yelp. Twine doesn’t necessarily have to cover all domains to be useful–perhaps a “short snout” approach like Bing’s will be good enough to drive [...]

By: The Far Edge » Blog Archive » TechCrunch50 Wrap-Up. Congrats To All The Startups Who Made It.

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:40:45 +0000

[...] Finance. Bing 2.0 “Visual Search” Launches, Allows Search By Pictures Search Engine Land. Is Bing Optimizing for the Short Snout? The Noisy Channel. Microsoft announces Bing Visual Search MobileTechWorld. Bing Goes the Visual [...]

By: TechCrunch50 Wrap-Up. Congrats To All The Startups Who Made It. - btclip

TechCrunch50 Wrap-Up. Congrats To All The Startups Who Made It. - btclip — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:33:29 +0000

By: TechCrunch50 Wrap-Up. Congrats To All The Startups Who Made It. · QuickieURL

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:56:04 +0000

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:42:51 +0000

Agreed.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:15:45 +0000

I agree that today’s search engines pre-filter access too aggressively, and that giving more control to users would make it possible to change that. Still, much as I like the ability to restrict my search to Wikipedia, I suspect that many people want filters that are designed to emphasize the head–and that it makes sense to invest more heavily in optimizing for that head, as Bing is doing. What would be nice is to make all of this machinery user-controlled rather than a system-controlled black box.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:12:02 +0000

And yet I am happy to toss out much of the web that is spam or worse.

Just a minor point: The tail isn’t spam. Sure, there is a lot of spam in the tail. But there is a lot of missed relevance, too. It’s just that the signal to noise ratio is lower in the tail, and that makes it harder for big-data techniques to detect.

So isn’t one of the whole purposes of HCIR to give the user control over part of the search process? Because humans can do a much better job than heavily prior-ed, big data search engines at separating out the signal from the noise, and in a manner that is the most relevant to the user’s task at hand.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:57:14 +0000

Oh, I agree with you that not everyone optimizes for the same head. And that’s one of the reasons I strongly advocate rotating one’s search engine usage constantly. Only by so doing can you learn which optimization works best on which queries — which details matter for your current task.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:41:25 +0000

That’s a fair point, though I think the details matter. For example, I was having a discussion just last night about the notability criteria for Wikipedia, and my stance was that Wikipedia’s attempt to keep the entry barrier high serves its user base well. At the same time, I’d be pretty upset if my web search were restricted to Wikipedia. And yet I am happy to toss out much of the web that is spam or worse.

Google and others endorse algorithms that have a strong prior (i.e., static and query-independent) component to their ranking measures, and thus filter out much of the “long tail” content for “short snout” queries. In contrast, Bing’s approach is to selectively enrich the user experience for “short snout” queries. Actually, Google does that too, though to a much lesser extent.

So, at the very least, I’d say that not everyone optimizes for the same head.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:31:28 +0000

Perhaps they are focusing on the short snout. Check out these quotes from MS employee Don Dodge:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8256046.stm

At the moment only a small number of topics will return a visual display. These centre around popular categories like entertainment, famous people, shopping and sports.

“I think in those isolated cases it’s going to work very well and those are the areas where there is a lot of money,” Don Dodge, Microsoft’s director of business development told BBC News.

“There is a lot of advertising money for shopping, for travel and so on. So not only is it a better user experience but it’s a better business model too,” said Mr Dodge.

Then again, I think everyone optimizes for the short snout. Well, maybe for the snout and for the fat belly. But certainly not for the long tail.

That’s what I was getting into with P. Norvig a few months ago. It was the notion that by relying on big-data only techniques for solving lots of problems, you are essentially focusing your algorithms on areas that have big data. By definition there will never be big-data in the long tail, and so you’ll never have solutions for needs that arise from the long tail.

So maybe Bing is focusing on the head of the head right now, and other search engines get more into the tail of the head. But nobody really gets into the real tail. Everyone optimizes for the head. Right?