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.

Continue Reading

Lucky me. I a few months ago I won a ticket to Google I/O by posting a comment on Techcrunch.

Google gave each attendee an Android phone; the new ones are due out this August. The phone came with a one-month SIM card from T-Mobile, including 3G connectivity. It initially looked like a cheap iPhone: the touchscreen doesn’t respond well while scrolling web pages (I still don’t know if it’s a bad hardware or slow software, or a combination), the soft-keyboard is slightly too small and suffers from the same problem as scrolling pages.

Continue Reading

Google claims to want to organize all the world’s information, a role that at least in some part has traditionally been filled by Libraries. Thus it was with some interest that I saw an announcement that there will be a panel  discussion at JCDL 2009, “Google as Library – Redux,” featuring Michael Lesk, Clifford Lynch, and Gretchen Hoffman.

This is surely likely to be a contentious topic, and one that would benefit from contributions of those who may not be able to make it to the conference. Thus the organizers have created a form to collect questions and comments to pose to the panelists.

Please post your questions! Alternatively, please feel free to add them as comments on this post, and I will forward them to the organizers (with or without attribution — your choice!). After the conference, I will summarize the discussion and highlight the interesting bits.

First, I agree with Daniel Tunkelang and many others that this is an important step for Google, an important departure from the ranked list. Hurray! My sense about this way of performing exploratory search is that Google Squared addresses (at least) two different kinds of activity: filtering through structured data, and collecting different instances of some topic. The former, of interest to the set-oriented retrieval crowd, should make it easier to do feature comparison for a variety of domains, typically with some sort of a shopping angle. In this post, I will focus on the second kind, the less structured exploratory search. Continue Reading

Just announced is an interesting new platform from Google, around shared collaboration environments.  Explicitly-shared environments.

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more…Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Now, add a search layer into this rich, shared space, and you’ll have something quite akin to Merrie Morris’ SearchTogether system, which combines real-time awareness with a collaboratively authored results and note set.  Put some algorithmic mediation under that, and you’ll have some of the projects that we’ve been working over the past few years here at FXPAL, which uses real-time actions and behaviors of multiple, explicitly collaborating team members to alter and inform the information that each individual sees.  We think that the ability to put jointly-relevant information on the same real-time page, but also let users explicitly work together in the finding and discovery of that information, is and will continue to be an extremely useful application.

Looks like this space is heating up.

Google recently announced its 2009 Google Fellowship recipients, and I was pleased to find a name I recognize among them. Nicholas Chen (University of Maryland) won the fellowship for HCI. Nick’s been doing very interesting research on multi-screen reading devices (check out this CHI 2008 video) and pen-based computing. Congrats to Nick on this impressive achievement! It’s great to see this interesting part of the HCI field being highlighted in this fashion.

It is ironic, however, that there is no award for research in anything resembling information seeking support  systems. There are awards for  research areas such as cloud computing, machine vision, distributed systems, and natural language processing, but nothing integrative that could be used to improve information seeking interfaces. Sigh.

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.

Continue Reading

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?

Continue Reading

Google recently unveiled its public data search that allows people to generate charts of data from public sources. Nifty. But it doesn’t seem to allow the user to customize the visualization by selecting representations, date ranges, etc., or for data to be extracted for further analysis. It would be great if I could run my own statistical analyses on the data, or generate visualizations with, for example, Many Eyes.

Another problem I see with the data is lack of transparency: I couldn’t see any way to browse the various datasets they have indexed. Instead, it seems that you have to stumble onto them by chance. Nice for serendipity, not so nice for exploratory search.

One of my ongoing information retrieval interests revolves around the relationship between the search engine user and the search engine advertiser.  In a search engine that is supported by advertising, there is a natural conflict of interest that exists between the users and the advertisers.  Users want to find the information that is most relevant to themselves and advertisers want the users to see the information that is most financially rewarding to the advertiser. These two sets of information do not always overlap.

Continue Reading