i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Hello everybody,

Our promised 202 search tool is now available on bit.ly/202search

You can enter a query and the tool will perform 4 different searches against the corpus of 202 lecture slides. The search algorithms are:

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am starting to feel very concerned about Google's new Public DNS service. It seems that Google is trying to build its own Library of Babel collecting as much information as it can in order to improve its knowledge of web usage. I haven't read their privacy policy, but this opens new possibilities for targeted advertising.

Google realizes that its search algorithm is far from perfect. It seems that even the "politically incorrect" opinions could be able to show up in the first places out of Google control. If you search for words such as "jew" or "obama" you may find disturbing results and images.

I was reading this article in The New Yorker about a book called "Eating animals" today and something came to my mind. Somehow categories define how we feel. I like eating "pork", but maybe I wouldn't like to eat "pig". We also do not want to have "cow sausages", let's better call them "beef sausages". Why don't we eat "dog" or "cat"? Well... because they are pets, aren't they?

I've just learned about Google's Sidewiki initiative. It's supossed to help people to add information next to any webpage and display other's entries.

Collecting information is not the same everywhere. This article by The Economist reveals different methods used to collect information for digital maps: from using sophisticated GPS systems in England, to note-taking in India and voluntary contributions in Nigeria. There is no single way to get data from every place, and different information is needed by different users in a variety of contexts. The following questions arise: How do we standarize all these different data-collections?