Thanks to Nathan Treloar’s post on search user experience, I came across a set of Flickr pages created by Peter Morville dedicated to documenting user interface designs for search interfaces. His goal is “collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns” to inform subsequent design. The pages collect many images of well-designed sites, grouped into about 20 different categories (e.g., Faceted Navigation, Pagination, Clustering, E-Commerce, etc.) with annotations by Peter highlighting some important aspects of each design.

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Yahoo! Search Pad was released last week without much ado, certainly not to the kind of media buzz surrounding Google and MS announcements. Search Pad collects documents you click on in search results, and allows you to annotate them with notes. The interface, while simple, is not necessarily easy to figure out. It took me some time to poke around and figure out how it works. It some ways, it is similar to Bing’s history mechanism. It’s more useful than the history mechanism because it allows the user to type notes or copy pieces of documents into the Search Pad to help with document triage and other recall-oriented aspects of exploratory search. On the other hand, the history mechanism works in a more intuitive way, and keeps track of documents you’ve already seen when you re-visit a query.

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I dodged being empaneled on a jury, and I made it to IBM Almaden to attend most of NPUC. I did miss the talk by Brad Myers, which I’ll have to view on video, but got to see most of the other presentations and the poster/demo session. One demo I found particularly interesting was Mira Dontcheva‘s Blueprint work. Blueprint is an Eclipse plugin for Flex programming that allows people to search for snippets of code directly from the IDE, and displays them in an overlay or side bar. Blueprint makes it possible to search the web with an interface similar to the typical auto-complete functionality. Furthermore, because it understands Flex syntax, its ranking should more accurate than a regular full-text index that happens to contain code. When you select a search result, Blueprint inserts it into your code, and automatically annotates the code to include the URL at which the snippet was found so that you can re-visit that page later.

Adobe Blueprint screenshot

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Thanks to @davefauth I came across an interesting blog post by Naumi Haque on the diminishing returns of collaboration. The basis of his thesis is that as the number of explicit collaborators in a project increases past a certain point, the overall utility decreases due in part to costs associated with maintaining the collaboration. This reminds me of the notion of group coherence that Morten Hertzum wrote about in his paper on Collaborative Information Seeking. He focused on the need for teams to devote resources to ground the collaboration to prevent loss of coherence (and thus shared goals and values).

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We are happy to see that the summer issue of the AIEDAM journal is now published (editors:  Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Mark D. Gross). It contains our article on the electronic-paper-based Post-Bits system, “Prototyping a tangible tool for design: Multimedia e-paper sticky notes.”

So, what are Post-Bits? We were looking for new ways to use e-paper, and at the same time, we were (and are) very interested in tangible tools for enhancing all kinds of work. This project started when Takashi Matsumoto interned here at FXPAL.  You can see Takashi talking about Post-Bits in the video below the fold:

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In his comment to an earlier post, Miles Efron reiterated the usefulness of the various TREC competitions to fostering IR research. I agree with him (and with others) that TREC has certainly been a good incubator both in its annual competition and in follow-on studies that use its data in other ways.  And, as Miles points out,we have seen a proliferation of collections: everything from the original newspaper articles to blogs, video, large corpora, etc.

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Miles Efron posted recently on his take on the progress of the IR field in response to a question posted by Andrew Dillon at the last ASIST conference. Miles’ take was that progress was indeed being made for two reasons: the SIGIR conference has become more competitive over the years, and the diversity of corpora in the TREC umbrella has also increased. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to hear the question or the subsequent discussion, but my guess as to what Andrew Dillon actually meant was not a question of statistical significance, but rather one of magnitude.

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Marti Hearst‘s new book, Search User Interfaces, is out, as Daniel Tunkelang reported earlier. The book covers a range of topics related to interaction around information seeking, including topics such as design, evaluation, models of information seeking, query reformulation, etc. It also discusses emerging trends: Mobile Search Interfaces, Multimedia (although this field has arguably been around long enough to no longer be emerging), Social Search, and natural-language queries. The Social Search section discusses collaborative filtering, recommendation systems, and collaborative search, describing several systems along the full range of depth of mediation.

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[“ubuntu”] describes humanity as “being-with-others” and prescribes what “being-with-others” should be all about. Ubuntu emphasises sharing, consensus, and togetherness.

according to ubuntu.com. Over the last two days I have experienced a palpable lack of togetherness with this beast in an attempt to explore the world beyond Windows. I have some Grails/Java code that I wanted to try running on a linux box rather than on Windows (on which I had no problem getting it to work). Grails is a dynamic language that requires run-time compiler support, so it must use the JDK rather than the JRE.

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In their JCDL 2009 paper titled “Cost and Benefit Analysis of Mediated Enterprise Search” Wu et al. described a cost-benefit analysis of call center activity. The goal was to understand when an experts should help “consultants” who are handling phone calls from customers. The idea was that experts could make improvements in search results of queries run by consultants by identifying useful documents; the challenge is to make effective use of the more expensive experts’ time.

This seems like a great opportunity to implement a collaborative search interface that would mediate the collaboration between the people handling the phone calls and the technical experts. In addition to screen sharing (to help the expert understand the problem), the system might provide the expert with additional tools to facilitate searches and to reuse previously-found results.