The Probably Irrelevant blog has been quiet for a while, but I was happy to see a new post there by Miles Efron about “micro-IR“. He characterizes micro-IR, as distinct from macro or general IR, as follows: In ad hoc (text) IR a principal intellectual challenge lies in modeling ‘aboutness.’  In micro-IR settings, the creativity [...]

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Like many folks, I’ve assumed that Yahoo’s partnership with Bing–assuming it is approved–offers the best chance of validating CEO Carol Bartz’s claim that Yahoo has “never been a search company“. She may not be able to change the past, but she certainly is making up for lost time. To be clear, I agree with her [...]

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A few people have commented that the events I advertise here tend to be expensive–or, worse, require a lot of work to get into! So I’m glad to announce a freebie that I hope will be as much fun for me as for attendees. I’ve been invited to participate in a webinar on the ethics [...]

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The two biggest academic conferences for information retrieval are SIGIR and CIKM (a site which, sadly, is still hacked). Hopefully some of you enjoyed my coverage of SIGIR 2009–or, better yet, attended and experienced it for yourselves. Anyway, thanks to Jeff Dalton for alerting me that the CIKM 2009 accepted papers list is now available. [...]

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Jeff Jarvis wrote a post today entitled “Google bigotry“, in which he asserts that: Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). He then goes on to launch a tirade against a Le Monde journalist whose offense was [...]

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John Battelle has a pair of posts on BingTweets (yes, I know, horrible name) entitled “Decisions Are Never Easy – So Far“. In his second post, he sums up the problem with conventional search engines in a nutshell: “I don’t know what to ask about”. His describing the need for a “decision engine” is a [...]

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I’m a big fan of using machine learning and automated information extraction to improve search performance and generally support information seeking. I’ve had some very good experiences with both supervised (e.g., classification) and unsupervised (e.g., terminology extraction) learning approaches, and I think that anyone today who is developing an application to help people access text [...]

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Just noticed that the Web Ecology Project has published “The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter“. The blog post includes a link to their full report. Their approach strikes me as a generalization of measuring retweets, but perhaps I’m giving it too cursory a read. I did compare their results to TunkRank: we [...]

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Gene Golovchinsky at FXPAL has written a great series of posts on medical literature search, specifically looking at how MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) has been used to augment conventional text search, and whether its use improves the overall effectiveness of information seeking. Here are the posts: What a tangled MeSH we weave Open-source queries Have [...]

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