i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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.    

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.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/business/media/16adco.html?_r=1&ref=te...

Other than a traditional search box for information retrieval, it is not a new idea to employ much richer user interfaces such as voice search, or visual search.

A year ago, Google introduced a smartphone application that lets users take photos of objects and get search results in return. Now they start testing water by working with five national brands to see how consumers interact with a brand.

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?

A Contextual Discovery Engine is a search which does a context sensitive searches so that even the information which is present in unstructured data can be retrieved. This not only searches for terms which are similar in the syntax and meaning but it will also search for everything that has been used in a similar context. It will then group the searches by the context.

To take an example from the website of such a search engine www.sophiasearch.com, Java can stand for

Several weeks ago, the Oxford University Press conceded that because of the internet, there probably won't be a physical print version of the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7970391/Oxford-English-Dictionary-will-not-be-printed-again.html

I came across the following article: "Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload" 

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/02/ev-williams-twitter-will-actually-help-information-overload/

Even a legendary visionary like Vannevar Bush might have been taken aback had he visited the VMworld conference held last week.
 Three ideas that will enable the seamless flow of information, that integrate humans with the world of digital data. There are no definite boundaries anymore. Are we becoming like human  computers , or are they becoming computer humans!

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.