As I was testing out various blog search options today, I discovered a cool blog called Oodles of Design. I’m embarassed not to have discovered it sooner, given its focus on faceted search and interaction design. Check it out; I’ve added it to my Blogroll.
Last week I posted about Google’s new “In Quotes” beta. Today Bob Carpenter posted about how to extact quotes using LingPipe. Worth a read.
My colleague Oscar Berg at The Content Economy posted about how the name of his blog is drawing a surprising amount of traffic from people looking for content about the economy:
The last weeks the most commonly used search keywords are:
“what’s the worst that could happen with the economy” and “how does the economy crash effect people as individuals¨ (in slightly different variations) .
The search statistics also show that a lot can be done to improve relevancy in search.
Indeed. We really need to do better when it comes to blog search–and, by extension, search for semistructured content on the web.
Maybe it’s just an accident, but I was surprised to see that the top search result on Google for Avrim Blum is not Avrim’s page, but rather John Langford‘s:
No idea whether this a prank or just an accident.
Thanks to Kristiaan Pelckmans for posting about the upcoming Workshop on Empirical Hypothesis Spaces at NIPS 2008:
This workshop asks for insights how far we may/can push the theoretical boundary of using data in the design of learning machines. Can we express our classification rule in terms of the sample, or do we have to stick to a core assumption of classical statistical learning theory, namely that the hypothesis space is to be defined independent from the sample?
The workshop chairs are an impressive crew: Maria-Florina Balcan, Shai Ben-David, Avrim Blum, Kristiaan Pelckmans, and John Shawe-Taylor.
The Nasdaq Stock Market said it will cancel some of the late trades in Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), whose shares appeared to plunge as low as 1 cent at the close of North American markets on Tuesday.
For those who prefer pictures:
Just noticed this Jon Udell interview with Scott Prevost, General Manager and Director of Product for Microsoft-acquired Powerset. I’m as skeptical as ever, but I thought readers here might appreciate the link.
I don’t know if Dan Bauhaus reads this blog, but hats off to him for adding a list of acquisitions to the List of Enterprise Search Vendors Wikipedia entry. He even does a respectable job of disclosing the undisclosed sums for some of the aquisitions.
Check out Jeff’s post about a presentation that Dave Jensen and David Smith recently gave at UMass entitled Myths of Research in Computer Science I particularly like his take-away:
The code you write today won’t run in five years. Get over it. What will be used? It is the understanding derived from running the code.
Just saw this piece in the New York Times entitled “You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge Is Power.” The lede: “Are patients swimming in a sea of health information? Or are they drowning in it?”
No earth-shattering revelations, but a sober reminder that, for all of the health information available on the web, we still have a major information access problem. Information availability is clearly not the same as information accessibility.
The Noisy Channel 