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 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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What does it mean to collaborate while searching?

There are many different ways to characterize collaborative information seeking, many dimensions on which collaborative search systems can be categorized.

For the past few years Jeremy Pickens and I have been thinking that our model of collaborative exploratory search needs some further explication. Or maybe we’re just trying to understand it better ourselves. We have found that to explain what our model is, we have to simultaneously explain what our model is not.  This has led to numerous discussions not only about the various dimensions of collaboration, but also about the relative importance among those dimensions for distinguishing between systems.

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Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions about exploratory search on this blog and in comments on The Noisy Channel. One way to look at exploratory search (and there are many others!) is to separate issues of interaction from issues of retrieval. The two are complementary: for example, recently Daniel Tunkelang posted about using sets rather than ranked lists as a way of representing search results. This has implications on one hand for how the retrieval engine identifies promising documents, and on the other for how results are to be communicated to the user, and how the user should interact with them.

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The ACM Digital Libary is an invaluable research resource for a wide range of academic disciplines. I would find it hard to write papers without it. Invaluable as it is, it could be more valuable still by supporting not just use by its subscribers, but also research by its subscribers.

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Max Wilson recently commented on an article by Zhang et al on time series analysis of search logs.  (Thanks to Daniel for the web link.) This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, in particular for finding evidence of exploratory search in the logs.  Max notes that the average session length is just under three interactions, and concludes that this really amounts to a single query/selection interaction. If that’s so, then the average behavior  characterized in the Zhang paper is not in fact exploratory.

I was looking forward to reading the paper, but my excitement was short-lived:

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