i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Is Qwiki the multimedia search engine of the future?

For those of you in Section C, you may recall when Rami mentioned that a startup named Qwiki, working on a multimedia information retrieval service, had won the grand prize of the venture competition at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.

They have now moved into alpha, allowing testers to use their system and provide feedback. You can request an invite at http://www.qwiki.com or email me for one.

What is Qwiki?

When you type in phrases that are more natural to you but usually less processable by computers, search engines most of the times provide bad results. Google for instance gives you as the first result a website with the title "How to Figure Out What Size Turkey to Buy". To be fair, Google started to provide information such as population at the top of the search results when typing in more feasible questions. However, there is another search engine which specialized on quanitative data which is provided when querying actual questions. E.g.

 What gives a national park unit it's parkiness? Each park should satisfy these requirements: 

We've talked a lot about Moby Dick as an example of a narrative document, but Chapter 32 of Moby Dick deserves a place slightly farther to the right in the document type spectrum. Chapter 32 is all about cetology, the study of whales and dolphins.

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?

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/

 http://berkeley.worldcat.org/title/semantic-senselab-implementing-the-vision-of-the-semantic-web-in-neuroscience/oclc/506082546&referer=brief_results

What is being organized – things, information about things, information?

Neuroscience research data

Ontology design

What is the scope and scale of the domain?

DH's blog post made me think of a very weird sports franchise snafu that occurred fifteen years ago.