I hope everyone who attended the recent SIGIR 2011 in Beijing had an excellent experience. I didn’t manage to make it to that side of the globe myself, but I’m looking forward to hearing back from my LinkedIn colleagues who were there — particularly Paul Ogilvie, who gave an invited talk at the first Workshop on Entity-Oriented [...]

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A major feature of the recently released Google+ is Circles, which allows you to “share relevant content with the right people, and follow content posted by people you find interesting.” Most people seem to look at Circles as a privacy feature — and indeed Google’s official description gives the impression that Circles exist to manage [...]

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Diego Basch is the CEO and founder of IndexTank, a hosted search service that powers major web sites such as Reddit, Twitvid, blip.tv, as well as providing a WordPress plug-in for blogs (like this one). Diego gained his search experience working with Inktomi, where he wrote some of the world’s first web-scale link analysis algorithms. He [...]

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When I left Google last December, it was an open secret that Google was developing a social networking product. Now that Google has released Google+, I am at liberty to share my personal impressions. Let’s start with the clear wins. Impressive launch. Google has certainly learned its lesson from the past launches of Wave and Buzz. [...]

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