i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

http://youtu.be/F0QXB5pw2qE

Recently, Google released an interesting video that uses popular and fastest-rising search keywords in 2010. Using their collected data, they compile them into a video describing the overview and story of 2010.

Most IR research has been focused on static information retrieval as if we are retrieving information from physical and digital libraries, and those techniques are what we have learned as part of this course. However, increasingly, researchers have become interested in the dynamic and temporal nature of information on the Web.

 In today's lecture, Bob mentioned the differences between traditional linguistic and statistical approaches to language processing.  In my undergraduate linguistics major, I studied both syntax and "grammar engineering," for which we had to construct representations like the one below.  If anyone ever had to diagram sentences in middle or high school, it's kind of like that on steroids: 

Did you enjoy working with the text tools?

Recently launched, Blekko, a new search engine, is attempting to provide users with better search results. Currently, when individuals search the web, they have to sort through various sites in order to find 'trustworthy' information. According to Rick Skrenta, CEO and co-founder of Blekko,'the web is filling up with spam and low-rent webpages from content farms like Demand Media, saying the web now has 100 billion urls, most created by bots.'

There are still tasks out there which you can't easily do with a computer. They might be complex, ambiguous and/or adhoc. Why don't you get a online virtual assistant for that? S/he helps you with data analysis, research, outbound calling, blog management etc.

Check it out: www.asksunday.com/

The Deep Web (also called Deepnet, the invisible Web, dark Web or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.

 Human Jeopardy contestants impress me, but a computer that can give similar responses, in as little time, would really amaze me.  "Watson" needs to interpret clues, process information quickly, and give correct answers.  It's that first bit that falls into Natural Language Processing, which we'll be discussing in 202.  

Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine that launched in May that is geared toward an educated audience looking just for data. Instead of providing a list of links like Google or another search engine, WA returns just the data and relevant graphs. The system's strengths are real-time calculations, powerful algorithms that search the web, and curated data sets.