Sarah Vogel’s comment on yesterday’s post got me thinking about recall-oriented search. She wrote about preferring Boolean queries for complex searches because they gave her a sense for when she really had exhausted a particular topic, something that’s often required for medical literature reviews. But we really have multiple problems here, that it may be useful to decouple: one is the issue of coverage (did we find all there was to find?) and the other is ranking (the order in which documents are shown).

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Every once in a while a Twitter query turns up something completely unexpected. I suppose that’s one reason for having them.  My query on all things PubMed recently turned up the following gem: a blog entitled PubMed Search Strategies. What is it? A list of queries. What? PubMed Queries, in all the Boolean glory. The latest pair of posts are pharmacoepidemiology — keywords, and its paternal twin, pharmacoepidemiology — MeSH.  The queries run for 39 and 13 terms, respectively. No average 2.3 word Web searches these.

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I just watched an interesting webcast by David Gillikin, Chief of NLM’s Bibliographic Services, about the upcoming changes to the PubMed interface, followed by extensive Q&A. There was some confusion about how existing functionality would be mapped to the new interface, and understandable concern that the familiar interface would become dramatically less so. From an outsider’s perspective, the changes that were implemented looked reasonable, reducing the clutter of the existing design with some simplified controls and a more modern look and feel.

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William Webber recently wrote an interesting analysis of the reports of the original Cranfield experiments that were so influential in establishing the primacy of evaluation in information seeking, and in particular a certain kind of evaluation methodology around recall and precision based on a ground truth. One reason that the experiments were so influential was that they provided strong evidence that previously-held assumptions about the effectiveness of various indexing techniques were unfounded. Specifically, the experiments showed that full-text indexing outperformed controlled vocabularies. While this result was shocking in the 1950s, 50 years later it seems banal. Or almost.

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Having seen the recent news of gun-toting protesters at health reform meetings, I got into a discussion with my wife about gun control, and you know where that can lead. Yes, that’s right, to exploratory search. I had some hypotheses about the relationship between gun control and crime, and wanted to find some data to test them. I needed to find some crime statistics by state, and to cross-reference it with some aspects of states, including the degree of urbanization, population density, laws, etc. While I thought the odds of finding a canned analysis of my hypotheses was small given the amount of time I was willing to devote to the problem, I did try a few obvious queries. No luck.

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My declaration of the difficulty of the solution to a challenge posed by Eleanor was premature. The problem was difficult, but apparently not impossible to solve. I wrote the previous post before Francine found a solution using classic berrypicking techniques, further confirming the utility of using more search engines than just Google to increase the diversity of results. Of course now that she has linked to that page (particularly in such a prominent blog :-) )  Google may promote it in its ranking and make that result more findable. (I am not sure about the no-follow restriction on comment links, but none the less the likelihood of someone else linking or bookmarking that page has just increased.) Francine’s discovery through exploratory search thereby increases the odds that others will now find that document through Social Search.

Yesterday Eleanor posted a great example of a difficult exploratory search. The goal was to answer a question, but not only was it difficult to figure out how to articulate the search effectively, but also it was not clear whether the answer even exists. The difficulty of articulation stems from the fact that even in combination, the terms that Eleanor used to characterize the information need retrieved documents that were similar to the desired information, but were lacking some key aspect.

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Some friends of mine believe that “search” has been solved. They explain that they can almost always find what they are looking for, and quickly, using keyword search. My life is much more frustrating! There are all sorts of things I look for and can’t find. An additional source of frustration is that I don’t know when to give up, when to conclude that what I’m looking for isn’t there.

Recently I had this experience with a question I thought would make a good blog challenge:

Does there exist a polyhedron such that all of its faces are nonconvex?

If you can think up a proof or example, please post your answer in the comments section, but with “Spoiler alert:” at its start. If you find an answer through a web search, give us the URL and tell us your search strategy. A URL pointing to discussion of this exact question would also be acceptable, even if the discussion doesn’t provide an answer.

I’d like to give a prize, and thought about various prizes (a Tcho chocolate bar? treating the winner to coffee? …) but decided in true blog spirit to ask for suggestions for an appropriate prize.

P.S. I thought about defining  terms such as “polyhedron” and “nonconvex” here.  But since this is a search and/or geometry challenge, any readers who do not know the meaning of these 3D geometry terms can still participate. I would be particularly delighted if someone who did not understand the question initially was able to find a solution.

Update: An answer has been found. Congratulations, Francine. However I realize I mixed up two searches, and this one isn’t as hard as I thought I remembered.

This has been a busy summer for the ReBoard project: Scott Carter, Jake Biehl and I spent a bunch of time building and debugging our code, and  Wunder-intern Stacy ran a great study for us, looking at how people use their office whiteboards before and after we deployed our system. We’ll be blogging more about some of the interesting details in the coming months, but I wanted to touch on a topic that occurred to me as we’re working on the CHI 2010 submission.

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The USE SIG of ASIS&T is celebrating its 10th anniversary at the annual ASIS&T conference in Vancouver, BC this year with a symposium on collaborative information seeking, followed by a plenary reception. Continue Reading