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	<title>Comments for The Noisy Channel</title>
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		<title>Comment on Not All Queries Are Created Equal by Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/16/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/not-all-queries-are-created-equal/comment-page-1/#comment-5511</link>
		<dc:creator>Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/16/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:44:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2987#comment-5511</guid>
		<description>[...] Not All Queries Are Created Equal - Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Not All Queries Are Created Equal &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/16/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5510</link>
		<dc:creator>Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/16/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:41:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5510</guid>
		<description>[...] Google and Transparency  - Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Google and Transparency  - Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Is Spontaneity Overrated? by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/14/is-spontaneity-overrated/comment-page-1/#comment-5509</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:35:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2996#comment-5509</guid>
		<description>Thanks for the comments--especially from folks who are new here!

Miriam, I imagine most businesses would prefer negative feedback in private and positive feedback in public. But I could be wrong. Indeed, responding to negative feedback in public may be a great way to win new customers. I&#039;m curious how many businesses encourage such an open conversation.

Gregor, I agree that there&#039;s a lot more information in a review than a star rating. You might want to take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.buzzillions.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.buzzillions.com/&lt;/a&gt;.

Bob, that makes sense intuitively--and only reinforces concerns about bias. As for finding negative reviews on the open web, that seems to be one of the canonical applications of text analytics.

Lecia, you raise an important point about private investigators--and you might appreciate my blog post about &lt;http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/08/08/public-expression-liability-and-anonymity/&gt;public expression, liability, and anonymity&lt;/a&gt;. As for the opinion marketplace, I don&#039;t see money changing hands, but rather people using their reputations as social currency. People already do that offline--why should the online world be so different?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Thanks for the comments&#8211;especially from folks who are new here!</p>
<p>Miriam, I imagine most businesses would prefer negative feedback in private and positive feedback in public. But I could be wrong. Indeed, responding to negative feedback in public may be a great way to win new customers. I&#8217;m curious how many businesses encourage such an open conversation.</p>
<p>Gregor, I agree that there&#8217;s a lot more information in a review than a star rating. You might want to take a look at <a href="http://www.buzzillions.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzillions.com/</a>.</p>
<p>Bob, that makes sense intuitively&#8211;and only reinforces concerns about bias. As for finding negative reviews on the open web, that seems to be one of the canonical applications of text analytics.</p>
<p>Lecia, you raise an important point about private investigators&#8211;and you might appreciate my blog post about <http ://thenoisychannel.com/2009/08/08/public-expression-liability-and-anonymity/>public expression, liability, and anonymity. As for the opinion marketplace, I don&#8217;t see money changing hands, but rather people using their reputations as social currency. People already do that offline&#8211;why should the online world be so different?</p>
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		<title>Comment on Is Spontaneity Overrated? by Lecia Kaslofsky</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/14/is-spontaneity-overrated/comment-page-1/#comment-5508</link>
		<dc:creator>Lecia Kaslofsky</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:17:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2996#comment-5508</guid>
		<description>&quot;Still, my hope is that consumers will start placing less stock in the aggregated opinions of anonymous strangers and shift their trust to people who are more transparent about their identities and motives. &quot;

A big (and growing) field for private investigators is getting the identities of people who post strong, negative opinions of businesses online -- hired by the businesses of course. 

This lack of &quot;reviewer&quot; transparency clearly has a dollar value to the businesses who are willing to pay to uncover the origin of the review.

Will there ever be a dollar value to uncover positive reviewers? Would consumers be willing to pay to figure it out through some form of an opinion marketplace? 

I doubt it...but you pose an interesting question!</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;Still, my hope is that consumers will start placing less stock in the aggregated opinions of anonymous strangers and shift their trust to people who are more transparent about their identities and motives. &#8221;</p>
<p>A big (and growing) field for private investigators is getting the identities of people who post strong, negative opinions of businesses online &#8212; hired by the businesses of course. </p>
<p>This lack of &#8220;reviewer&#8221; transparency clearly has a dollar value to the businesses who are willing to pay to uncover the origin of the review.</p>
<p>Will there ever be a dollar value to uncover positive reviewers? Would consumers be willing to pay to figure it out through some form of an opinion marketplace? </p>
<p>I doubt it&#8230;but you pose an interesting question!</p>
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		<title>Comment on Is Spontaneity Overrated? by Bob Carpenter</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/14/is-spontaneity-overrated/comment-page-1/#comment-5507</link>
		<dc:creator>Bob Carpenter</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:17:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2996#comment-5507</guid>
		<description>The sociolinguistics literature, at least as reported in Nass and Reeves&#039; &lt;i&gt;The Media Equation&lt;/i&gt;, indicates that people provide more positive feedback when asked for the feedback by the entity (not necessarily person) being evaluated.   They may not have a reason to lie, but there&#039;s an induced bias.

The &quot;equation&quot; in the title refers to Nass and Reeves&#039; and others&#039; findings that people interact with computers socially with many of the same patterns as they react with people.

As a search problem, many companies are interested in finding negative reviews to see if there are issues they can address.

To bring this all back to Endeca-style search, what Gregor&#039;s saying is that we need to be able to auto-facet the reviews (by what is called &quot;aspect&quot; if you&#039;re looking for papers on the topic).</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The sociolinguistics literature, at least as reported in Nass and Reeves&#8217; <i>The Media Equation</i>, indicates that people provide more positive feedback when asked for the feedback by the entity (not necessarily person) being evaluated.   They may not have a reason to lie, but there&#8217;s an induced bias.</p>
<p>The &#8220;equation&#8221; in the title refers to Nass and Reeves&#8217; and others&#8217; findings that people interact with computers socially with many of the same patterns as they react with people.</p>
<p>As a search problem, many companies are interested in finding negative reviews to see if there are issues they can address.</p>
<p>To bring this all back to Endeca-style search, what Gregor&#8217;s saying is that we need to be able to auto-facet the reviews (by what is called &#8220;aspect&#8221; if you&#8217;re looking for papers on the topic).</p>
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		<title>Comment on Is Spontaneity Overrated? by Gregor Erbach</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/14/is-spontaneity-overrated/comment-page-1/#comment-5500</link>
		<dc:creator>Gregor Erbach</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:24:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2996#comment-5500</guid>
		<description>A good review should help consumers find a product or service that fits their use cases for the product, and not just rate the product on a linear good/bad scale.  For example, a MP3 player may have rave reviews, if one review says that you cannot resume playback in the middle of a track,  I can rule it out as a player for listening to audiobooks. 
Often, I go deliberately for the few one-star reviews, to see if they point out any flaws that I would consider fatal. 
What I really need is a search engine that finds those product reviews that address my particular use case.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A good review should help consumers find a product or service that fits their use cases for the product, and not just rate the product on a linear good/bad scale.  For example, a MP3 player may have rave reviews, if one review says that you cannot resume playback in the middle of a track,  I can rule it out as a player for listening to audiobooks.<br />
Often, I go deliberately for the few one-star reviews, to see if they point out any flaws that I would consider fatal.<br />
What I really need is a search engine that finds those product reviews that address my particular use case.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Is Spontaneity Overrated? by MiriamEllis</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/14/is-spontaneity-overrated/comment-page-1/#comment-5499</link>
		<dc:creator>MiriamEllis</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:55:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2996#comment-5499</guid>
		<description>Mike Blumenthal forwarded a link to this article to me, and for sure, it&#039;s a really interesting one. 

Like you, I don&#039;t see anything wrong with a business owner asking customers to consider reviewing them. Our company acquires testimonials to be published on our website in this manner, and when a client is really happy, they are glad to oblige.

I am especially in favor of soliciting reviews because of the fact that many people are unaware that user reviews even exist. The business owner has the chance to educate his customer about this, acting, in a sense, as an entree into this world of user generated content.

But you&#039;ve raised a good point: does lack of spontaneity diminish the value of reviews? Inasmuch as any smart SMB is only going to encourage reviews from his happy customers, then, yes...there might be something slightly artificial about a company&#039;s profile with 100% positive reviews. It also might have the effect of distorting an SMB&#039;s understanding of how people are actually talking about him if the majority of his reviews are ones he&#039;s attained rather than one&#039;s that have occurred without any action on his part. So, there is a bit of shaky ground here.

Overall, though, I think that as time goes by and more people understand that they can review businesses, there will be a healthy mix of owner-sought and voluntary reviews.

A good and thoughtful piece.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Mike Blumenthal forwarded a link to this article to me, and for sure, it&#8217;s a really interesting one. </p>
<p>Like you, I don&#8217;t see anything wrong with a business owner asking customers to consider reviewing them. Our company acquires testimonials to be published on our website in this manner, and when a client is really happy, they are glad to oblige.</p>
<p>I am especially in favor of soliciting reviews because of the fact that many people are unaware that user reviews even exist. The business owner has the chance to educate his customer about this, acting, in a sense, as an entree into this world of user generated content.</p>
<p>But you&#8217;ve raised a good point: does lack of spontaneity diminish the value of reviews? Inasmuch as any smart SMB is only going to encourage reviews from his happy customers, then, yes&#8230;there might be something slightly artificial about a company&#8217;s profile with 100% positive reviews. It also might have the effect of distorting an SMB&#8217;s understanding of how people are actually talking about him if the majority of his reviews are ones he&#8217;s attained rather than one&#8217;s that have occurred without any action on his part. So, there is a bit of shaky ground here.</p>
<p>Overall, though, I think that as time goes by and more people understand that they can review businesses, there will be a healthy mix of owner-sought and voluntary reviews.</p>
<p>A good and thoughtful piece.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Payola? There&#8217;s An App For That! by Is Spontaneity Overrated?</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/08/22/payola-theres-an-app-for-that/comment-page-1/#comment-5498</link>
		<dc:creator>Is Spontaneity Overrated?</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:38:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2479#comment-5498</guid>
		<description>[...] folks seem to agree that incented reviews are a bad idea. And let&#8217;s not get started on hiringinterns or Turkers to write them! Rather, the question is whether a review is less meaningful because it [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] folks seem to agree that incented reviews are a bad idea. And let&#8217;s not get started on hiringinterns or Turkers to write them! Rather, the question is whether a review is less meaningful because it [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Resolving the Battle Royale between Information Retrieval and Information Science by Search Facets &#187; IEEE works! But what works?</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/07/06/resolving-the-battle-royale-between-information-retrieval-and-information-science/comment-page-1/#comment-5491</link>
		<dc:creator>Search Facets &#187; IEEE works! But what works?</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:58:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=52#comment-5491</guid>
		<description>[...] &#8212; sliders, breadcrumbs, multi-select? Their interaction? Something else? As Daniel Tunkelang reminds us, we’re all still new at measuring the effects of HCIR, given the “battle royale” between the [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] &#8212; sliders, breadcrumbs, multi-select? Their interaction? Something else? As Daniel Tunkelang reminds us, we’re all still new at measuring the effects of HCIR, given the “battle royale” between the [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on HCIR 2010: A Pre-Announcement by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/hcir-2010-a-pre-announcement/comment-page-1/#comment-5481</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:38:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2983#comment-5481</guid>
		<description>Otis, thanks for the thought--you certainly have the requisite expertise! I believe we&#039;re already set with a volunteer. I&#039;ll share more details when everything is confirmed, hopefully very soon!</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Otis, thanks for the thought&#8211;you certainly have the requisite expertise! I believe we&#8217;re already set with a volunteer. I&#8217;ll share more details when everything is confirmed, hopefully very soon!</p>
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		<title>Comment on HCIR 2010: A Pre-Announcement by Otis Gospodnetic</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/hcir-2010-a-pre-announcement/comment-page-1/#comment-5480</link>
		<dc:creator>Otis Gospodnetic</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:34:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2983#comment-5480</guid>
		<description>Id&#039; volunteer, but I may not be in the country during HCIR in the second half of August.  Feel free to email the details anyway, who knows...</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Id&#8217; volunteer, but I may not be in the country during HCIR in the second half of August.  Feel free to email the details anyway, who knows&#8230;</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5479</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:19:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5479</guid>
		<description>&quot;I do think it would be interesting to have an independent search engine that was completely transparent and to see if users who tried it stuck with it.&quot;

Agreed.  Caveat, however: transparency alone wouldn&#039;t be enough.  Because not all queries (e.g. navigation) need transparency.  So the independent search engine that we&#039;d need to build to run this experiment has to be equal in quality to Google for navigational queries, with the ability to switch to transparent interaction for informational/exploratory queries.  Given that requirement, Wikia Search does not count as such an experiment.

&quot;But the success of Hadoop that I alluded to earlier is evidence that this transparency isn’t completely obscured.&quot;

Yup, I agreed to the Hadoop/Mapreduce benefits in my comment #8, above.  Still, that&#039;s not a part of the system (other than query response time) that the user sees.  I&#039;m interested in HCIR.

&quot;I’m glad we agree that we’re debating shades of gray.&quot;

Of course.  We&#039;re not republicans, now, are we? :-)

&quot;I agree with colleagues that there’s a real risk to users in over-disclosing the details of ranking. I hope to see the day where it’s possible to have relevance without obscurity.&quot;

One day when you can finally, legally talk about it, I&#039;d like to know what it is you&#039;ve learned since joining the Big G that seems to have moved you more toward this risk-averse state.  Maybe that&#039;ll have to be in 20 years.  But I have sheer academic curiosity about the thinking process that is occurring.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;I do think it would be interesting to have an independent search engine that was completely transparent and to see if users who tried it stuck with it.&#8221;</p>
<p>Agreed.  Caveat, however: transparency alone wouldn&#8217;t be enough.  Because not all queries (e.g. navigation) need transparency.  So the independent search engine that we&#8217;d need to build to run this experiment has to be equal in quality to Google for navigational queries, with the ability to switch to transparent interaction for informational/exploratory queries.  Given that requirement, Wikia Search does not count as such an experiment.</p>
<p>&#8220;But the success of Hadoop that I alluded to earlier is evidence that this transparency isn’t completely obscured.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yup, I agreed to the Hadoop/Mapreduce benefits in my comment #8, above.  Still, that&#8217;s not a part of the system (other than query response time) that the user sees.  I&#8217;m interested in HCIR.</p>
<p>&#8220;I’m glad we agree that we’re debating shades of gray.&#8221;</p>
<p>Of course.  We&#8217;re not republicans, now, are we? <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>&#8220;I agree with colleagues that there’s a real risk to users in over-disclosing the details of ranking. I hope to see the day where it’s possible to have relevance without obscurity.&#8221;</p>
<p>One day when you can finally, legally talk about it, I&#8217;d like to know what it is you&#8217;ve learned since joining the Big G that seems to have moved you more toward this risk-averse state.  Maybe that&#8217;ll have to be in 20 years.  But I have sheer academic curiosity about the thinking process that is occurring.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5477</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:29:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5477</guid>
		<description>Fair point re: user education. But it&#039;s not just a question of what users see as possible--it&#039;s also a question what search engines can do, and at what cost. I do think it would be interesting to have an independent search engine that was completely transparent and to see if users who tried it stuck with it. Does &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia_Search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikia Search&lt;/a&gt; (R.I.P.) count as such an experiment?

As for the research papers, I think Google has made a point of promoting what it believes to be the most important ones--and they are infrastructure papers, not search papers per se. But the success of Hadoop that I alluded to earlier is evidence that this transparency isn&#039;t completely obscured.

I&#039;m glad we agree that we&#039;re debating shades of gray. I&#039;d like to strive toward a lighter shade than the current one, but I agree with colleagues that there&#039;s a real risk to users in over-disclosing the details of ranking. I hope to see the day where it&#039;s possible to have relevance without obscurity.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Fair point re: user education. But it&#8217;s not just a question of what users see as possible&#8211;it&#8217;s also a question what search engines can do, and at what cost. I do think it would be interesting to have an independent search engine that was completely transparent and to see if users who tried it stuck with it. Does <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia_Search" rel="nofollow">Wikia Search</a> (R.I.P.) count as such an experiment?</p>
<p>As for the research papers, I think Google has made a point of promoting what it believes to be the most important ones&#8211;and they are infrastructure papers, not search papers per se. But the success of Hadoop that I alluded to earlier is evidence that this transparency isn&#8217;t completely obscured.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m glad we agree that we&#8217;re debating shades of gray. I&#8217;d like to strive toward a lighter shade than the current one, but I agree with colleagues that there&#8217;s a real risk to users in over-disclosing the details of ranking. I hope to see the day where it&#8217;s possible to have relevance without obscurity.</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by searchenginemarketingvox &#187; Blog Archive &#187; Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/09/2010</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5475</link>
		<dc:creator>searchenginemarketingvox &#187; Blog Archive &#187; Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/09/2010</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5475</guid>
		<description>[...] You Can’t Hurry Relevance - Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] You Can’t Hurry Relevance &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5474</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:44:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5474</guid>
		<description>&quot;But it still is a disclosure that sheds light on the black box, and I think that supports Matt’s general argument.&quot;

Matt&#039;s general argument isn&#039;t that there are things about Google that are open/known.  His argument is that Google the company actively has an agenda to make more things transparent,  carries through with that agenda, and that Google should get more credit for making things transparent (the active followthrough) than its critics give it.

Because PageRank was disclosed by NSF-funded grad students doing their job of publishing, and not by Google, it doesn&#039;t support Matt&#039;s argument at all.  

I&#039;m sorry that I&#039;m being such a stickler about this point, but I see it quite strongly.  What we&#039;re talking about is what  Google as a company is actively doing. 

For that matter, Cutts writes: &quot;Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the &quot;secret formulas&quot; for how Google works&quot;

I&#039;ll ask the question again: &quot;And sure, there are hundreds of papers by Googlers. But how many of those papers were done (primarily) by summer interns, who already came to Google with a solid sense of a research idea? And of the ones that are Google-internal only, how many of those are on production-code systems, vs raw research? Microsoft publishes hundreds of papers as well, the vast majority of which are never incorporated into shipped products. Does that also make Microsoft transparent?&quot;

In other words, how much of this is &quot;transparency through obscurity&quot;.  I.e. if there are hundreds of papers with secret formulas in them, and only 7 of those formulas actually make it into production code, and it is never make known which 7 those are, then how can this reasonably be called transparency?  If there is so much flak thrown up, then any real disclosure is essentially so obfuscated so as to not really be transparency at all.

I do agree with you, Daniel, that it&#039;s not a black and white issue.  Google doesn&#039;t get an A+ on transparency, nor do they get an F-.  But the picture is also not quite as clean as Cutts paints it, either.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;But it still is a disclosure that sheds light on the black box, and I think that supports Matt’s general argument.&#8221;</p>
<p>Matt&#8217;s general argument isn&#8217;t that there are things about Google that are open/known.  His argument is that Google the company actively has an agenda to make more things transparent,  carries through with that agenda, and that Google should get more credit for making things transparent (the active followthrough) than its critics give it.</p>
<p>Because PageRank was disclosed by NSF-funded grad students doing their job of publishing, and not by Google, it doesn&#8217;t support Matt&#8217;s argument at all.  </p>
<p>I&#8217;m sorry that I&#8217;m being such a stickler about this point, but I see it quite strongly.  What we&#8217;re talking about is what  Google as a company is actively doing. </p>
<p>For that matter, Cutts writes: &#8220;Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the &#8220;secret formulas&#8221; for how Google works&#8221;</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll ask the question again: &#8220;And sure, there are hundreds of papers by Googlers. But how many of those papers were done (primarily) by summer interns, who already came to Google with a solid sense of a research idea? And of the ones that are Google-internal only, how many of those are on production-code systems, vs raw research? Microsoft publishes hundreds of papers as well, the vast majority of which are never incorporated into shipped products. Does that also make Microsoft transparent?&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, how much of this is &#8220;transparency through obscurity&#8221;.  I.e. if there are hundreds of papers with secret formulas in them, and only 7 of those formulas actually make it into production code, and it is never make known which 7 those are, then how can this reasonably be called transparency?  If there is so much flak thrown up, then any real disclosure is essentially so obfuscated so as to not really be transparency at all.</p>
<p>I do agree with you, Daniel, that it&#8217;s not a black and white issue.  Google doesn&#8217;t get an A+ on transparency, nor do they get an F-.  But the picture is also not quite as clean as Cutts paints it, either.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5472</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:24:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5472</guid>
		<description>&quot;I believe this is already happening in markets like enterprise search, but I don’t see the evidence for it in web search.&quot;

How much of this is chicken/egg?  I remember Steve Jobs claiming that there was no evidence that users wanted to watch video on an extremely small screen.  Six months later Apple released the video iPod, and now lots of people do.

If users don&#039;t know or don&#039;t understand what is possible, they&#039;ll never ask for it.  There has to be some education, first.  How much education is Google doing?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;I believe this is already happening in markets like enterprise search, but I don’t see the evidence for it in web search.&#8221;</p>
<p>How much of this is chicken/egg?  I remember Steve Jobs claiming that there was no evidence that users wanted to watch video on an extremely small screen.  Six months later Apple released the video iPod, and now lots of people do.</p>
<p>If users don&#8217;t know or don&#8217;t understand what is possible, they&#8217;ll never ask for it.  There has to be some education, first.  How much education is Google doing?</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/09/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5471</link>
		<dc:creator>Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/09/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:11:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5471</guid>
		<description>[...] You Can’t Hurry Relevance - Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] You Can’t Hurry Relevance &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5470</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:04:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5470</guid>
		<description>Fair enough, I&#039;ll concede that Google as a company doesn&#039;t get credit for publishing the paper. But it still is a disclosure that sheds light on the black box, and I think that supports Matt&#039;s general argument.

But you raise an interesting point. I&#039;m with you on the HCIR perspective of focusing on end-user penetrability. And Gregor is a refreshing example of a user who cares about the details of how the search engine works.

But I see far greater concern about the ranking details by site owners than by users, e.g. a lot more literature about site owners can improve their site ranking than on how users can search more effectively.

According to the Christensen&#039;s theory of disruptive technology (at least &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology#The_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&#039;s explanation&lt;/a&gt;), &quot; a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.&quot; If users value transparency, then there should be room for someone to offer a product that lags the incumbent on most measures but offers greater transparency. I believe this is already happening in markets like enterprise search, but I don&#039;t see the evidence for it in web search.

And, to be clear, I&#039;ve &lt;a href=&quot;http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/08/google-tech-talk-reconsidering-relevance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;advocated&lt;/a&gt; for it! But that&#039;s doesn&#039;t make it so.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Fair enough, I&#8217;ll concede that Google as a company doesn&#8217;t get credit for publishing the paper. But it still is a disclosure that sheds light on the black box, and I think that supports Matt&#8217;s general argument.</p>
<p>But you raise an interesting point. I&#8217;m with you on the HCIR perspective of focusing on end-user penetrability. And Gregor is a refreshing example of a user who cares about the details of how the search engine works.</p>
<p>But I see far greater concern about the ranking details by site owners than by users, e.g. a lot more literature about site owners can improve their site ranking than on how users can search more effectively.</p>
<p>According to the Christensen&#8217;s theory of disruptive technology (at least <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology#The_theory" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia&#8217;s explanation</a>), &#8221; a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.&#8221; If users value transparency, then there should be room for someone to offer a product that lags the incumbent on most measures but offers greater transparency. I believe this is already happening in markets like enterprise search, but I don&#8217;t see the evidence for it in web search.</p>
<p>And, to be clear, I&#8217;ve <a href="http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/08/google-tech-talk-reconsidering-relevance/" rel="nofollow">advocated</a> for it! But that&#8217;s doesn&#8217;t make it so.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5468</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:14:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5468</guid>
		<description>&lt;i&gt;Given that Larry and Sergey are founders and major shareholders, I think Google should get at least a little credit for their actions.&lt;/i&gt;

With all respect, I still strongly disagree about giving even a little credit -- not to L&amp;S -- but to Google.  You have to look at the motivation of Larry and Sergey, and what was going on at the time.  At the time that they actually submitted the paper for publication, they were researchers at a university and funded by NSF money.  Their job, their primary product, their deliverable, was publications.  So when they published PageRank they did so before they ever started Google the company, and did so because it was the mandate of their academic position and government funding to do so.   Not because of any attempt to be more or less transparent.   Had they not published the paper, they would have not been properly doing their jobs at that time.  Transparency had nothing to do with it.

I hear what you&#039;re saying; they are indeed the founders of Google.  But I still do not see how you can give Google credit for something that was a requirement of a pre-Google job.  Doesn&#039;t make any sense.

But I think Gregor gets to the heart of this issue, above.  What Gregor is saying is that it doesn&#039;t really matter what the exact mathematics of the Google ranking algorithm is.  What matters is the end-user penetrability of that algorithm.  Is Google transparent enough so that a searcher using the Google system can give Google the right signals, in the right way, at the right time, so as to find the information that is needed?  And I think the answer to that is still no.  It&#039;s changing, and I do see small HCIR signs here and there.  But at the end of the day, that&#039;s the question that really matters.  

Of course, making Google more HCIR-transparent will most likely involve exposing, in some fashion or other, more of the Google ranking algorithm.  It might not be a raw exposure, but there will still have to be an exposure of some sort in order to give the users more control over their experience.  

So the question: How transparent is Google in that regard? 

From that perspective, all those papers on MapReduce (which I do give transparency credit for) and PageRank (which I don&#039;t give transparency credit for -- it was their job at the time!) don&#039;t matter one way or the other.  Because the technical details contained in those papers are still not exposed to the end user in a transparent way.  There is no way for the end user to say &quot;Stop using the PageRank popularity signal for my query, because I know that what I am looking for is in the tail!&quot;  

Transparency is therefore still at a minimum for what really matters: End user experience.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i>Given that Larry and Sergey are founders and major shareholders, I think Google should get at least a little credit for their actions.</i></p>
<p>With all respect, I still strongly disagree about giving even a little credit &#8212; not to L&amp;S &#8212; but to Google.  You have to look at the motivation of Larry and Sergey, and what was going on at the time.  At the time that they actually submitted the paper for publication, they were researchers at a university and funded by NSF money.  Their job, their primary product, their deliverable, was publications.  So when they published PageRank they did so before they ever started Google the company, and did so because it was the mandate of their academic position and government funding to do so.   Not because of any attempt to be more or less transparent.   Had they not published the paper, they would have not been properly doing their jobs at that time.  Transparency had nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>I hear what you&#8217;re saying; they are indeed the founders of Google.  But I still do not see how you can give Google credit for something that was a requirement of a pre-Google job.  Doesn&#8217;t make any sense.</p>
<p>But I think Gregor gets to the heart of this issue, above.  What Gregor is saying is that it doesn&#8217;t really matter what the exact mathematics of the Google ranking algorithm is.  What matters is the end-user penetrability of that algorithm.  Is Google transparent enough so that a searcher using the Google system can give Google the right signals, in the right way, at the right time, so as to find the information that is needed?  And I think the answer to that is still no.  It&#8217;s changing, and I do see small HCIR signs here and there.  But at the end of the day, that&#8217;s the question that really matters.  </p>
<p>Of course, making Google more HCIR-transparent will most likely involve exposing, in some fashion or other, more of the Google ranking algorithm.  It might not be a raw exposure, but there will still have to be an exposure of some sort in order to give the users more control over their experience.  </p>
<p>So the question: How transparent is Google in that regard? </p>
<p>From that perspective, all those papers on MapReduce (which I do give transparency credit for) and PageRank (which I don&#8217;t give transparency credit for &#8212; it was their job at the time!) don&#8217;t matter one way or the other.  Because the technical details contained in those papers are still not exposed to the end user in a transparent way.  There is no way for the end user to say &#8220;Stop using the PageRank popularity signal for my query, because I know that what I am looking for is in the tail!&#8221;  </p>
<p>Transparency is therefore still at a minimum for what really matters: End user experience.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Phil Simon</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5466</link>
		<dc:creator>Phil Simon</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:24:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5466</guid>
		<description>I agree that this is a really massive subject for a blog post. However, I agree that Google can&#039;t give away the store. I have no problem with not knowing every detail in how Google ranks pages. I&#039;d be silly to presume that I would be able to understand it all anyway.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I agree that this is a really massive subject for a blog post. However, I agree that Google can&#8217;t give away the store. I have no problem with not knowing every detail in how Google ranks pages. I&#8217;d be silly to presume that I would be able to understand it all anyway.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Gregor Erbach</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5465</link>
		<dc:creator>Gregor Erbach</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5465</guid>
		<description>Well, I liked the dash because I am lazy - it was just so easy to replace a blank with a dash -- phrase search without any extra keystrokes.  But I am not complaining - Google has done a lot to make searching easy and effective.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Well, I liked the dash because I am lazy &#8211; it was just so easy to replace a blank with a dash &#8212; phrase search without any extra keystrokes.  But I am not complaining &#8211; Google has done a lot to make searching easy and effective.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5464</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:33:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5464</guid>
		<description>Gregor, I understand changes in search bavior over time can be confusing, but I think Google has tried to explain many of them. &lt;a href=&quot;http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Contextual synonym inference&lt;/a&gt; may explain how adding a term makes the result set larger--though I can&#039;t know for sure without seeing your particular example. Localization of results is something Google has &lt;a href=&quot;http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-google-ranking.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;publicized&lt;/a&gt; with pride. And I&#039;m not sure why you&#039;re suing a dash rather than quotation marks to specify phrases--you might want to look at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=136861&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;help page&lt;/a&gt;

In any case, I agree that it would be great for researchers to run different algorithms and approaches on a Google-size index and with real-life queries. I think researchers are in a position to build a sufficiently large index--in part because of the publications I describe above. But what researchers really want--at least from what I have heard--is access to query logs and actual user traffic. That raises major privacy concerns for users, as well as concern about abuse by spammers. Don&#039;t forget &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;what happened a few years ago&lt;/a&gt;.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Gregor, I understand changes in search bavior over time can be confusing, but I think Google has tried to explain many of them. <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html" rel="nofollow">Contextual synonym inference</a> may explain how adding a term makes the result set larger&#8211;though I can&#8217;t know for sure without seeing your particular example. Localization of results is something Google has <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-google-ranking.html" rel="nofollow">publicized</a> with pride. And I&#8217;m not sure why you&#8217;re suing a dash rather than quotation marks to specify phrases&#8211;you might want to look at this <a href="http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#038;answer=136861" rel="nofollow">help page</a></p>
<p>In any case, I agree that it would be great for researchers to run different algorithms and approaches on a Google-size index and with real-life queries. I think researchers are in a position to build a sufficiently large index&#8211;in part because of the publications I describe above. But what researchers really want&#8211;at least from what I have heard&#8211;is access to query logs and actual user traffic. That raises major privacy concerns for users, as well as concern about abuse by spammers. Don&#8217;t forget <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal" rel="nofollow">what happened a few years ago</a>.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Gregor Erbach</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5462</link>
		<dc:creator>Gregor Erbach</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:01:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5462</guid>
		<description>It is no wonder that Google&#039;s algorithms get a reputation for being intransparent. For a long time, adding a search term to a Google query would give a smaller result set; recently I added a search term and the result set got larger! Long, long time ago, a Google query would give the same results all over the world, now I get wildly different results depending on where I am (being in Belgium, I get mostly Dutch-language pages).  And for about a decade connecting search terms with a dash operator meant that the terms should occur as a phrase in the document -- not any longer.  No wonder I use Google with a feeling that I don&#039;t really know what&#039;s going on under the hood. 

Anyway, there are good reasons for obscurity for the commercial and search quality reasons you mentioned. However, in order to advance scientific understanding of search quality, there is also a need for transparency. I mean that it should be possible for IR and HCIR researchers to run different algorithms and approaches on a Gooogle-size index and with real-life queries, and publish the algorithms and results.  It would be nice to see Google contribute to such an endeavour, in order to prevent a situation where the knowledge about how to deliver a great search experience is confined to only a handful of big companies.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It is no wonder that Google&#8217;s algorithms get a reputation for being intransparent. For a long time, adding a search term to a Google query would give a smaller result set; recently I added a search term and the result set got larger! Long, long time ago, a Google query would give the same results all over the world, now I get wildly different results depending on where I am (being in Belgium, I get mostly Dutch-language pages).  And for about a decade connecting search terms with a dash operator meant that the terms should occur as a phrase in the document &#8212; not any longer.  No wonder I use Google with a feeling that I don&#8217;t really know what&#8217;s going on under the hood. </p>
<p>Anyway, there are good reasons for obscurity for the commercial and search quality reasons you mentioned. However, in order to advance scientific understanding of search quality, there is also a need for transparency. I mean that it should be possible for IR and HCIR researchers to run different algorithms and approaches on a Gooogle-size index and with real-life queries, and publish the algorithms and results.  It would be nice to see Google contribute to such an endeavour, in order to prevent a situation where the knowledge about how to deliver a great search experience is confined to only a handful of big companies.</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5460</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:54:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5460</guid>
		<description>Eric, thanks for the detailed explanation! I understand that this area is a hard slog--and that it&#039;s a place where artificial intelligence can easily go wrong.  I wish you and your colleagues luck in productizing this long-term research program.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Eric, thanks for the detailed explanation! I understand that this area is a hard slog&#8211;and that it&#8217;s a place where artificial intelligence can easily go wrong.  I wish you and your colleagues luck in productizing this long-term research program.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5459</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:37:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5459</guid>
		<description>Given that Larry and Sergey are founders and major shareholders, I think Google should get at least a little credit for their actions. :-)

And yes, the measure doesn&#039;t conform precisely to the paper--and in any case it&#039;s only &lt;a href=&quot;http://searchengineland.com/googles-norvig-pagerank-is-overhyped-37282&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;one factor&lt;/a&gt;. But, to put it in the context of Matt&#039;s post: &quot;One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google&#039;s scoring has always been PageRank. That &#039;secret ingredient&#039; is hardly a secret.&quot;

As for the papers, MapReduce, the Google File System, Bigtable, and Protocol Buffers are essential production tools. I agree with Matt that Google deserves credit for enabling &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hadoop&lt;/a&gt;, thus &lt;a href=&quot;http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/hadoop/2008/02/yahoo-worlds-largest-production-hadoop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;supporting its largest web search competitor&lt;/a&gt;.

In any case, no one at Google denies keeping the precise details of ranking secret. But I&#039;d say that critics who extrapolate that the entire ranking algorithm is a black box overstate their case, given how much has been disclosed. Unless you feel that being transparent is like being pregnant--an all or nothing deal. I don&#039;t believe that.

Of course, the other issue is Google&#039;s motive for what secrecy it does keep. As per an official blog post by Google&#039;s counsel, Google stands accused of &lt;a href=&quot;http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/committed-to-competing-fairly.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;demoting the positions of competitive sites&lt;/a&gt;. I don&#039;t personally believe this to be the case, nor have I even seen anyone present evidence for it. I do understand how some people--particularly site owners unhappy with their ranking--may feel Google is guilty unless it discloses everything in order to prove itself innocent. Given the stakes, I don&#039;t think it&#039;s reasonable to expect Google to make such a sacrifice--at the expense not only of its own competitive position but also of its users.

Jeremy, I know you have many points of disagreement with Google&#039;s approach, particularly with regard to transparency.  Perhaps the extent of Google&#039;s disclosure isn&#039;t enough to earn a passing score in your book. I&#039;m hardly giving it an A+. But I hope we can agree that it isn&#039;t black and white.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Given that Larry and Sergey are founders and major shareholders, I think Google should get at least a little credit for their actions. <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>And yes, the measure doesn&#8217;t conform precisely to the paper&#8211;and in any case it&#8217;s only <a href="http://searchengineland.com/googles-norvig-pagerank-is-overhyped-37282" rel="nofollow">one factor</a>. But, to put it in the context of Matt&#8217;s post: &#8220;One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google&#8217;s scoring has always been PageRank. That &#8217;secret ingredient&#8217; is hardly a secret.&#8221;</p>
<p>As for the papers, MapReduce, the Google File System, Bigtable, and Protocol Buffers are essential production tools. I agree with Matt that Google deserves credit for enabling <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop" rel="nofollow">Hadoop</a>, thus <a href="http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/hadoop/2008/02/yahoo-worlds-largest-production-hadoop.html" rel="nofollow">supporting its largest web search competitor</a>.</p>
<p>In any case, no one at Google denies keeping the precise details of ranking secret. But I&#8217;d say that critics who extrapolate that the entire ranking algorithm is a black box overstate their case, given how much has been disclosed. Unless you feel that being transparent is like being pregnant&#8211;an all or nothing deal. I don&#8217;t believe that.</p>
<p>Of course, the other issue is Google&#8217;s motive for what secrecy it does keep. As per an official blog post by Google&#8217;s counsel, Google stands accused of <a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/02/committed-to-competing-fairly.html" rel="nofollow">demoting the positions of competitive sites</a>. I don&#8217;t personally believe this to be the case, nor have I even seen anyone present evidence for it. I do understand how some people&#8211;particularly site owners unhappy with their ranking&#8211;may feel Google is guilty unless it discloses everything in order to prove itself innocent. Given the stakes, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s reasonable to expect Google to make such a sacrifice&#8211;at the expense not only of its own competitive position but also of its users.</p>
<p>Jeremy, I know you have many points of disagreement with Google&#8217;s approach, particularly with regard to transparency.  Perhaps the extent of Google&#8217;s disclosure isn&#8217;t enough to earn a passing score in your book. I&#8217;m hardly giving it an A+. But I hope we can agree that it isn&#8217;t black and white.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5457</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:02:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5457</guid>
		<description>While this topic deserves a longer response, let me just quickly say that I don&#039;t think Google should be trying to claim any credit for publishing the &quot;Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine&quot; paper.  Why?  Because Google the company never published this paper.  Sergey and Larry, the grad students, published this paper.  Their affiliations on the paper are &quot;Stanford&quot;, not Google.  

So it is disingenuous, at the very least, to give Google credit for this.  This information was released (at least submitted for publication with the intention of being released) before Google the company existed.  So whatever L&amp;S&#039;s attitudes about transparency were as grad students, I think it changed once they became incorporated as Google.  

And I cannot count the number of times I&#039;ve seen Google talks in which the Google speaker has intentionally gone out of his or her way to mention that the form of PageRank that they use in today&#039;s engine is nothing like the one published in the paper.  I don&#039;t know if that&#039;s the truth, or a deliberate attempt at obfuscation.  But the upshot is that this means that Google is even less transparent than claimed, because it has the feel of trying to throw people off track -- now one doesn&#039;t know what to believe anymore.. the published paper or the research talks.

So to go back now and try and claim &quot;transparency credit&quot; for this paper... makes me uneasy.

And sure, there are hundreds of papers by Googlers.  But how many of those papers were done (primarily) by summer interns, who already came to Google with a solid sense of a research idea?  And of the ones that are Google-internal only, how many of those are on production-code systems, vs raw research?  Microsoft publishes hundreds of papers as well, the vast majority of which are never incorporated into shipped products.  Does that also make Microsoft transparent?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>While this topic deserves a longer response, let me just quickly say that I don&#8217;t think Google should be trying to claim any credit for publishing the &#8220;Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine&#8221; paper.  Why?  Because Google the company never published this paper.  Sergey and Larry, the grad students, published this paper.  Their affiliations on the paper are &#8220;Stanford&#8221;, not Google.  </p>
<p>So it is disingenuous, at the very least, to give Google credit for this.  This information was released (at least submitted for publication with the intention of being released) before Google the company existed.  So whatever L&amp;S&#8217;s attitudes about transparency were as grad students, I think it changed once they became incorporated as Google.  </p>
<p>And I cannot count the number of times I&#8217;ve seen Google talks in which the Google speaker has intentionally gone out of his or her way to mention that the form of PageRank that they use in today&#8217;s engine is nothing like the one published in the paper.  I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s the truth, or a deliberate attempt at obfuscation.  But the upshot is that this means that Google is even less transparent than claimed, because it has the feel of trying to throw people off track &#8212; now one doesn&#8217;t know what to believe anymore.. the published paper or the research talks.</p>
<p>So to go back now and try and claim &#8220;transparency credit&#8221; for this paper&#8230; makes me uneasy.</p>
<p>And sure, there are hundreds of papers by Googlers.  But how many of those papers were done (primarily) by summer interns, who already came to Google with a solid sense of a research idea?  And of the ones that are Google-internal only, how many of those are on production-code systems, vs raw research?  Microsoft publishes hundreds of papers as well, the vast majority of which are never incorporated into shipped products.  Does that also make Microsoft transparent?</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google and Transparency by renaissance chambara &#124; Ged Carroll - Links of the day</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/03/07/google-and-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-5455</link>
		<dc:creator>renaissance chambara &#124; Ged Carroll - Links of the day</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:01:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2990#comment-5455</guid>
		<description>[...] Google and Transparency [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Google and Transparency [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Set Retrieval vs. Ranked Retrieval by Google and Transparency</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/08/24/set-retrieval-vs-ranked-retrieval/comment-page-1/#comment-5452</link>
		<dc:creator>Google and Transparency</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:34:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=73#comment-5452</guid>
		<description>[...] for complete transparency in search requires moving from a ranking-based retrieval approach to a set-based approach. For many web search information needs (e.g., navigational queries), it&#8217;s hard to see how [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] for complete transparency in search requires moving from a ranking-based retrieval approach to a set-based approach. For many web search information needs (e.g., navigational queries), it&#8217;s hard to see how [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Going (to) Google by Google and Transparency</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/11/06/going-to-google/comment-page-2/#comment-5451</link>
		<dc:creator>Google and Transparency</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:34:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2763#comment-5451</guid>
		<description>[...] and have made my own calls on this blog for Google to be more transparent. The fact that I work at Google now doesn&#8217;t change my values. But being on the inside has informed my [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] and have made my own calls on this blog for Google to be more transparent. The fact that I work at Google now doesn&#8217;t change my values. But being on the inside has informed my [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Eric Horvitz</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5449</link>
		<dc:creator>Eric Horvitz</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:21:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5449</guid>
		<description>Well, there&#039;s more to talk about than can be written in a short blog response, but here are a few comments: 

We had great resonance within Microsoft with the research on attention as scarce resource and with attention-aware machinery/designs at the company especially during the span of years around 1999-2002, with strong support of Bill Gates and other senior executives and group leads.  My sense is that the research and prototyping helped with company-wide reflection about ideas and directions, and, perhaps more important, helped to catalyze a persistent shift of thinking about the importance of attentional considerations in computing systems.   The shift in perspective is having some long-term influences in both machinery and design (and combinations)--we are only at the beginning!  There&#039;s much to be done! Progress in going from exciting research prototypes has been slower than I had expected.  I had demo&#039;d a fairly comprehensive (per components), end-to-end attention management system named Notification Platform to Bill Gates and others in 1999 or so-and that had generated a bunch of excitement.   

Specific product influences to date include MSN Alerts, several pieces of infrastructure, such as rich schemas/APIs for communicating about urgency and attention, components in products for computing time until user available, next usage, etc..  and several products and product features, such as the Outlook Mobile Manager product--based on the Priorities system (Priorities was available internally at Microsoft since 1998 or so) or so, and on Microsoft Communicator --which evolved out of the Bestcom (best-means communication) prototype that we had developed in a collaboration with a product team.  The Bestcom prototype for managing telephony/real-time communications and communication scheduling spread like wildfire within Microsoft around 2003-2005 and was used by about 10,000 Microsoft folks (per our logging--part of the deal for using it) at its peak within Microsoft before the code was forked to start the path toward the Communicator product (now shipping, but lacking a bunch of the deeper attention management features in the research prototype ancestor).  There have also been some influences on design.  Priorities used an urgency- and context-sensitive fading alert that was picked up by Outlook, but that alert, while resembling the alpha-blended alert in the Priorities system isn&#039;t currently attention sensitive.  

So, we&#039;re on the path on this challenging and interesting terrain, and people at all levels seem to be aware and interested, but there&#039;s a great deal to be done to make our systems more aware of human cognition (attention, memory, judgment, etc.)</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Well, there&#8217;s more to talk about than can be written in a short blog response, but here are a few comments: </p>
<p>We had great resonance within Microsoft with the research on attention as scarce resource and with attention-aware machinery/designs at the company especially during the span of years around 1999-2002, with strong support of Bill Gates and other senior executives and group leads.  My sense is that the research and prototyping helped with company-wide reflection about ideas and directions, and, perhaps more important, helped to catalyze a persistent shift of thinking about the importance of attentional considerations in computing systems.   The shift in perspective is having some long-term influences in both machinery and design (and combinations)&#8211;we are only at the beginning!  There&#8217;s much to be done! Progress in going from exciting research prototypes has been slower than I had expected.  I had demo&#8217;d a fairly comprehensive (per components), end-to-end attention management system named Notification Platform to Bill Gates and others in 1999 or so-and that had generated a bunch of excitement.   </p>
<p>Specific product influences to date include MSN Alerts, several pieces of infrastructure, such as rich schemas/APIs for communicating about urgency and attention, components in products for computing time until user available, next usage, etc..  and several products and product features, such as the Outlook Mobile Manager product&#8211;based on the Priorities system (Priorities was available internally at Microsoft since 1998 or so) or so, and on Microsoft Communicator &#8211;which evolved out of the Bestcom (best-means communication) prototype that we had developed in a collaboration with a product team.  The Bestcom prototype for managing telephony/real-time communications and communication scheduling spread like wildfire within Microsoft around 2003-2005 and was used by about 10,000 Microsoft folks (per our logging&#8211;part of the deal for using it) at its peak within Microsoft before the code was forked to start the path toward the Communicator product (now shipping, but lacking a bunch of the deeper attention management features in the research prototype ancestor).  There have also been some influences on design.  Priorities used an urgency- and context-sensitive fading alert that was picked up by Outlook, but that alert, while resembling the alpha-blended alert in the Priorities system isn&#8217;t currently attention sensitive.  </p>
<p>So, we&#8217;re on the path on this challenging and interesting terrain, and people at all levels seem to be aware and interested, but there&#8217;s a great deal to be done to make our systems more aware of human cognition (attention, memory, judgment, etc.)</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5448</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5448</guid>
		<description>Eric, thanks for wandering into it, and for fixing the link. Do you know (or can you say) if any of your research has been productized? It&#039;s exciting stuff!</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Eric, thanks for wandering into it, and for fixing the link. Do you know (or can you say) if any of your research has been productized? It&#8217;s exciting stuff!</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Eric Horvitz</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5447</link>
		<dc:creator>Eric Horvitz</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:52:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5447</guid>
		<description>Wonderful discussion.  I was just referred to the conversation--and asked me to fix a broken link (sorry!) at:
http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm

  -Eric</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Wonderful discussion.  I was just referred to the conversation&#8211;and asked me to fix a broken link (sorry!) at:<br />
<a href="http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm</a></p>
<p>  -Eric</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Lecia Kaslofsky</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5445</link>
		<dc:creator>Lecia Kaslofsky</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:46:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5445</guid>
		<description>Jeremy- 

Very interesting (and sorry just finding out now about the conference!).  

I&#039;m going to use the Furnas quote in the paper in my next blog - &quot;people use a  surprisingly great variety of words to refer to the same thing.&quot; Hm.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Jeremy- </p>
<p>Very interesting (and sorry just finding out now about the conference!).  </p>
<p>I&#8217;m going to use the Furnas quote in the paper in my next blog &#8211; &#8220;people use a  surprisingly great variety of words to refer to the same thing.&#8221; Hm.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Software Patents: A Personal Story by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/10/03/software-patents-a-personal-story/comment-page-2/#comment-5443</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:45:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2648#comment-5443</guid>
		<description>One to three years? Try five or six, at least based on my own experience and what I&#039;ve heard from others. Go to the USPTO site and look at recently granted patents--you&#039;ll find that few were filed after 2005. In software, that&#039;s practically a lifetime, even assuming everything else about the process is perfect.

I haven&#039;t ever known someone to wait on launching a product until their patents are granted. Folks who do pursue patents will file first, of course, but will then launch with pending applications. Given that inventors can pursue back-date royalties based on published applications, the delay doesn&#039;t strike me as such a big deal. The bigger problem in my view, is that the current system incents the wrong behavior, such as in the story I describe here (which has an &lt;a href=&quot;http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/12/26/r-i-p-modista/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;unhappy ending&lt;/a&gt;) .</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>One to three years? Try five or six, at least based on my own experience and what I&#8217;ve heard from others. Go to the USPTO site and look at recently granted patents&#8211;you&#8217;ll find that few were filed after 2005. In software, that&#8217;s practically a lifetime, even assuming everything else about the process is perfect.</p>
<p>I haven&#8217;t ever known someone to wait on launching a product until their patents are granted. Folks who do pursue patents will file first, of course, but will then launch with pending applications. Given that inventors can pursue back-date royalties based on published applications, the delay doesn&#8217;t strike me as such a big deal. The bigger problem in my view, is that the current system incents the wrong behavior, such as in the story I describe here (which has an <a href="http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/12/26/r-i-p-modista/" rel="nofollow">unhappy ending</a>) .</p>
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		<title>Comment on Software Patents: A Personal Story by Lorindal Hempen Carrville</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/10/03/software-patents-a-personal-story/comment-page-2/#comment-5442</link>
		<dc:creator>Lorindal Hempen Carrville</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2648#comment-5442</guid>
		<description>Wow! I clicked through on Chen&#039;s links on how much money inventors make and was blown away by the statistics. The numbers become even more of a head shaker when you look at what has happened to the patent office. See http://www.inventorinsights.com/Patent_Office_Problems.html  A question I have is what is the opportunity cost of a one- or two- or three-year delay in approving a patent for the next transformational technology breakthrough?  Say for a carbon sequestration technology to mitigate global warming?  Has anyone seen any calculations on this?
Carrville
http://www.t3-line-cost.com/</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Wow! I clicked through on Chen&#8217;s links on how much money inventors make and was blown away by the statistics. The numbers become even more of a head shaker when you look at what has happened to the patent office. See <a href="http://www.inventorinsights.com/Patent_Office_Problems.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.inventorinsights.com/Patent_Office_Problems.html</a>  A question I have is what is the opportunity cost of a one- or two- or three-year delay in approving a patent for the next transformational technology breakthrough?  Say for a carbon sequestration technology to mitigate global warming?  Has anyone seen any calculations on this?<br />
Carrville<br />
<a href="http://www.t3-line-cost.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.t3-line-cost.com/</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5437</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:53:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5437</guid>
		<description>Much appreciated! And there&#039;s even a demo by Bill Gates! Do you know if any of this research has made it into production?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Much appreciated! And there&#8217;s even a demo by Bill Gates! Do you know if any of this research has made it into production?</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Greg Linden</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5436</link>
		<dc:creator>Greg Linden</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:42:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5436</guid>
		<description>Might be worth a pointer here to the old Priorities work by Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/attend.htm

It&#039;s a great paper.  From the abstract: &quot;We present models and inference procedures that balance the context-sensitive costs of deferring alerts with the cost of interruption.&quot;</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Might be worth a pointer here to the old Priorities work by Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research:</p>
<p><a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/attend.htm" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/attend.htm</a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a great paper.  From the abstract: &#8220;We present models and inference procedures that balance the context-sensitive costs of deferring alerts with the cost of interruption.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5434</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:29:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5434</guid>
		<description>Lecia -- 

&lt;i&gt;Along the lines of a semantic web, what if senders could “tag” their emails, which would allow each receiver to rank what “tags” get higher priority?&lt;/i&gt;

A similar system was described at our recent CSCW Collaborative Information Seeking workshop:

http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/

See the paper by Manas Tungare:

http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/AcceptedPapers.aspx</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Lecia &#8212; </p>
<p><i>Along the lines of a semantic web, what if senders could “tag” their emails, which would allow each receiver to rank what “tags” get higher priority?</i></p>
<p>A similar system was described at our recent CSCW Collaborative Information Seeking workshop:</p>
<p><a href="http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/" rel="nofollow">http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/</a></p>
<p>See the paper by Manas Tungare:</p>
<p><a href="http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/AcceptedPapers.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://workshops.fxpal.com/cscw2010cis/AcceptedPapers.aspx</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Lecia Kaslofsky</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5431</link>
		<dc:creator>Lecia Kaslofsky</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:25:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5431</guid>
		<description>Seems to me the sender is a big part of the solution... but the sender has to be given more options than say, &quot;urgent&quot; or &quot;not urgent.&quot;  Along the lines of a semantic web, what if senders could &quot;tag&quot; their emails, which would allow each receiver to rank what &quot;tags&quot; get higher priority? 

For example, emails tagged assignment, speaking engagement, basketball tickets, deadline changed, or even &quot;new baby&quot; (a la Ian&#039;s example) will come through at real time if you choose and others would be saved for the end-of-day email review. 

Of course the above system is easily exploitable by advertisers and spammers, but there are already ways to deal with them. 

Enjoying your blog!

Lecia</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Seems to me the sender is a big part of the solution&#8230; but the sender has to be given more options than say, &#8220;urgent&#8221; or &#8220;not urgent.&#8221;  Along the lines of a semantic web, what if senders could &#8220;tag&#8221; their emails, which would allow each receiver to rank what &#8220;tags&#8221; get higher priority? </p>
<p>For example, emails tagged assignment, speaking engagement, basketball tickets, deadline changed, or even &#8220;new baby&#8221; (a la Ian&#8217;s example) will come through at real time if you choose and others would be saved for the end-of-day email review. </p>
<p>Of course the above system is easily exploitable by advertisers and spammers, but there are already ways to deal with them. </p>
<p>Enjoying your blog!</p>
<p>Lecia</p>
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		<title>Comment on Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? by Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/02/2010 &#124; YouAreLookingFor Info</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/20/holding-back-the-rise-of-the-machines/comment-page-1/#comment-5427</link>
		<dc:creator>Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/02/2010 &#124; YouAreLookingFor Info</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:33:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2969#comment-5427</guid>
		<description>[...] Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on SIGIR 2009: Day 3, Industry Track: Vanja Josifovski by Nick Trendov</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/07/31/sigir-2009-day-3-industry-track-vanja-josifovski/comment-page-1/#comment-5425</link>
		<dc:creator>Nick Trendov</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:14:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2370#comment-5425</guid>
		<description>re: &quot;...So the ad gets in the way of organic relevance.&quot;

Your perception may change if you consider an ad as a vehicle that carries the viewer to the web page or as a vehicle that carries the ad to the viewer.

Consider a teeter-totter in a playground with a searcher on one side and a web page on the other.  The ad is just the pivot.

Once the ad takes the searcher to the web page or the web page to the searcher then it is useless.

Cheers,
Nick
www.neuropersona.com</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>re: &#8220;&#8230;So the ad gets in the way of organic relevance.&#8221;</p>
<p>Your perception may change if you consider an ad as a vehicle that carries the viewer to the web page or as a vehicle that carries the ad to the viewer.</p>
<p>Consider a teeter-totter in a playground with a searcher on one side and a web page on the other.  The ad is just the pivot.</p>
<p>Once the ad takes the searcher to the web page or the web page to the searcher then it is useless.</p>
<p>Cheers,<br />
Nick<br />
<a href="http://www.neuropersona.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.neuropersona.com</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? by Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/02/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/20/holding-back-the-rise-of-the-machines/comment-page-1/#comment-5424</link>
		<dc:creator>Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 03/02/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:38:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2969#comment-5424</guid>
		<description>[...] Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? &#8211; Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5423</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:53:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5423</guid>
		<description>Thanks all for the nice words and related blog posts!

Max: I hadn’t thought about task-based desktop organization of activities, but I could see how a smarter desktop might be more prudent about interrupting user flow. Still, that feels second-order to the issue of being interrupted by communication.

Ian: fair points. In response to one of them, perhaps we could all be expose to a small amount of random content, thus distributing the work of scouting.

Craig: I agree that the sender should be part of the equation. I was going to go off on a tangent about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/spam/contributions/Spam%20economics-faq.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;attention bond mechanisms&lt;/a&gt;, but I figured I&#039;d save that for another post.

Jeremy: nice segue! And I think the challenge is understanding what the user will perceive as better. I actually think users would accept an interface that sometimes said &quot;hold on, this will take me a moment&quot; if it then delivered on expectations. But there is a catch: latency in giving users initial feedback may mean that they wait too long to find out that their going on the wrong track. Anyway, this is a another great subject for another post. :-)

David: good point about the cost of soliciting feedback. I think I&#039;m advocating a similar &quot;comparative advantage&quot; approach by having high-urgency users scout for low-urgency ones.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Thanks all for the nice words and related blog posts!</p>
<p>Max: I hadn’t thought about task-based desktop organization of activities, but I could see how a smarter desktop might be more prudent about interrupting user flow. Still, that feels second-order to the issue of being interrupted by communication.</p>
<p>Ian: fair points. In response to one of them, perhaps we could all be expose to a small amount of random content, thus distributing the work of scouting.</p>
<p>Craig: I agree that the sender should be part of the equation. I was going to go off on a tangent about <a href="http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/spam/contributions/Spam%20economics-faq.pdf" rel="nofollow">attention bond mechanisms</a>, but I figured I&#8217;d save that for another post.</p>
<p>Jeremy: nice segue! And I think the challenge is understanding what the user will perceive as better. I actually think users would accept an interface that sometimes said &#8220;hold on, this will take me a moment&#8221; if it then delivered on expectations. But there is a catch: latency in giving users initial feedback may mean that they wait too long to find out that their going on the wrong track. Anyway, this is a another great subject for another post. <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>David: good point about the cost of soliciting feedback. I think I&#8217;m advocating a similar &#8220;comparative advantage&#8221; approach by having high-urgency users scout for low-urgency ones.</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by David Karger</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5421</link>
		<dc:creator>David Karger</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:29:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5421</guid>
		<description>I too have been thinking about attention economies, but as I wrote in a recent blog post (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2010/02/18/cscw-the-attention-economy-and-efficient-information-markets/) there&#039;s a paradox.  Economies exist to allocate effort to where it&#039;s best used.  The way they allocate effort is by providing signals (prices) about where that effort should be directed.  But to use those signals we have to pay attention.   In other words, to decide where to allocate our attention resource, we have to spend it.  It&#039;s a kind  of tax on our attention.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I too have been thinking about attention economies, but as I wrote in a recent blog post (<a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2010/02/18/cscw-the-attention-economy-and-efficient-information-markets/" rel="nofollow">http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2010/02/18/cscw-the-attention-economy-and-efficient-information-markets/</a>) there&#8217;s a paradox.  Economies exist to allocate effort to where it&#8217;s best used.  The way they allocate effort is by providing signals (prices) about where that effort should be directed.  But to use those signals we have to pay attention.   In other words, to decide where to allocate our attention resource, we have to spend it.  It&#8217;s a kind  of tax on our attention.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? by renaissance chambara &#124; Ged Carroll - Links of the day</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/20/holding-back-the-rise-of-the-machines/comment-page-1/#comment-5420</link>
		<dc:creator>renaissance chambara &#124; Ged Carroll - Links of the day</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:02:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2969#comment-5420</guid>
		<description>[...] Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5419</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:58:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5419</guid>
		<description>&lt;i&gt;What I’d really like to see is systems take advantage of the differences in users’ personal senses of urgency.&lt;/i&gt;

Yes, I would like this to extend to web search, too.  Instead of assuming that fast is always better than slow, as certain :-) companies do, I would like the option of being able to say: I don&#039;t care if it take 10 seconds or even 2 minutes for this particular query to return, as long as the results, or the organization of the results, is better than what I&#039;m getting with the 0.34 second result.

Why does this not exist?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i>What I’d really like to see is systems take advantage of the differences in users’ personal senses of urgency.</i></p>
<p>Yes, I would like this to extend to web search, too.  Instead of assuming that fast is always better than slow, as certain <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' />  companies do, I would like the option of being able to say: I don&#8217;t care if it take 10 seconds or even 2 minutes for this particular query to return, as long as the results, or the organization of the results, is better than what I&#8217;m getting with the 0.34 second result.</p>
<p>Why does this not exist?</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Where&#8217;s My Interruption Manager? Not In One Place, I&#8217;m Afraid &#171; KnowledgeForward</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5418</link>
		<dc:creator>Where&#8217;s My Interruption Manager? Not In One Place, I&#8217;m Afraid &#171; KnowledgeForward</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:31:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5418</guid>
		<description>[...] &#124; Leave a Comment  Larry Cannell pointed me to a good posting by Daniel Tunkelang called &#8220;You Can’t Hurry Relevance&#8220;. Mr. Tunkelang obviously believes in the idea of attention management.&#160; I especially [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] | Leave a Comment  Larry Cannell pointed me to a good posting by Daniel Tunkelang called &#8220;You Can’t Hurry Relevance&#8220;. Mr. Tunkelang obviously believes in the idea of attention management.&nbsp; I especially [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Craig Roth</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5417</link>
		<dc:creator>Craig Roth</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:23:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5417</guid>
		<description>There will not be one tangible &quot;thing&quot; that manages interruptions based on priorities.  But there will be a collection of technologies and capabilities that, taken together, can be used to manage attention.  I call this collection of technologies and capabilities that manage attention the Enterprise Attention Management conceptual architecture.  I posted this architectural model on the KnowledgeForward blog in 2006.  You can find it here:

http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2006/12/22/my-attention-management-system-conceptual-architecture/

Since it is not one, purpose-built, tightly integrated set of pieces, it takes a walk-through to apply it to any particular problem.  The problem you mention in this posting is e-mail, and you&#039;ve provided 3 good suggestions on how to take advantage of urgency.  I applied the EAM model to e-mail as an example and yielded 15 examples where technology could help, many of which are indeed available in some e-mail systems (although often buried or cludgy).  You can see my list and how the EAM architecture helped derive it here:

http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/e-mail-overload-no-cure-but-enterprise-attention-management-can-shed-some-light/

I really like your thought that urgency should be taken into account in the e-mail process.  You have some good ideas for the receiving end of e-mail.  I still wouldn&#039;t give up on the sender&#039;s side too.  When sending letters and packages, people don&#039;t mind picking between a number of options (ground, express, signature required, etc.) that indicate urgency.  If we can do a bit of behavior change (or possible force people via a token system), it&#039;s interesting to think about how much e-mail could be improved.  Easier said than done though.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There will not be one tangible &#8220;thing&#8221; that manages interruptions based on priorities.  But there will be a collection of technologies and capabilities that, taken together, can be used to manage attention.  I call this collection of technologies and capabilities that manage attention the Enterprise Attention Management conceptual architecture.  I posted this architectural model on the KnowledgeForward blog in 2006.  You can find it here:</p>
<p><a href="http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2006/12/22/my-attention-management-system-conceptual-architecture/" rel="nofollow">http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2006/12/22/my-attention-management-system-conceptual-architecture/</a></p>
<p>Since it is not one, purpose-built, tightly integrated set of pieces, it takes a walk-through to apply it to any particular problem.  The problem you mention in this posting is e-mail, and you&#8217;ve provided 3 good suggestions on how to take advantage of urgency.  I applied the EAM model to e-mail as an example and yielded 15 examples where technology could help, many of which are indeed available in some e-mail systems (although often buried or cludgy).  You can see my list and how the EAM architecture helped derive it here:</p>
<p><a href="http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/e-mail-overload-no-cure-but-enterprise-attention-management-can-shed-some-light/" rel="nofollow">http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/e-mail-overload-no-cure-but-enterprise-attention-management-can-shed-some-light/</a></p>
<p>I really like your thought that urgency should be taken into account in the e-mail process.  You have some good ideas for the receiving end of e-mail.  I still wouldn&#8217;t give up on the sender&#8217;s side too.  When sending letters and packages, people don&#8217;t mind picking between a number of options (ground, express, signature required, etc.) that indicate urgency.  If we can do a bit of behavior change (or possible force people via a token system), it&#8217;s interesting to think about how much e-mail could be improved.  Easier said than done though.</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by FXPAL Blog &#187; Blog Archive &#187; Metrics don&#8217;t come easy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5416</link>
		<dc:creator>FXPAL Blog &#187; Blog Archive &#187; Metrics don&#8217;t come easy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:25:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5416</guid>
		<description>[...] Tunkelang wrote about Herb Simon&#8217;s attention economy and ways to measure the way people allocate attention. [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Tunkelang wrote about Herb Simon&#8217;s attention economy and ways to measure the way people allocate attention. [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Jonathan Mendez</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5415</link>
		<dc:creator>Jonathan Mendez</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:15:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5415</guid>
		<description>Great post. There is no question from an advertising standpoint fewer, more relevant ads would get better response rates, be more memorable, etc. The signal to noise ratio in advertising is of course a huge issue. In display we&#039;ve already been trained to ignore the ads whereas in search non commercial queries don&#039;t contain ads on the SERP at all. Some basic lessons here I think. Look forward to more thoughts from you on this in the future.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Great post. There is no question from an advertising standpoint fewer, more relevant ads would get better response rates, be more memorable, etc. The signal to noise ratio in advertising is of course a huge issue. In display we&#8217;ve already been trained to ignore the ads whereas in search non commercial queries don&#8217;t contain ads on the SERP at all. Some basic lessons here I think. Look forward to more thoughts from you on this in the future.</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Ian Truscott</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5414</link>
		<dc:creator>Ian Truscott</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:05:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5414</guid>
		<description>I agree - nice post.

I agree with what you are saying - it&#039;s also not just about the amount of information, but the wasted attention time is spent filtering rather than consuming. 

You make a nice point about interrupting too, which is compounded by the wasted attention spent as we get distracted with consuming something that is not relevant. 

I love the idea of an e-mail voting system, where the priority of a mail gets voted down - but who chooses this gateway of folks?

Also, if we start consuming stuff that only creates &#039;buzz&#039; - the propagation of content from scouts to followers - don&#039;t we then end up consuming a lot of bland popular content, enjoyed by the noisy few - rather than relevant to us? 

Obviously we choose our scouts ourselves and I admit I have scouts that I trust when clicking on a link on Twitter - but don&#039;t we miss the opportunity to find something interesting, maybe surprising and perhaps uniquely relevant to us? Aren&#039;t the majority of us scouts for own small communities? 

Also, I think the timeliness of consumption could be a uniquely personal thing. If an &#039;all staff&#039; email tells me someone is joining the organisation that day and I stumble into them at the coffee machine. The timeliness of that email maybe its relevance. 

Not sure where I am going with this - whilst I agree I&#039;d love an &#039;Ian Truscott&#039; shaped internet and e-mail filter - but I wonder if that&#039;s more about the delivering and finding of well understood content. It&#039;s actually about the content?

I also wonder if we should actually just make time for the irrelevant? Make time to enjoy a blog post that&#039;s not laser focused on our interests, or enjoy the fact that Mary in some far flung office (who you&#039;ve never met, will probably never meet) is having a baby.  

Anyway, nice post... 


Ian</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I agree &#8211; nice post.</p>
<p>I agree with what you are saying &#8211; it&#8217;s also not just about the amount of information, but the wasted attention time is spent filtering rather than consuming. </p>
<p>You make a nice point about interrupting too, which is compounded by the wasted attention spent as we get distracted with consuming something that is not relevant. </p>
<p>I love the idea of an e-mail voting system, where the priority of a mail gets voted down &#8211; but who chooses this gateway of folks?</p>
<p>Also, if we start consuming stuff that only creates &#8216;buzz&#8217; &#8211; the propagation of content from scouts to followers &#8211; don&#8217;t we then end up consuming a lot of bland popular content, enjoyed by the noisy few &#8211; rather than relevant to us? </p>
<p>Obviously we choose our scouts ourselves and I admit I have scouts that I trust when clicking on a link on Twitter &#8211; but don&#8217;t we miss the opportunity to find something interesting, maybe surprising and perhaps uniquely relevant to us? Aren&#8217;t the majority of us scouts for own small communities? </p>
<p>Also, I think the timeliness of consumption could be a uniquely personal thing. If an &#8216;all staff&#8217; email tells me someone is joining the organisation that day and I stumble into them at the coffee machine. The timeliness of that email maybe its relevance. </p>
<p>Not sure where I am going with this &#8211; whilst I agree I&#8217;d love an &#8216;Ian Truscott&#8217; shaped internet and e-mail filter &#8211; but I wonder if that&#8217;s more about the delivering and finding of well understood content. It&#8217;s actually about the content?</p>
<p>I also wonder if we should actually just make time for the irrelevant? Make time to enjoy a blog post that&#8217;s not laser focused on our interests, or enjoy the fact that Mary in some far flung office (who you&#8217;ve never met, will probably never meet) is having a baby.  </p>
<p>Anyway, nice post&#8230; </p>
<p>Ian</p>
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		<title>Comment on You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance by Max L. Wilson</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/28/you-cant-hurry-relevance/comment-page-1/#comment-5413</link>
		<dc:creator>Max L. Wilson</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:15:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2975#comment-5413</guid>
		<description>nice blog post. 

one thing, that i saw as a side benefit, as it wasnt mentioned in the talk at CHI, was a potential benefit of a task-based desktop system - on-going work from stephen voida.

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518744

its not hitting all of your goals for an email prioritization system, but it highlighted new email per task-desktop (based on labelled collaborators). 

i know task-based desktop organisation is still a little idealistic, but i liked it and it seemed like an opportunity to interrupt work if new email relating to the current task arrived.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>nice blog post. </p>
<p>one thing, that i saw as a side benefit, as it wasnt mentioned in the talk at CHI, was a potential benefit of a task-based desktop system &#8211; on-going work from stephen voida.</p>
<p><a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518744" rel="nofollow">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518744</a></p>
<p>its not hitting all of your goals for an email prioritization system, but it highlighted new email per task-desktop (based on labelled collaborators). </p>
<p>i know task-based desktop organisation is still a little idealistic, but i liked it and it seemed like an opportunity to interrupt work if new email relating to the current task arrived.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Playing With Wolfram Alpha by Wolfram Alpha Answers Its Own Questions… &#124; Search Done Right</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/05/07/playing-with-wolfram-alpha/comment-page-1/#comment-5411</link>
		<dc:creator>Wolfram Alpha Answers Its Own Questions… &#124; Search Done Right</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:25:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2050#comment-5411</guid>
		<description>[...] answer a small portion of the questions asked of it. A lot has been said about its limitations in NLP but I actually see WA&#8217;s limitation more related to the data – how it collects it and how it [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] answer a small portion of the questions asked of it. A lot has been said about its limitations in NLP but I actually see WA&#8217;s limitation more related to the data – how it collects it and how it [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood by New details on LinkedIn architecture &#124; IP Address Visitor</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/comment-page-1/#comment-5408</link>
		<dc:creator>New details on LinkedIn architecture &#124; IP Address Visitor</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:46:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2924#comment-5408</guid>
		<description>[...]   Posted by ariefew March 1, 2010            Googler Daniel Tunkelang recently wrote a post, &#8220;LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood&#8220;, that has slides from a talk by LinkedIn engineers along with some commentary on [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...]   Posted by ariefew March 1, 2010            Googler Daniel Tunkelang recently wrote a post, &#8220;LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood&#8220;, that has slides from a talk by LinkedIn engineers along with some commentary on [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Overwhelmed by Email? by You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/12/06/overwhelmed-by-email/comment-page-1/#comment-5406</link>
		<dc:creator>You Can&#8217;t Hurry Relevance</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:08:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=926#comment-5406</guid>
		<description>[...] of us is the frequency with which email causes us to interrupt our workflow. Knowing this, I made a brief attempt in 2008 to check email only once a day. Unfortunately, this approach would have violated too many [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] of us is the frequency with which email causes us to interrupt our workflow. Knowing this, I made a brief attempt in 2008 to check email only once a day. Unfortunately, this approach would have violated too many [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5367</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:47:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5367</guid>
		<description>No, I understand that is not your interest.  But given the predominance of ranked list approaches, I&#039;m proposing that Anton&#039;s work is better than raw ranked list, rather than worse.  I&#039;m just saying that Anton&#039;s work is such that the graph is an augmentation of interaction as list iteration.  Rather than a replacement of it.  

Most other graph visualization approaches try to replace standard list-following interaction with graph-based traversal, and that&#039;s why (imo) they don&#039;t work.

Maybe similar-set-common-membership is the best way to do things.  But w/r/t ranked lists, I am proposing the following ordering of systems:

(worst = 3) Graph traversal + graph visualization interfaces
(2) Ranked list traversal + ranked list visualization interfaces
(best = 1) Ranked list traversal + graph visualization interfaces

I&#039;m just trying to make the case that 3 != 1, that you cannot just conflate anything with a graph into the same thing.  And that by understanding the difference in interaction (the &quot;I&quot; in HCIR) between (graph traversal + graph visualization) versus (list traversal + graph visualization), we don&#039;t risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I&#039;m still interested in hearing back from Ed Chi, too.  Ed, are you following this thread?  Is the work that you&#039;ve done in any way similar to Anton&#039;s?  Because again, most of everything else that I&#039;ve seen over the past 10 years is not like that.  And so I can see why folks dismiss it. They haven&#039;t actually played around with ideas like Anton&#039;s.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>No, I understand that is not your interest.  But given the predominance of ranked list approaches, I&#8217;m proposing that Anton&#8217;s work is better than raw ranked list, rather than worse.  I&#8217;m just saying that Anton&#8217;s work is such that the graph is an augmentation of interaction as list iteration.  Rather than a replacement of it.  </p>
<p>Most other graph visualization approaches try to replace standard list-following interaction with graph-based traversal, and that&#8217;s why (imo) they don&#8217;t work.</p>
<p>Maybe similar-set-common-membership is the best way to do things.  But w/r/t ranked lists, I am proposing the following ordering of systems:</p>
<p>(worst = 3) Graph traversal + graph visualization interfaces<br />
(2) Ranked list traversal + ranked list visualization interfaces<br />
(best = 1) Ranked list traversal + graph visualization interfaces</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just trying to make the case that 3 != 1, that you cannot just conflate anything with a graph into the same thing.  And that by understanding the difference in interaction (the &#8220;I&#8221; in HCIR) between (graph traversal + graph visualization) versus (list traversal + graph visualization), we don&#8217;t risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m still interested in hearing back from Ed Chi, too.  Ed, are you following this thread?  Is the work that you&#8217;ve done in any way similar to Anton&#8217;s?  Because again, most of everything else that I&#8217;ve seen over the past 10 years is not like that.  And so I can see why folks dismiss it. They haven&#8217;t actually played around with ideas like Anton&#8217;s.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5365</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:12:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5365</guid>
		<description>I guess I&#039;m just not a big fan of scalar document similarity measures. I&#039;d like to see document similarity expressed in terms of common membership in explainable sets. Those sets could be presented visually, but text seems quite up to the task. In any case, this isn&#039;t a criticism of Anton&#039;s work--just that I&#039;m interested in a different approach to the problem.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I guess I&#8217;m just not a big fan of scalar document similarity measures. I&#8217;d like to see document similarity expressed in terms of common membership in explainable sets. Those sets could be presented visually, but text seems quite up to the task. In any case, this isn&#8217;t a criticism of Anton&#8217;s work&#8211;just that I&#8217;m interested in a different approach to the problem.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5363</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:02:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5363</guid>
		<description>What I find about most graph visualization interfaces is that they require you to traverse the information along pathways defined by the graph itself. 

I&#039;ve always found that completely problematic, because even if the document similarity algorithm is 100% reliable, there is still a difference between similar documents and relevant documents.   A ranked list orders documents by their relevance to the query, whereas a graph layout orders documents by their similarity to each other.  

So what you really want is to traverse the documents by their relevance to the query.  (Well, I know you&#039;re not a huge fan of ranking, but bear with me for this moment; generally sorting by probability of relevance is a good thing.)  So what Anton&#039;s system lets you do is traverse by relevance to the query.  But if there then does happen to be a set of documents that do cluster, you can easily visualize that in a way that you can&#039;t from the ranked list.  You can quickly jump to those few documents, then jump back to the ranked list traversal.

So that&#039;s the interaction, that&#039;s the process.  Walk the list, but see the graph.  

Most of everything else I&#039;ve seen in this space requires searchers to both walk and see the graph, with no list in sight.  And that&#039;s (imo) why they don&#039;t work.  

But that difference in interaction -- walk the list vs. walk the graph -- is key.  

Here&#039;s the reference that Don mentioned: http://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/getpdf.php?id=176</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>What I find about most graph visualization interfaces is that they require you to traverse the information along pathways defined by the graph itself. </p>
<p>I&#8217;ve always found that completely problematic, because even if the document similarity algorithm is 100% reliable, there is still a difference between similar documents and relevant documents.   A ranked list orders documents by their relevance to the query, whereas a graph layout orders documents by their similarity to each other.  </p>
<p>So what you really want is to traverse the documents by their relevance to the query.  (Well, I know you&#8217;re not a huge fan of ranking, but bear with me for this moment; generally sorting by probability of relevance is a good thing.)  So what Anton&#8217;s system lets you do is traverse by relevance to the query.  But if there then does happen to be a set of documents that do cluster, you can easily visualize that in a way that you can&#8217;t from the ranked list.  You can quickly jump to those few documents, then jump back to the ranked list traversal.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s the interaction, that&#8217;s the process.  Walk the list, but see the graph.  </p>
<p>Most of everything else I&#8217;ve seen in this space requires searchers to both walk and see the graph, with no list in sight.  And that&#8217;s (imo) why they don&#8217;t work.  </p>
<p>But that difference in interaction &#8212; walk the list vs. walk the graph &#8212; is key.  </p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the reference that Don mentioned: <a href="http://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/getpdf.php?id=176" rel="nofollow">http://ciir-publications.cs.umass.edu/getpdf.php?id=176</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Don Byrd</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5361</link>
		<dc:creator>Don Byrd</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:06:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5361</guid>
		<description>Glad to hear you&#039;re psyched about us UMass alums, Dan :-) . In support of Jeremy&#039;s observation about the interplay being the important thing, one of Anton&#039;s publications about Lighthouse is entitled &quot;The best of both worlds: Combining ranked list and clustering&quot;. And true, you can&#039;t tell much from a screenshot, but there&#039;s a movie of a demo on Anton&#039;s site too. Unfortunately, Firefox 3.5.8 -- at least on my MacBook -- renders the page without the QuickTime movie frame!, but it displays in Safari... It&#039;d be nice to hear from Anton, wouldn&#039;t it? I emailed him about this conversation a few days ago but haven&#039;t heard from him yet.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Glad to hear you&#8217;re psyched about us UMass alums, Dan <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' />  . In support of Jeremy&#8217;s observation about the interplay being the important thing, one of Anton&#8217;s publications about Lighthouse is entitled &#8220;The best of both worlds: Combining ranked list and clustering&#8221;. And true, you can&#8217;t tell much from a screenshot, but there&#8217;s a movie of a demo on Anton&#8217;s site too. Unfortunately, Firefox 3.5.8 &#8212; at least on my MacBook &#8212; renders the page without the QuickTime movie frame!, but it displays in Safari&#8230; It&#8217;d be nice to hear from Anton, wouldn&#8217;t it? I emailed him about this conversation a few days ago but haven&#8217;t heard from him yet.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/20/holding-back-the-rise-of-the-machines/comment-page-1/#comment-5360</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:01:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2969#comment-5360</guid>
		<description>Jim, I understand the concern with fraud, though they could could something as simple as only allowing automatic submissions as an opt-in feature for Developers (i.e., task providers). Then, by defaults, nothing changes.

I&#039;m not convinced that automation would decrease quality on a per-submission basis, but it certainly introduces thorny dependency issues. But I think that&#039;s an acceptable price to pay in order to potentially expand the marketplace by several orders of magnitude.

Davidc, perhaps I&#039;m naive to take Mechanical Turk at face value. Though even spam creation is ripe for &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/sz.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;automation&lt;/a&gt;. Anyway, I do like Hanson&#039;s attitude (&lt;a href=&quot;http://hanson.gmu.edu/gamble.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; worked better for me). But my goal is here is the advancement of commerce rather than science. That the latter would benefit is merely a benign side effect. :-)</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Jim, I understand the concern with fraud, though they could could something as simple as only allowing automatic submissions as an opt-in feature for Developers (i.e., task providers). Then, by defaults, nothing changes.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not convinced that automation would decrease quality on a per-submission basis, but it certainly introduces thorny dependency issues. But I think that&#8217;s an acceptable price to pay in order to potentially expand the marketplace by several orders of magnitude.</p>
<p>Davidc, perhaps I&#8217;m naive to take Mechanical Turk at face value. Though even spam creation is ripe for <a href="http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/sz.pdf" rel="nofollow">automation</a>. Anyway, I do like Hanson&#8217;s attitude (<a href="http://hanson.gmu.edu/gamble.html" rel="nofollow">this link</a> worked better for me). But my goal is here is the advancement of commerce rather than science. That the latter would benefit is merely a benign side effect. <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5359</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:48:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5359</guid>
		<description>Admittedly my experience is not with a graph-list interplay. I worked on stuff like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.research.ibm.com/irgroup/lexical_navigation.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, where visualization of the concept network was intended to guide query refinement. But I&#039;ve seen lots of attempts to use graph layout to communicate document or term similarity. I feel this often is better expressed textually if the measure is reliable / useful--or not expressed at all otherwise.

In any case, I&#039;d love to play with Anton&#039;s demo. Hard for me to conclude much from a screenshot.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Admittedly my experience is not with a graph-list interplay. I worked on stuff like <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/irgroup/lexical_navigation.htm" rel="nofollow">this</a>, where visualization of the concept network was intended to guide query refinement. But I&#8217;ve seen lots of attempts to use graph layout to communicate document or term similarity. I feel this often is better expressed textually if the measure is reliable / useful&#8211;or not expressed at all otherwise.</p>
<p>In any case, I&#8217;d love to play with Anton&#8217;s demo. Hard for me to conclude much from a screenshot.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5357</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:15:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5357</guid>
		<description>Well, that&#039;s what I am curious about, Daniel.  What is your experience with graph drawing?  More to the point: Is your experience solely with a graph-only visualization?  Or does it include a graph-list interplay?  Because the latter is a very different beast than the former, a very different mode of user interaction.  

And it&#039;s the interaction, rather than the visualization, that I think is the key here.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Well, that&#8217;s what I am curious about, Daniel.  What is your experience with graph drawing?  More to the point: Is your experience solely with a graph-only visualization?  Or does it include a graph-list interplay?  Because the latter is a very different beast than the former, a very different mode of user interaction.  </p>
<p>And it&#8217;s the interaction, rather than the visualization, that I think is the key here.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? by davidc</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/20/holding-back-the-rise-of-the-machines/comment-page-1/#comment-5356</link>
		<dc:creator>davidc</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:29:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2969#comment-5356</guid>
		<description>I find the mechanical turk fascinating as well. But I am cynical about how it is actually being used. About 40% of the tasks seem to be to create spam of some kind. Another 20% seem related to porn.

I think you have a good idea though. How about a online prize site. You would need measurable tests on each task and give the reward to the best algorithm. Robin Hanson has a good paper on the value of prizes for science here 
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67.9839&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I find the mechanical turk fascinating as well. But I am cynical about how it is actually being used. About 40% of the tasks seem to be to create spam of some kind. Another 20% seem related to porn.</p>
<p>I think you have a good idea though. How about a online prize site. You would need measurable tests on each task and give the reward to the best algorithm. Robin Hanson has a good paper on the value of prizes for science here<br />
<a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67.9839&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf" rel="nofollow">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67.9839&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on Holding Back the Rise of the Machines? by Jim Moran</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/20/holding-back-the-rise-of-the-machines/comment-page-1/#comment-5354</link>
		<dc:creator>Jim Moran</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:17:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2969#comment-5354</guid>
		<description>I am a big fan of the MTurk platform and the power of being able to hire 1,000 people for 10 minutes of work. And I agree with the benefit of Turkers enabling automated solutions. 

I imagine Amazon&#039;s reasoning is to prevent fraud (e.g., someone builds a script that automatically submits thousands of bad results, hoping the HITs will be approved). Certainly the requestors could build ways to not approve such results, however, I imagine Amazon is requestor-focused, especially in ameliorating their concerns for quality. Some requestors I know approve all HITs as policy and just avoid any fraudulent workers in future tasks.

Humans also occasionally submit bad results, but I think the overall level of bad results may increase if automated submissions were facilitated.

There should definitely be MTurk like platforms  that are optimized for developers (ideally also on the Amazon system), for those interested in finding out ways to automate tasks. That way requestors could pick and choose.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I am a big fan of the MTurk platform and the power of being able to hire 1,000 people for 10 minutes of work. And I agree with the benefit of Turkers enabling automated solutions. </p>
<p>I imagine Amazon&#8217;s reasoning is to prevent fraud (e.g., someone builds a script that automatically submits thousands of bad results, hoping the HITs will be approved). Certainly the requestors could build ways to not approve such results, however, I imagine Amazon is requestor-focused, especially in ameliorating their concerns for quality. Some requestors I know approve all HITs as policy and just avoid any fraudulent workers in future tasks.</p>
<p>Humans also occasionally submit bad results, but I think the overall level of bad results may increase if automated submissions were facilitated.</p>
<p>There should definitely be MTurk like platforms  that are optimized for developers (ideally also on the Amazon system), for those interested in finding out ways to automate tasks. That way requestors could pick and choose.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5353</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:44:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5353</guid>
		<description>I&#039;m psyched to have surrounded myself online and offline with UMass alums! And I recognize that my skepticism about graph drawing (even when mixed with non-visual approaches) may be a prejudice--albeit one informed by personal experience.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;m psyched to have surrounded myself online and offline with UMass alums! And I recognize that my skepticism about graph drawing (even when mixed with non-visual approaches) may be a prejudice&#8211;albeit one informed by personal experience.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Don Byrd</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5352</link>
		<dc:creator>Don Byrd</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:44:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5352</guid>
		<description>Anton is an old colleague of mine from those UMass days (the late 1990s), too. As is Jeremy, not coincidentally. (In fact, it&#039;s mostly my fault Jeremy has so much music IR background :-) .) I was also very impressed with Lighthouse, for the same reasons Jeremy was. Of course tradeoffs in using screen space are always important, but Anton&#039;s design lets you weight things the way you want... Incidentally, Marti Hearst&#039;s new book includes some work of mine from UMass back then, the &quot;Scrollbar with Confetti&quot;, that visualizes the content of a document at zero cost in screen space.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Anton is an old colleague of mine from those UMass days (the late 1990s), too. As is Jeremy, not coincidentally. (In fact, it&#8217;s mostly my fault Jeremy has so much music IR background <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' />  .) I was also very impressed with Lighthouse, for the same reasons Jeremy was. Of course tradeoffs in using screen space are always important, but Anton&#8217;s design lets you weight things the way you want&#8230; Incidentally, Marti Hearst&#8217;s new book includes some work of mine from UMass back then, the &#8220;Scrollbar with Confetti&#8221;, that visualizes the content of a document at zero cost in screen space.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Privacy through Difficulty by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/05/01/privacy-through-difficulty/comment-page-1/#comment-5351</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:30:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=18#comment-5351</guid>
		<description>Sure, but I don&#039;t see how anyone can control that. I can&#039;t imagine even a theoretical framework where X and Y are both public, but the aggregation of X and Y is not. I think that we as a society have to start expecting that the information we disclose will be combined, so that those consequences are less hard to predict. The recent &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.google.com/news/more?um=1&amp;cf=all&amp;ned=us&amp;cf=all&amp;ncl=dE7mtokxzxaM3SMI6k0gonig18dFM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;please rob me&lt;/a&gt;&quot; story highlights that we have a ways to go before we have rational conversations about privacy.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Sure, but I don&#8217;t see how anyone can control that. I can&#8217;t imagine even a theoretical framework where X and Y are both public, but the aggregation of X and Y is not. I think that we as a society have to start expecting that the information we disclose will be combined, so that those consequences are less hard to predict. The recent &#8220;<a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?um=1&#038;cf=all&#038;ned=us&#038;cf=all&#038;ncl=dE7mtokxzxaM3SMI6k0gonig18dFM" rel="nofollow">please rob me</a>&#8221; story highlights that we have a ways to go before we have rational conversations about privacy.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Google: Find Similar Images by M Decker</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/04/20/google-find-similar-images/comment-page-1/#comment-5350</link>
		<dc:creator>M Decker</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:43:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=1980#comment-5350</guid>
		<description>Saw that eyeBuy on the iPhone AppStore does something similar.  Seems they use the SDK provided by: http://sites.google.com/site/imagecomparison/</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Saw that eyeBuy on the iPhone AppStore does something similar.  Seems they use the SDK provided by: <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/imagecomparison/" rel="nofollow">http://sites.google.com/site/imagecomparison/</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on Privacy through Difficulty by Gene Golovchinsky</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/05/01/privacy-through-difficulty/comment-page-1/#comment-5349</link>
		<dc:creator>Gene Golovchinsky</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:01:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=18#comment-5349</guid>
		<description>The true danger lies in federation of multiple sources, with hard-to-predict consequences to the consumer. Can we come up with a technological solution that would give the user control (before or after the fact) about what data about that person can be aggregated? If this aggregation is of value to some, is there a way to monetize that, to have the consumer derive a revenue stream from the reuse of their data?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The true danger lies in federation of multiple sources, with hard-to-predict consequences to the consumer. Can we come up with a technological solution that would give the user control (before or after the fact) about what data about that person can be aggregated? If this aggregation is of value to some, is there a way to monetize that, to have the consumer derive a revenue stream from the reuse of their data?</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5345</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:52:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5345</guid>
		<description>&lt;i&gt;mark the notes that you’d like to see more of&lt;/i&gt;

Correction: &quot;mark the &lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;nodes&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/i&gt; that you&#039;d like to see more of&quot;.

Too much music IR in my background ;-)</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i>mark the notes that you’d like to see more of</i></p>
<p>Correction: &#8220;mark the <i><b>nodes</b></i> that you&#8217;d like to see more of&#8221;.</p>
<p>Too much music IR in my background <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif' alt=';-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5344</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:14:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5344</guid>
		<description>Ed: Well, Anton&#039;s work was over a decade ago, and to this day I haven&#039;t seen anything like it.  One thing that it let you do is control the amount of screen space dedicated to the ranked snippet, vs. to the graph.  You could make the snippets as large (and the graph as small) as you wanted it to be.  So it allowed you do basically have the ranked list take up 4/5 of the screen, and the graph take up 1/5.  Then, while you are traversing the ranked list, as you normally would in a non-visual interface, if any of the documents that you are marking as &quot;interesting&quot; appear to start clustering, you could easily detect that and make the graph larger again, mark the notes that you&#039;d like to see more of, based on the visualization, then switch back to the ranked list.

It was the interactivity, the back-and-forth play between list and visualization, that I like, that make this work interesting.

Everything else that I&#039;ve seen in graph visualization over the past decade gives you the graph, and only the graph, with maybe a summary snippet of whatever current node you are mousing over.  And I will definitely agree with you that having only the graph is not good.  

But you do have more experience than me in this, so could you point me to any sort of evaluation of something like Anton&#039;s work, where the user essentially has both visualizations simultaneously, i.e. the list AND the graph, and can see the effect that manipulating one has on the other, simultaneously?  

Because again, it is wrong to call Anton&#039;s work a &quot;graph visualization&quot;.  Because it&#039;s not.  It&#039;s a &quot;list plus graph visualization&quot;.  It works because it does both, simultaneously.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Ed: Well, Anton&#8217;s work was over a decade ago, and to this day I haven&#8217;t seen anything like it.  One thing that it let you do is control the amount of screen space dedicated to the ranked snippet, vs. to the graph.  You could make the snippets as large (and the graph as small) as you wanted it to be.  So it allowed you do basically have the ranked list take up 4/5 of the screen, and the graph take up 1/5.  Then, while you are traversing the ranked list, as you normally would in a non-visual interface, if any of the documents that you are marking as &#8220;interesting&#8221; appear to start clustering, you could easily detect that and make the graph larger again, mark the notes that you&#8217;d like to see more of, based on the visualization, then switch back to the ranked list.</p>
<p>It was the interactivity, the back-and-forth play between list and visualization, that I like, that make this work interesting.</p>
<p>Everything else that I&#8217;ve seen in graph visualization over the past decade gives you the graph, and only the graph, with maybe a summary snippet of whatever current node you are mousing over.  And I will definitely agree with you that having only the graph is not good.  </p>
<p>But you do have more experience than me in this, so could you point me to any sort of evaluation of something like Anton&#8217;s work, where the user essentially has both visualizations simultaneously, i.e. the list AND the graph, and can see the effect that manipulating one has on the other, simultaneously?  </p>
<p>Because again, it is wrong to call Anton&#8217;s work a &#8220;graph visualization&#8221;.  Because it&#8217;s not.  It&#8217;s a &#8220;list plus graph visualization&#8221;.  It works because it does both, simultaneously.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Ed H. Chi</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5337</link>
		<dc:creator>Ed H. Chi</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:40:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5337</guid>
		<description>jeremy: there has been many graph layout and visualization of search result over the last decade, and most of them seem not to work out very well, since they spend precious screen space that should be allocated to actual presentation of the words (snippets) of the search results.  I believe graph layouts and visualization of search results make the wrong tradeoff in design, and I speak of this as an information visualization researcher.

Eric&#039;s tool very much reminds me of our own work at http://MrTaggy.com 

The issue he speaks of about &quot;It’s too much work to scan to see what’s new, what went away, and what moved&quot;, we spent a lot of time dealing with in our design.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>jeremy: there has been many graph layout and visualization of search result over the last decade, and most of them seem not to work out very well, since they spend precious screen space that should be allocated to actual presentation of the words (snippets) of the search results.  I believe graph layouts and visualization of search results make the wrong tradeoff in design, and I speak of this as an information visualization researcher.</p>
<p>Eric&#8217;s tool very much reminds me of our own work at <a href="http://MrTaggy.com" rel="nofollow">http://MrTaggy.com</a> </p>
<p>The issue he speaks of about &#8220;It’s too much work to scan to see what’s new, what went away, and what moved&#8221;, we spent a lot of time dealing with in our design.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5336</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:51:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5336</guid>
		<description>That&#039;s the thing: Most graph layout visualizations do that and only that.  You&#039;re forced into that one and only mode.

Anton&#039;s work, on the other hand, lets you simultaneously see both the graph and the ranked list (top 50 or 100 results).  So when you make a change to the list view, it appears in the graph view, and vice versa.

This is the power of his work, imho.  It&#039;s the multiplicity of the views, which share state and are mutually informative.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>That&#8217;s the thing: Most graph layout visualizations do that and only that.  You&#8217;re forced into that one and only mode.</p>
<p>Anton&#8217;s work, on the other hand, lets you simultaneously see both the graph and the ranked list (top 50 or 100 results).  So when you make a change to the list view, it appears in the graph view, and vice versa.</p>
<p>This is the power of his work, imho.  It&#8217;s the multiplicity of the views, which share state and are mutually informative.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5335</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:41:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5335</guid>
		<description>Eric: thank you for putting the demo out there!

Jeremy: I&#039;m intrigued by Anton&#039;s work, though I have to confess a certain skepticism about information retrieval using graph-layout visualizations. Perhaps I&#039;m too burned by my own past attempts in this area.

Otis: thanks for the link. I do think global occurrence counts are helpful. I also assume that Yahoo is using its query logs to improve the quality of keyword extraction beyond what would be possible if all you could look at was the document text.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Eric: thank you for putting the demo out there!</p>
<p>Jeremy: I&#8217;m intrigued by Anton&#8217;s work, though I have to confess a certain skepticism about information retrieval using graph-layout visualizations. Perhaps I&#8217;m too burned by my own past attempts in this area.</p>
<p>Otis: thanks for the link. I do think global occurrence counts are helpful. I also assume that Yahoo is using its query logs to improve the quality of keyword extraction beyond what would be possible if all you could look at was the document text.</p>
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		<title>Comment on LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood by Enlaces rápidos (16-02-2010) &#124; Sentido Web</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/comment-page-1/#comment-5334</link>
		<dc:creator>Enlaces rápidos (16-02-2010) &#124; Sentido Web</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:05:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2924#comment-5334</guid>
		<description>[...] LinkedIn usa Lucene en su arquitectura [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] LinkedIn usa Lucene en su arquitectura [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Otis Gospodnetic</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5333</link>
		<dc:creator>Otis Gospodnetic</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:51:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5333</guid>
		<description>Cool cool.
Using term counts in SERPs reminds me of what you see on top-right of, say, http://www.simpy.com/user/otis/tag/%22information+retrieval%22 (no division by global occurrence counts)

If I had to do that again, I&#039;d use this Key Phrase Extractor (I&#039;m biased):
http://www.sematext.com/products/key-phrase-extractor/index.html :)</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Cool cool.<br />
Using term counts in SERPs reminds me of what you see on top-right of, say, <a href="http://www.simpy.com/user/otis/tag/%22information+retrieval%22" rel="nofollow">http://www.simpy.com/user/otis/tag/%22information+retrieval%22</a> (no division by global occurrence counts)</p>
<p>If I had to do that again, I&#8217;d use this Key Phrase Extractor (I&#8217;m biased):<br />
<a href="http://www.sematext.com/products/key-phrase-extractor/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sematext.com/products/key-phrase-extractor/index.html</a> <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by Eric Iverson</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5330</link>
		<dc:creator>Eric Iverson</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:43:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5330</guid>
		<description>Thanks for the interest in itty bitty search.  This is a work in progress, and sidebar term ordering may change.

I am particularly leaning towards only having one sidebar per search.  Right now I have one sidebar per page of search results.  It&#039;s too much work to scan to see what&#039;s new, what went away, and what moved.

Also, I am looking into using Google AdWords keyword cost per day and total searches per day to help order the sidebar results.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Thanks for the interest in itty bitty search.  This is a work in progress, and sidebar term ordering may change.</p>
<p>I am particularly leaning towards only having one sidebar per search.  Right now I have one sidebar per page of search results.  It&#8217;s too much work to scan to see what&#8217;s new, what went away, and what moved.</p>
<p>Also, I am looking into using Google AdWords keyword cost per day and total searches per day to help order the sidebar results.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5328</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 06:52:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5328</guid>
		<description>..and not only see both the cluster and the ranked list.. but (more importantly) interact with both the cluster and ranked list at the same time, and have the changes that you affect on one instantly appear on the other, so you can get a sense of what is happening as you interactively adjust your search strategy, online.  

I first encountered Anton&#039;s work back in &#039;98 or so.  I agree; it&#039;s a shame that this sort of interactivity never took off on the open web.  I&#039;ve always been fascinated by it.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>..and not only see both the cluster and the ranked list.. but (more importantly) interact with both the cluster and ranked list at the same time, and have the changes that you affect on one instantly appear on the other, so you can get a sense of what is happening as you interactively adjust your search strategy, online.  </p>
<p>I first encountered Anton&#8217;s work back in &#8216;98 or so.  I agree; it&#8217;s a shame that this sort of interactivity never took off on the open web.  I&#8217;ve always been fascinated by it.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search by jeremy</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/16/guest-demo-eric-iversons-itty-bitty-search/comment-page-1/#comment-5327</link>
		<dc:creator>jeremy</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 06:45:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2960#comment-5327</guid>
		<description>Anton is an old colleague of mine from the UMass days.  If you&#039;ve never seen his Lighthouse system, you really should.  It&#039;s a great example of exploratory search, combining ranked lists with clustering, in a way that lets you see both at the same time.  

http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/projects/lighthouse/index.html</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Anton is an old colleague of mine from the UMass days.  If you&#8217;ve never seen his Lighthouse system, you really should.  It&#8217;s a great example of exploratory search, combining ranked lists with clustering, in a way that lets you see both at the same time.  </p>
<p><a href="http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/projects/lighthouse/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/projects/lighthouse/index.html</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on Yahoo BOSS, Now With Key Terms by Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/18/yahoo-boss-now-with-key-terms/comment-page-1/#comment-5326</link>
		<dc:creator>Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:09:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=810#comment-5326</guid>
		<description>[...] perform a query, the application retrieves a set of related term candidates using Yahoo&#8217;s key terms API. It then scores each term by dividing its occurrence count within the result set by its global [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] perform a query, the application retrieves a set of related term candidates using Yahoo&#8217;s key terms API. It then scores each term by dividing its occurrence count within the result set by its global [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Yahoo BOSS, Now With Key Terms by Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/18/yahoo-boss-now-with-key-terms/comment-page-1/#comment-5325</link>
		<dc:creator>Guest Demo: Eric Iverson&#8217;s Itty Bitty Search</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:09:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=810#comment-5325</guid>
		<description>[...] perform a query, the application retrieves a set of related term candidates using Yahoo&#8217;s key terms API. It then scores each term by dividing its occurrence count within the result set by its global [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] perform a query, the application retrieves a set of related term candidates using Yahoo&#8217;s key terms API. It then scores each term by dividing its occurrence count within the result set by its global [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on WSDM 2010: Day 3 by Eric Schwarzkopf</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/06/wsdm-2010-day-3/comment-page-1/#comment-5313</link>
		<dc:creator>Eric Schwarzkopf</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:54:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2952#comment-5313</guid>
		<description>Hi Iteman, I think Daniel is talking about the paper &#039;Early exit optimizations for additive machine learned ranking systems&#039; by Cambazoglu et al. Find the abstract at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1718487.1718538</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hi Iteman, I think Daniel is talking about the paper &#8216;Early exit optimizations for additive machine learned ranking systems&#8217; by Cambazoglu et al. Find the abstract at <a href="http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1718487.1718538" rel="nofollow">http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1718487.1718538</a></p>
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		<title>Comment on LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood by kafka0102的边城客栈 &#187; Blog Archive &#187; 一周技术文档分享</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/comment-page-1/#comment-5308</link>
		<dc:creator>kafka0102的边城客栈 &#187; Blog Archive &#187; 一周技术文档分享</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:14:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2924#comment-5308</guid>
		<description>[...] http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/# [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] <a href="http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/#" rel="nofollow">http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/#</a> [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on A Twitter Analog to PageRank by FXPAL Blog &#187; Blog Archive &#187; Making sense of Twitter search</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/comment-page-2/#comment-5307</link>
		<dc:creator>FXPAL Blog &#187; Blog Archive &#187; Making sense of Twitter search</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:44:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=1182#comment-5307</guid>
		<description>[...] to the results set; other sort orders such as the number of followers, recency of tweet, TunkRank, [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] to the results set; other sort orders such as the number of followers, recency of tweet, TunkRank, [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by Report on the Third Workshop on Search a&#8230; &#171; AuthTweet</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5304</link>
		<dc:creator>Report on the Third Workshop on Search a&#8230; &#171; AuthTweet</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:08:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5304</guid>
		<description>[...] http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-20...  &#160; [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] <a href="http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-20.." rel="nofollow">http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-20..</a>.  &nbsp; [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on WSDM 2010: Day 1 by WSDM 2010: Day 1 http://thenoisychannel&#8230;. &#171; AuthTweet</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/05/wsdm-2010-day-1-2/comment-page-1/#comment-5303</link>
		<dc:creator>WSDM 2010: Day 1 http://thenoisychannel&#8230;. &#171; AuthTweet</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:07:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2946#comment-5303</guid>
		<description>[...] http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/05/wsdm-2010-day-1-2/ [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] <a href="http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/05/wsdm-2010-day-1-2/" rel="nofollow">http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/05/wsdm-2010-day-1-2/</a> [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on A Twitter Analog to PageRank by http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-&#8230; &#171; AuthTweet</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/comment-page-2/#comment-5300</link>
		<dc:creator>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-&#8230; &#171; AuthTweet</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:11:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=1182#comment-5300</guid>
		<description>[...] http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/  &#160; [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] <a href="http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/" rel="nofollow">http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/</a>  &nbsp; [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 02/09/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5299</link>
		<dc:creator>Weekly Search &#38; Social News: 02/09/2010 &#124; Search Engine Journal</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:26:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5299</guid>
		<description>[...] Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) – Noisy Channel [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) – Noisy Channel [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on WSDM 2010: Day 3 by Itman</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/06/wsdm-2010-day-3/comment-page-1/#comment-5287</link>
		<dc:creator>Itman</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:27:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2952#comment-5287</guid>
		<description>Thank you for the excellent follow-up. Could you please remember the name of the paper that deals with combining ensemble ranking and pruning?
PS: Web-compression article promises to be interesting. Paulo Ferragina is one of my favorite authors!</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Thank you for the excellent follow-up. Could you please remember the name of the paper that deals with combining ensemble ranking and pruning?<br />
PS: Web-compression article promises to be interesting. Paulo Ferragina is one of my favorite authors!</p>
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		<title>Comment on LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood by Display Ads Are Back!; Microsoft Display Ads Takes Facebook Punch; Broadcast Execs See More Video Ads Online</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/comment-page-1/#comment-5285</link>
		<dc:creator>Display Ads Are Back!; Microsoft Display Ads Takes Facebook Punch; Broadcast Execs See More Video Ads Online</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:07:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2924#comment-5285</guid>
		<description>[...] Linden points to a recent presentation by LinkedIn engineers (who are likely &quot;LinkedIn&quot;) which shows the importance of delivering [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] Linden points to a recent presentation by LinkedIn engineers (who are likely &quot;LinkedIn&quot;) which shows the importance of delivering [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on WSDM 2010: Day 1 by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/05/wsdm-2010-day-1-2/comment-page-1/#comment-5278</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:42:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2946#comment-5278</guid>
		<description>I don&#039;t know if Soumen has posted his slides, but you can find all of his papers on his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~soumen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;home page&lt;/a&gt;. The WSDM conference is all being recorded by &lt;a href=&quot;http://videolectures.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VideoLectures&lt;/a&gt;, so you can also wait for the video.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I don&#8217;t know if Soumen has posted his slides, but you can find all of his papers on his <a href="http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~soumen/" rel="nofollow">home page</a>. The WSDM conference is all being recorded by <a href="http://videolectures.net/" rel="nofollow">VideoLectures</a>, so you can also wait for the video.</p>
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		<title>Comment on A Twitter Analog to PageRank by WSDM 2010: Day 2</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/comment-page-2/#comment-5274</link>
		<dc:creator>WSDM 2010: Day 2</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:01:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=1182#comment-5274</guid>
		<description>[...] with modeling authority and influence in social networks, a problem in which I take a deep personal interest. Another inferred attributes of social network users based on those of other users in their [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] with modeling authority and influence in social networks, a problem in which I take a deep personal interest. Another inferred attributes of social network users based on those of other users in their [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on WSDM 2010: Day 1 by Lee Johnson</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/05/wsdm-2010-day-1-2/comment-page-1/#comment-5273</link>
		<dc:creator>Lee Johnson</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:50:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2946#comment-5273</guid>
		<description>Thanks Daniel. Is there slide/paper of &quot;Bridging the Structured Un-Structured Gap&quot; keynote?</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Thanks Daniel. Is there slide/paper of &#8220;Bridging the Structured Un-Structured Gap&#8221; keynote?</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by FXPAL Blog &#187; Blog Archive &#187; SSM2010</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5271</link>
		<dc:creator>FXPAL Blog &#187; Blog Archive &#187; SSM2010</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:31:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5271</guid>
		<description>[...] post, I wrote about one way that we can characterize the space, and Daniel did an excellent job of summarizing the workshop, which was also cross-posted  [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] post, I wrote about one way that we can characterize the space, and Daniel did an excellent job of summarizing the workshop, which was also cross-posted  [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by Marti</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5268</link>
		<dc:creator>Marti</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:33:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5268</guid>
		<description>Thank you, Daniel.  This summary is a real contribution.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Thank you, Daniel.  This summary is a real contribution.</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by Jeff Kubina</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5263</link>
		<dc:creator>Jeff Kubina</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:48:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5263</guid>
		<description>Great summary Daniel. Thank you!</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Great summary Daniel. Thank you!</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by Daniel Tunkelang</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5261</link>
		<dc:creator>Daniel Tunkelang</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:46:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5261</guid>
		<description>Fixed, thanks! And you&#039;re most welcome for the summary. I&#039;m delighted that Richard could be there to represent Glasgow!</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Fixed, thanks! And you&#8217;re most welcome for the summary. I&#8217;m delighted that Richard could be there to represent Glasgow!</p>
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		<title>Comment on Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010) by Craig Macdonald</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/02/04/report-on-the-third-workshop-on-search-and-social-media-ssm-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-5260</link>
		<dc:creator>Craig Macdonald</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:47:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2936#comment-5260</guid>
		<description>Daniel, thanks so much for a brilliant roundup of SSM . I was forced offline yesterday, but its good to be able to read a comprehensive roundup the workshop so quickly today.

One minor thing, in the paragraph 3, &quot;Robert&quot; -&gt; &quot;Richard&quot;  ;)

Cheers

Craig</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Daniel, thanks so much for a brilliant roundup of SSM . I was forced offline yesterday, but its good to be able to read a comprehensive roundup the workshop so quickly today.</p>
<p>One minor thing, in the paragraph 3, &#8220;Robert&#8221; -&gt; &#8220;Richard&#8221;  <img src='http://thenoisychannel.com/wordpress/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif' alt=';)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>Cheers</p>
<p>Craig</p>
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		<title>Comment on LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood by Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010)</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/comment-page-1/#comment-5259</link>
		<dc:creator>Report on the Third Workshop on Search and Social Media (SSM 2010)</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:25:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2924#comment-5259</guid>
		<description>[...] After lunch, Jeremy Pickens (FXPAL) moderated a panel representing social media / networking companies: Hilary Mason (bit.ly), Igor Perisic (LinkedIn), and David Hendi (MySpace). Hilary noted that, while bit.ly does not have access to an explicit social graph, it captures implicit connections from user behavior that may not be represented in the graph. Jeremy asked the panelists how much a person&#8217;s extended network matters; David and Igor pointed out research indicating correlations of mood and even medical conditions between people and their third-degree connections. Again, the audience was full of questions, especially for Igor. As a fan of faceted search, I was glad to see him touting LinkedIn&#8217;s success in making faceted search the primary means of performing people search on the site. For an in-depth view, I recommend &#8220;LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood&#8220;. [...]</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[...] After lunch, Jeremy Pickens (FXPAL) moderated a panel representing social media / networking companies: Hilary Mason (bit.ly), Igor Perisic (LinkedIn), and David Hendi (MySpace). Hilary noted that, while bit.ly does not have access to an explicit social graph, it captures implicit connections from user behavior that may not be represented in the graph. Jeremy asked the panelists how much a person&#8217;s extended network matters; David and Igor pointed out research indicating correlations of mood and even medical conditions between people and their third-degree connections. Again, the audience was full of questions, especially for Igor. As a fan of faceted search, I was glad to see him touting LinkedIn&#8217;s success in making faceted search the primary means of performing people search on the site. For an in-depth view, I recommend &#8220;LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood&#8220;. [...]</p>
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		<title>Comment on LinkedIn Search: A Look Beneath the Hood by OS</title>
		<link>http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/01/31/linkedin-search-a-look-beneath-the-hood/comment-page-1/#comment-5257</link>
		<dc:creator>OS</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:18:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=2924#comment-5257</guid>
		<description>Ever heard of Verity&#039;s Parametric search.  Sounds very familiar.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Ever heard of Verity&#8217;s Parametric search.  Sounds very familiar.</p>
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