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.    

Published Monday, the NYT wrote about the Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL). This article touches upon many topics from recent lectures!

Language Understanding has been studied for years. But so far, progresses are only made within a limited domain (think of controlled vocabulary).

In this article, researchers at CMU, Google and Yahoo come together ambitiously trying to build up an ontology space that could capture language meanings based on contents from billions of webpages.

The Deep Web (also called Deepnet, the invisible Web, dark Web or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.