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.

This is interesting for all who fell in love with 202 topics: Google is searching for an intern who can do exactly what we have been learning and practicing for the last 4 months...

http://www.google.com/jobs/students/us/internships/eng/librarian-internship-cambridge/index.html

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.

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."

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.    

One interesting service that provides an ontology for common things is Freebase (which is now part of Google). You can look for a concept/person/place and Freebase will tell you different domains in which the concept is used. For example, if you look for Berkeley, you can refine your search for Berkeley (USA), Berkeley (UK), or Berkeley (University). You can go crazy and see that all the information that Freebase has about Berkeley is available as an RDF file.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-health-update.html

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.