generality of query terms

An excellent blogger, named Daniel Tunkelang, recently brought up a discussion, within a discussion, on determining the exploratory nature of a query. He questions whether this is worth it. This is a very interesting focus. Ryen White has published a number of papers on determining exploratory style queries, and the effect of expertese on search style, which are very interesting and certainly related to this challenge.

The excerpt that daniel refers to, from another blog, is on how search engines should react to the terms 'vietnam travel' in comparison to 'vietnam population'. For the former, Yahoo, Google, and Live all bring up different top results, but all based around travel guides. For the latter, Google and Live try to answer the question directly. All three link to the wikipedia page on vietnamese demographics.

Term generality is an interesting case in this example. The term 'travel' has a broader network in wordnet, than population. Naturally, the more generic a term, like travel, the more broadly it will be used on the web, and so naturally generic terms bring out less specific web results, or greater variation in the highest ranked pages. Live search provides 'related queries' for both, where the travel query has many query expansions, the population query provides a series of sibling queries, like korean population.

Instead, however, determining the generality of a term, or its breadth of use on the web, calls for a good opportunity to directly and intentionally provide diversity in search results. That is, instead of letter the breadth of use on the web naturally lead to varience in results, to specifically expose the varience in results, and aim to cover them.

From an exploratory serach perspective, its interesting because it would be different to interactive query expansion, in that the search engine would be providing key results from each of the recommended query expansions, and so the interaction would be different. It, instead, may convert to exploratory behaviour, rather than directed re-querying.

Tracking people with phones: an example of good

There was both a wonderful result, and a brilliant information integration story today in the news. An girl was found by taking approximate GPS signal locations and google maps street view. First, brilliant that she was found safely. Second, this is the sort of thing that people are both scared of being unduely monitored. Here is a case, though, when you really do want the right people to be able to find you through simply the signal of your mobile phone. I like the additional notion here, however, that the street view was important in finding seeing which buildings, such a hotel, were in that area. Although they knew where abouts she was roughly, the street view helped them stake out possible locations that would fit with the abductor travelling.

anyway. good all round i think.

Karen Spärck Jones' homepage gone :(

I'm a little bit sad to have to edit Wikipedia entry on Karen Spärck Jones and remove the link to her home page on University of Cambridge Computer Science department's web space, as it appears to have been removed. This would have been a nice snapshot of history to have kept online, even if they have added an obituary and CV to their site.

Enjoying the holiday break - I hope you are too.

Quiet Blog

Despite promising to be more vocal on my blog, a very unsmooth move of house means that i have barely seen the internet! I have been searching a lot though. which box is X in, etc. More to come here soon. Max

Search Result Layouts

With the release of Yahoo's search monkey, and Google's Search Wiki, its been pretty exciting to see big companies (beyond Ask.com who set off with some novel aspects like adding a thumbnail per result) experimenting heavily with their layouts. I didn't even notice for ages something different that Live Search does - if a Wikipedia entry is a result, then it puts the whole first paragraph of the entry as the text snippit, regardless of how long it is (it seems). This appears to have occured because the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry is perhaps the best overview of that topic you're gonna get. This is contrary to the policy, promoted academically by White et al in SIGIR02, that putting the sentences that includes your keywords in the result is currently the best policy.

Search Monkey is interesting, too, because it allows you, as a user, to control how your web search results come up. If you want a special view of imdb results, or wikipedia results, you just include the available extra template. It will be interesting to see if representations stablise any time soon to produce a new standard after the now familiar: name, snippit, link combo.

I'm Back...

I've been totally off radar now for 3 months according to my last post! Where did it all go wrong? I blame the thesis! I've been all over the place recently, interning at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and trying to finish of my PhD work, that I put myself down into a work hole, until i realised that i'd cut myself off from some of the best resources available to me: like Daniel Tunkelang's Blog: The Noisy Channel. Step 1, obviously, was to read the >150 posts of his I was behind on. Always worth a read.

During that time, however, I've been stewing over a lot of cool stuff that I've seen including some pretty interesting events in London. I'll get right back on the horse with the next post!

Exploratory Search or Cognitive Overload

I've been pretty quiet here on the blog recently. I hear that's what happens when you are writing up your thesis!

Anyway, recently I wrote about how cognitive load theory might help us understand any negative effects of adding more exploratory search features. The example I used was that faceted search might overload users with too much information, given all the metadata that is presented. Well I have written a technical report on it. So give it a read if you like!