I am curious to play with Microsoft’s Kumo when it comes out. It looks from the screenshot in this CNET article like they’re trying to come up with some aspects to the search, which should make it easier to make sense of large results sets. I am a bit surprised that there isn’t more hype about it, compared, say, with what Wolfram | Alpha was able to generate.

The other interesting bit is how the PowerSet technology will be integrated and what its ultimate impact will be. My interest is not only technical but also personal, as a several of the PowerSet technical staff had worked at FXPAL a few years ago. They’ll probably appreciate the confusion this name is likely to cause us here at FXPAL  in the near future.

I just poked around and found an interesting Health search site that’s part of Microsoft Live. Although the blank landing page is a sharp blow to the senses coming from the nice Manatees currently inhabiting the Live Search page, once you enter a query, the interface is actually quite pleasant. I haven’t played with it for real, but it seems to populate some aspects (Conditions, Personal Health, Drugs & Substances, Alternative Medicine, and Nutrition, with others available through a link), organizes some featured content along with a set of links to medical sites, allows search results and searches to be saved, and shows some ads.

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In his resent post, Daniel Tunkelang was cautiously optimistic about Google’s forays into HCIR, suggesting that Google’s “baby steps” are leading in the right direction. I agree that it would be a great innovation if Google weaned itself (or allowed its users the option) off the single ranked list precision-oriented search paradigm, and made it easier to explore the results in a variety of ways.

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The PARC Forum last week featured Timothy Childs of TCHO with a cameo appearance by (ahem) me. The talk was part of a “Risk Takers” series at the PARC Forums, hosted by Linda Jacobson (who Timothy and I both knew from Web3D long ago – small world!).

The talk was primarily about TCHO’s re-invention of the chocolate production process, starting with the cacao farmers in countries like Peru and Ghana. The FXPAL/TCHO collaboration, which focuses on applying emerging technologies in a real-world industrial setting (the chocolate factory) is discussed starting at about 23:00 in the streamed video.

Sadly, though we do a lot of multi-modal media and interface work here, we are not yet equipped to provide chocolate tastings on this blog.

Noto bene: you might want to FF past some start-up kerfuffle (recalcitrant new laptop, USB drive troubles, projector connector troubles, finally solved by Ed Chi to the rescue with just the right cable). Talk really starts around 1:30.

Theobromine molecule

There is an interesting trend on the web (that I may be the last one to notice) of tools to save your search results. The purpose of these tools to is to do what bookmarks where invented to do, but to do so more effectively. The idea is that by putting useful or representative pieces of the pages you found onto some page or set of pages, you can get back to them easily, share them with others, etc. The number of such tools is growing. There is the Google Notebook, of course. And the Yahoo! Search Pad and EverNote. And now something called Snipi. Continue Reading

There is a great line in a paper by Reddy and Jansen about search:

information seeking is just as much about producing new knowledge–a creative and inventive activity–as it is about finding extant information.

This breaks out beautifully in terms of the dichotomy about finding and exploring: finding is the canonical “known item search” so well executed by Google and Yahoo!, whereas exploring is about creating new knowledge. Exploring is a much more complex activity, that cannot be boiled down to a short input text box for input and a ranked list of documents for output. It’s probably too late to change terminology, but this distinction is important to keep in mind when designing information seeking interfaces.

In Google’s 2008 annual letter, Sergey Brinn writes “Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant.” This seemingly cautious statement reveals Google’s narrow focus on precision-oriented search. It is plausible that as systems get better and better at understanding the searcher’s intent, they will be more likely to identify useful documents. Sergey’s take on search is that in his childhood he “could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds.”

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If you’d like a look inside a high-tech chocolate factory, as well as an update on what’s been going on with the FXPAL/TCHO research collaboration (hey! you got chocolate on my research!), Timothy Childs of TCHO and I are giving a talk at the PARC Forum tomorrow, May 7, at 4 PM. The PARC Forum is open to the public; directions are here.

In a recent blog post, Vegard Sandvold proposed a taxonomy of search systems based on two dimensions — algorithmic vs. user-powered and information accessibility. The first dimension represents a tradeoff between systems and people in terms of who does the information seeking, and the second one measures the ease of finding information in some search space. His blog post was intended to solicit discussion, and, in that spirit, here is my take on his ideas.

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Last week I blogged about Google’s public data visualizations, and suggested that the data lacked transparency that prevented Google’s visualizations from being used critically. Daniel Tunkelang pointed out that the source of the data is linked to the visualization. And indeed it is. So what’s the problem?

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