The 4th Annual Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2010) will be held in conjunction with the IIiX 2010 conference in New Brunswick, New Jersey on August 22, 2010. We’re pleased to announce that our keynote speaker will be Dan Russell from Google. New for this year, we will also be running an HCIR Challenge based on [...]

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I have had 10 invites for Quora, a social search site launched earlier this year by a bunch of ex-Facebookers (including former CTO Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever (who previously led Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect)–and which was just funded at an $86M valuation. Put your email address in a comment or communicated it to [...]

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Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to attend the New York Semantic Web Meetup, which featured three excellent presentations. I’ll confess that I primarily attended the event in order to learn more about open data platform Factual, particularly to see how it compares to Freebase and Google Squared. But I found the other [...]

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I’ve been following Hunch for a while, and my impression has evolved from the initial skepticism with which I greeted it a year ago (to the day!). Given the track records of co-founders Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, perhaps I should have expected their success at obtaining traffic and funding.  But what interests me more is that [...]

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Mathew Ingram posted an interview with Craig Newmark (the Craig of craigslist fame) in which the latter argued that what the web needs is a “distributed trust network” to manage our online reputations. As it happens, this is an idea that has occupied me for several years. So I figured it was about time that I shared my thoughts [...]

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In a post on ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez summarizes “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy“, a recent research paper by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, and Krishna Gummadi. The punch line should hardly be surprising to regular readers here given my variety of rants on the subject: follower count isn’t great measure [...]

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It used to be a surprise when people remembered our birthdays, but in the twenty-first century Facebook ensures that we will never forget a birthday. Does that make the happy birthday wishes any less sincere? Or is technology simply providing us with a cognitive assist and helping us express our sincere feelings? A related question is how [...]

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Let me preface this post with a clear disclaimer: I work at Google, but the views I express on this blog are my own personal views. Last week, Google head of webspam Matt Cutts posted a full-throated defense of Google’s transparency on Google’s European Policy Blog in response to complaints that a few companies raised [...]

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A topic with which I developed an obsession in my last few years at Endeca is understanding how to predict query difficulty and performance–performance in the information retrieval sense meaning results quality, not computational efficiency. If only we knew how well a search engine would do–or did–in meeting the user’s information need, we might adapt [...]

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We’re gearing up to officially announce the HCIR 2010 workshop, but I wanted to give folks here a heads up, as well as to put out a call for a volunteer. The Fourth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval will take place on August 22nd at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. It will [...]

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