i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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.

The sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically and semantically valid sentence in English and a great example of the challenges homophony presents for IR. Although a search engine would index this as 8 instances of the same word, there are actually three variations of “buffalo”:

According to a recent interview, Aphex Twin revealed he has 6 albums completed. To quote the man himself:

I've got six completed. Two are very non-commercial, abstract, modular-synthesis, field recordings-- those I finished four years ago. Another one isMelodies From Mars, which I redid about three years ago. There's one of stuff I won't go into, a comp of old tracks which is never really finished and always changing, and then one I'm working on now. There are also loads of tracks which don't belong anywhere.

 http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge

Google recently revealed an overhaul of its back-end web indexing infrastructure, called Caffeine, making search results “50 percent fresher”. The old system was split into layers that did a series of batch processes on new Web content.