Author: Daniel Tunkelang

Many people (myself included) have said that Bing’s strongest vertical is travel. And a number have noted the striking similarity between Bing’s travel search and Kayak.

David Radin:

This feels so much like Kayak that without asking, I assumed Microsoft licensed the technology from Kayak. Can you say “eerily similar”?

David Weinberger:

Bing’s ripping off of Kayak.com has me pretty cheesed.

Charlene Li:

Bing’s flight fare search reminded me very much of Kayak, my favorite travel search engine. In fact, it feels like an exact copy except for one major improvement — the integration of Farecast

That was a few weeks ago. Today, it looks like Kayak’s lawyers decided to do more than notice. As reported in Wired:

“We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer Robert Birge told Wired.com “From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.”

Indeed. I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea whether Kayak has a legal case. Nonetheless, I can certainly empathize with Kayak’s designers, who must be less than amused to see their distinctive look and feel copied wholesale.

But perhaps the more damning point this makes is that Bing, for all of its claims to be different or innovative, is simply copying the leaders. They certainly have good taste to use Kayak as a model for a travel “decision engine”. But, legal or not, imitation isn’t innovation.

I haven’t exactly been generous in my opinons about the widespread obsession with “real-time” search. But in today’s Telegraph there’s at least a story that makes sense in theory: “Hedge fund managers betting Twitter will give them an edge in rapid trading“.

In practice, I’m pretty skeptical, as is Gwen Robinson at the Financial Times Alphaville blog. She writes:

That’s very interesting, because several hedge fund managers we spoke to dismissed the idea variously as “all twatter” and “rubbish” – not least because Twitter has carved a reputation more for unfounded speculation and even sensational disinformation than for ground-breaking, market-moving alerts for alpha-hungry fund managers.

I’ll concede that time really is money for for hedge funds and other traders who need to make decisions before the rest of the market catches up. But I’m dubious that Twitter–let alone an automated processing of tweets–will enable traders to make better decisions. Moreover, any success would immediately be gamed, along the lines of pump and dump scams. I suppose that hasn’t put a damper on the popularity of StockTwits, but popularity does not necessarily translate to profitability for the traders. I hear that Swoopo (a great example of exploiting behavioral economics) is popular too.

If real-time search is to be useful–and I think it really should be called alerting–then the information it provides has to have some sort of quality assurance, and not just freshness. There’s almost certainly a trade-off, since it usually takes time to vet  information for quality, even if the vetting is through crowdsourcing. But that reality doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet for the real-time advocates. I say, give it time.

You have to love the irony: Waldo Jaquith of the Virgina Quarterly Review discovered that Free: The Future of a Radical Price, the latest book by Wired Editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, contains “almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources”–and that was without access to an electronic copy of the book, so he suspects there may be more. Most (though not all) of the plagiarism is from Wikipedia.

Having recently written a book, I can attest to the temptation to copy and paste from Wikipedia, much as I was tempted to copy from the encyclopedia for essays in grade school. In fact, Wikipedia explicitly permits reuse of its content–but only with proper attribution and in conformance with Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License or the GNU Free Documentation License. Evidently the book will be available for free online, so perhaps Anderson is in time to clean up the text through appropriate citation. Still, as commenter MrInBetween pointed out on Gawker, “Can’t decide which is more embarrassing — failing to cite wikipedia as a source or using wikipedia as a source.” Perhaps I’m old-school, but I feel that books should cite original sources, not encyclopedias.

In any case, the deeper irony is that the “radical” model Anderson advocates is at least partly responsible for encouraging an economy where it’s easier to profit from other people’s content than from your own. Splogs scrape legitimate blogs, copying their content in order to attract search traffic and generate ad revenue. Sites like the Huffington Post have pushed (or simply shredded) the envelope of fair use by excerpting others’ stories and employing SEO in order to leech their traffic. Radical or not, free can get pretty ugly.

It may not have been his intention, but Anderson has helped uncover a subtext of his advocacy: in a world where the only acceptable price for content is free, there’s a risk that respect for the value of content will correlate to its price.

On the Google News Blog today: you can now search by author. Actually, I think you could always search by author from their advanced search page, but now the links are available directly from the search results, facilitating exploration.

It’s a nice enhancement, though there are still some kinks to work out. For example when I did a Google News search for tim burton’s alice in wonderland, the first two hits have no author link, and the third article has an author link for Kofi Outlaw that leads to a dead end, i.e., no results found (you can find his articles here).

Interestingly, this is a case where Bing, even though it doesn’t offer author search, does do a lot better on related searches. I have to give them the win on this one, at least as far as supporting exploration goes. Unfortunately, their crawler could use a bit more muscle–they don’t even find the Kofi Outlaw article, and they return only 37 results compared to over 300 from Google. Yes, size isn’t everything, and Google’s returning more results is undermined by their not offering as much ability to sift through them. But, conversely, Bing’s exploratory search capabilities are undermined by their having far less content to explore. Is it that hard to do both?

Those of you who know Marti Hearst or follow her work may have heard that she’s been writing a book on Search User Interfaces to follow up on her chapter in Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribiero-Neto’s textbook on Modern Information Retrieval. Well, the wait is over: her book will be available later this week! Moreover, it will be available (and searchable!) for free online.

In the mean time, I’ve had a chance to preview the text, and I’m impressed. She introduces the book by saying:

Many books on information retrieval describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems. By contrast, this book focuses on the human users of search systems and the tool they use to interact with them: the search  user interface. Because of their global reach, search user interfaces must be understandable by and appealing to a wide variety of people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds, and for an enormous variety of information needs.

She then proceeds to elaborate on the design and evaluation of search interfaces. Not surprisingly, she reserves whole chapters for query reformulation and for integrating navigation and search–she is, after all, one of the pioneers of faceted search and one of the leading HCIR researchers. She also includes a chapter on theoretical models of the information seeking process–a nice review that includes the highlights from the decades of library and information science work on this topic.

Of course, the wide scope of the book requires some trade-offs. Each chapter is surely worthy of a book in its own right. But where breadth has to take precedence over depth, she makes up for it by citing hundreds of references so that readers can follow up to their hearts’ content. Also, the focus is academic, so most of the references are to academic rather than commercial work–though she does sneak in a reference to WebMD as an example of faceted search. That said, it’s great to see so much of the academic work on search interfaces brought together in one place. Some may find her thorough bibliography to be almost as useful as the book itself!

All in all, this is an excellent book, and I’m sure it will find its way into many course syllabi. The book is aimed primarily at academic audiences–in fact, she points out that, while there are some books for practicitioners (e.g., Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web), there have been no academic books that focus primarily on search user interfaces (the closest, in her view, have been books about theoretical models of information seeking behavior). Hopefully this new book will incite more academic interest in this area. For those of us who would like to advance beyond the status quo of search interfaces, this book is a welcome contribution.