Best of luck to you on this new challenge. I’m sure you’ll be successful as always! And thank you for all of your help and insightful conversation through the years.

Best,
Hal

And thanks again to all for the well wishes. My first week has been humbling–so much to learn that I’m still learning how much there is to learn!

Seriously, if you want the Nespresso back, let me know.

Personally, in addition to web search, one area I would like to see HCIR make an impact is the future merge between web search and personal communication. As google Wave develops, HCIR could provide a good integration between Wave and web search for discovery/research.

Have you seen our upcoming workshop announcement? I would invite you to submit a paper and/or attend and take part!

http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/

See also our previous workshop:

http://workshops.fxpal.com/jcdl2008/CFP.aspx

Just saw the pending move via Linkedin update. Congratulations. Must have been a huge decision!!

Personally, in addition to web search, one area I would like to see HCIR make an impact is the future merge between web search and personal communication. As google Wave develops, HCIR could provide a good integration between Wave and web search for discovery/research. The ability to instantly feed that information to all particpants of a wave for open discussion/collaboration would be very beneficial.

Cheers

Steve

Will there be any business trips to the Bay Area?

Best move GOOG has made in years…

congrats! and i will be looking forward to your work at Google. Please keep us posted!

Best wishes and we look forward to you continuing to be a strong advocated for HCIR and exploratory search and information discovery.

Also, being an evangelist for HCIR has been easy at Endeca, since HCIR is core to Endeca’s mission. I expect to face greater challenges doing so at Google. But those are the very challenges I’m looking forward to.

I may be a bit late to the congratulatory party here but I definitely want to join in. I’m thrilled for you and looking forward to benefitting from your contributions on the “big stage”. This is a big win for you as well as Google. Great start to the next chapter.

Be careful with the free food there, keep fit

Ack, I reread what I wrote above, and I think it came across as unintentionally insufferable. Let me try and rephrase:

but my first priority is to establish concrete proof points for HCIR on a web scale.

What I mean to say was that as you work to establish your proof points, it isn’t just a matter of getting the right raw numbers. You have to change hearts and minds about how those numbers should be interpreted, i.e. which numbers matter and which do not. Those value judgments are not intrinsic to the numbers.

Right now, the value judgments of speed and non-engagement/non-interactivity (getting the user off the page) appear to be that filter through which all the numbers are filtered. No matter what data points you show, none will be capable of proving your point until alter that filter.

So you naturally will not be able to talk about the numbers. But if you can, I would be interested in hearing about how you succeed in changing the hearts and minds. If that particular blog conversation is one that you can continue, if that transparency will be possible, I’d love to be a part of that conversation!

And again, congratulations!

Stay in touch and please keep writing!

Congratulations! I look for more great things to come out of Google with you on board.

-s

By the way, if it’s at all possible, those efforts are really something that you should blog about. Naturally you won’t be able to say how you do the things you do. But if you can talk about what you’ve done to show the value of HCIR at web scale, that would be of keenest interest to your audience here

Part of the challenge I think you face is convincing the Google quants that their metric is wrong. Currently, the metric is “that which gets the user off the site and on to the rest of the web quickly is better“. If that’s the metric that you’ll be judged by, then you will fail — through no fault of your own but because you’re essentially solving a different task.

Because what HCIR does (as if I have to lecture you) is slow the search process down slightly in order to get orders better results in the end. The metric itself has to be right, has to be able to see value in “slower”, lingering users. Even before you’ve done a single experiment, you’ll have to convince people that lightning fast and lucky isn’t always as good as deliberatively slower, and better.

You’re McDonald’s analogy, as you’ve argued in the past, is apt. We already know that slow food is healthier. But health isn’t the metric. Speed is. (See 3. Fast is better than slow: “We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible.”)

You’ll just have to convince ‘em to change their metric.

Good luck with that! And I really want to hear what you’ve done in order to succeed at that

And Steve, thanks for the offer, but I want my news to make it onto the front page of Techmeme! Barring that, I can always put it on the front page of The Noisy Channel. I know an insider there.

Congrats!

Evan

(psstt .. always available for interesting news from inside the great beast of search – anon always respected )

))))