i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Groupon spurns Google: Bad move or brilliant? (See, the article)

Is Groupon’s decision to turn down Google bad or brilliant? Two extreme thoughts:

The article “Hard-Coding Bias in Google "Algorithmic" Search Results”, by Harvard professor Benjamin Edelmen, presents strong evidence that Google is intentionally manipulating search results despite promises to the contrary.

Remember the WIRED article in Aug this year named “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet?"

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.

And in conclusion, it predicts that the web is dead. 

EU launches antirust probe into Google

"The issue could boil down to whether Google has a right to program its search engine the way it wants or whether it is abusing the market power it has accumulated by processing about two out of three search requests made worldwide."

I know we’ll spend a lot of time talking about privacy next spring in INFO 205, but over the course of this semester I’ve been reminded several times of this piece from NPR’s On The Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/12/18/06. Aired about a year ago, it does a nice job of addressing the personal implications of a world where the line between information organization and retrieval is continually blurring.

Marti Hearst's discussion of social search in the reading for 11/29 reminded me of Hotpot, which Google announced about a week and a half ago.  At its most basic, the feature is essentially the company's own twist on Yelp: an opportunity for people to share their opinions of restaurants and other local businesses.  One interesting departure, however, is Hotpot's use of a six star rating scale. Six stars signifies "best ever", but users are only allowed to bestow ten of these six star ratings.    

The Michelin guide is the most haughty-tauty of all the restaurant ranking systems.  It is headquartered in Paris, France and has been the platinum standard of fine dining since the very early 1900s. 

Our very own local Berkeley establishment, Chez Panisse, lost its single star this year.

StatSheet recently launched a network of websites devoted to individual college basketball teams. All the content and articles on these individual sites are apparently written by software not humans. The founder of StatSheet, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as "Robot Army" and this type of writing activity as "robo journalism."

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.