Category: Uncategorized

I’m givng a talk in the Google New York office this Wednesday (1/7) at 3pm entitled “Reconsidering Relevance”. The title is an allusion to Tefko Saracevic‘s paper, “Relevance Reconsidered“.

I’m not sure how many NYC Googlers read this blog, but I encourage you all to attend. I’ve also been able to put a few folks on the guest list. For everyone else, my host assures me that the recorded presentation will be posted on YouTube. And of course I’ll post the slides here at The Noisy Channel, as well as on SlideShare.

Here’s the title and abstract:

Reconsidering Relevance

We’ve become complacent about relevance. The overwhelming success of web search engines has lulled even information retrieval (IR) researchers to expect only incremental improvements in relevance in the near future. And beyond web search, there are still broad search problems where relevance still feels hopelessly like the pre-Google web.

But even some of the most basic IR questions about relevance are unresolved.  We take for granted the very idea that a computer can determine which documents are relevant to a person’s needs. And we still rely on two-word queries (on average) to communicate a user’s information need. But this approach is a contrivance; in reality, we need to think of information-seeking as a problem of optimizing the communication between people and machines.

We can do better. In fact, there are a variety of ongoing efforts to do so, often under the banners of “interactive information retrieval”, “exploratory search”, and “human computer information retrieval”. In this talk, I’ll discuss these initiatives and how they are helping to move “relevance” beyond today’s outdated assumptions.

There’s an apocryphal Chinese proverb and curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” It means:

May you experience much upheaval and trouble in your life. The clear implication being that ‘uninteresting times’, of peace and tranquility, are more life-enhancing.

Well, these are certainly interesting times, whether we look to the turmoil of the financial markets, the conflicts erupting around the globe, or even more narrowly to the developments in the microcosm of technology.

It has certainly been an eventful year for me personally, but on the whole I don’t feel the upheaval as a curse. I certainly am not ending 2008 the way I came into it, and that is the whole point of living.

The biggest changes have been on the personal front. I lost my father this year, a memory that is especially poignant on New Year’s Eve, which was our family’s sacrosanct holiday. Tonight I will think of him as we commemorate the New Year with a paella, a tradition I inherit.

But, as Anais Nin tells us in “Ragtime“, “nothing is lost but it changes.” My daughter snuck into this world a few weeks before 2008, but it’s this year that she’s had her first opportunities to explore it, and her joy and excitement are wonderfully contagious.

Of course, the other big change is that you are reading this post. While Manu is right that I used to think of blogging as exhibitionist diary publication (and he kept the evidence), I finally came around to embracing social media. Jeff deserves the credit for getting me to start blogging. As for Twitter, I think my first update says it all.

And here I am today, preaching “When In Doubt, Make It Public” and evangelizing social media.

What’s in store for 2009? I am humbled enough by this year’s surprises to not attempt to make predictions. Besides, as Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

But at least I can express a few intentions:

• To encourage my daughter’s intellectual curiosity at every turn.
• To continue raising people’s expectations about information seeking technology and striving to meet those expectations though my work at Endeca.
• To explore approaches to information access that do not depend so heavily on an adversarial model.

I wish everyone a Happy New Year! You have no choice but to live in interesting times. May they be interesting for you personally, in the best sense of the word.

A few months ago, I blogged about a lecture that behavioral economist Dan Ariely gave as part of his book tour for Predictably Irrational.

Today, I see that Chris Yeh has published an outline of the book, and that the SEOmoz blog has applied it to derive lessons for web marketing.

Fun and informative reading, at least if you aren’t too disillusioned in the systematic irrationality of our species.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at Ben Kunz’s “Modest Blogging Proposal” column in BusinessWeek. He leads with:

If “pay per post” lets online writers shill for cash, why not go all the way and sell real-life opinions, too?

He proceeds to take it all the way himself, ultimately concluding:

So let’s sell, people! Embed paid promotions into the fabric of life. Tell your kids to behave if they want an iPhone! Then ask Steve Jobs to send you an Apple (AAPL) gift card! We can call it Sponsored Paid Opinions in Human Meetings, or SPOHM—not to be confused with spam. 

It’s a brilliant piece, and I recommend that you read it in its entirety. And I’m not even being paid for my opinion! Swift would be proud.

The other day, Daniel Lemire posted a comment extolling Peter Turney as someone who does a great job blogging about his research. His blog, Apperceptual, is one of the highest-quality blogs I’ve seen in the information retrieval community.

Turney is a Research Officer at Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) Institute for Information Technology. His two decades of research cover a broad spectrum of topics in machine learning, information retrieval, and computational linguistics. Moreover, the practial orientation of the NRC helps ensure that Peter’s scholarly work is grounded in the real-world.

The best way to get a feeling for Turney’s blog is to read it. Here are a few posts I’d suggest:

• A Uniform Approach to Analogies, Synonyms, Antonyms, and Associations
• SVD, Variance, and Sparsity
• Beyond Proportional Analogy

This last post, published today, offers a promising approach towards establishing analogies as the central problem in a theory of semantics. Or, as Turney quotes Douglas Hofstadter, that “all meaning comes from analogies”.

Turney’s writing isn’t always so heavy. In fact, two of his most popular posts are “Open Problems” and “How to Maximize Citations“, both of which I’d recommend to aspiring researchers.

Turney doesn’t crank out blog posts daily or even weekly–he sometimes goes for over a month between posts. But what he does write is well worth reading.

Over the past few days, Kate Niederhoffer put together a collection of thoughts about the future of measurement in social media. Contributors include:

• Neal Burns, University of Texas, Austin Center for Brand Research
• Walter Carl, Chat Threads,
• Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City
• Sam Gosling, University of Texas, Austin: Department of Psychology
• Seth Grimes, Alta Plana
• Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs
• Paul Janowitz, Sentient Services
• Shawn Kung, Aster Data
• Roddy Lindsay, Facebook
• Jamie Pennebaker, University of Texas, Austin Department of Psychology
• Martha Russell, Media X at Stanford University
• Miles Sims, Small World Labs
• Marc Smith, Telligent
• Daniel Tunkelang, Endeca

I enjoyed being part of the collective writing process, and I hope you enjoy reading the results.

I don’t always agree with Jeff Jarvis, but he nailed it in “A danger to journalism“, a post in which he discusses the “GateHouseGate” controversy: 

GateHouse has sued The New York Times Co., arguing that the Boston Globe’s new YourTown hyperlocal site for Newton is violating copyright laws by copying headlines and first sentences verbatim from GateHouse sites in Massachusetts and–horrors!–linking to the stories themselves on GateHouse’s pages.

As Jarvis put it, “If you can’t stand the links, Gatehouse, get off the web.” I am sympathetic to authors whose work is being unfairly used, as I discussed in my recent post on fair use and SEO. But suing people for copying two sentences and linking? I thought we were past that by now.

Today’s post on SEOmozBlog explores how the evolution of search results is changing the landscape for search marketers, aka SEO professionals. Here’s a teaser:

I still believe we’re years (3-5) away from an SEO economy where links don’t play the primary role (and I doubt we can ever get away from keywords – that’s search at its most basic), but I do agree that we’re plodding slowly down that path.

The post also links to and excerpts a “thought paper” called “New Signals to Search Engines” by search marketing firm Acronym Media. It’s an interesting–and refreshingly intellectual–take on how the search engines of the future may move to a less link-centric approach.

The Sunday before Festivus is surely a slow news day, but today’s top tech story is a doozie. Evidently College Prowler, a publishing company for guidebooks on top colleges and universities in the United States, was creating hundreds of “Class of 2013” groups on Facebook, using sock puppet accounts, for the purposes of self-promotion. Brad Ward, a recruiter for Butler University, sleuthed out this marketing strategy and posted an expose at his blog, SquaredPeg. The story has spread like wildfire, including to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The story is still evolving, but it looks pretty bad for College Prowler. Social networks, whether offline or online, are built on trust, and, as we’ve learned recently from the Madoff scandal, networks of trust are vulnerable. Perhaps universities should have been more proactive in establish their own Class of 2013 Facebook groups, though that feels like blaming the victim.

In my view, this incident argues in favor of discouraging online anonymity, at least in contexts where we need to build trust. This is the one aspect in which Knol got it right.

Clip art

Line drawing

Google announced today that its image search now supports search-by-style. As someone who regularly uses Google’s image search to find fodder for my presentations, I am excited about this enhancement. Moreover, I think it’s a clever application of the various image analysis algorithms Google has been developing.

They now include a drop-down that allows you to restrict searches to images from news content, faces, clip art, line drawings, and photo content. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s not bad.

What is unfortunate is that the interface, whether you’d like to explore images by style or by size, doesn’t give you any sort of preview of the content in each category. I at least find it annoying to have to keep clicking to explore the space. But this is at least a baby step towards supporting exploratory search, in a domain that cries out for it.