Posts with keyword: search

12 entries

Saying Goodbye to ExpertsExchange! Creating a Personal Block List with Kynetx

Tue Feb 15 14:16:00 2011

Yesterday Google announced a Chrome extension that allows you to create a personal block list of Web site URLs. The idea is to reduce spam in search results by letting users block sites from their personal search results. The extension also sends this information to Google so that they can crowdsource their search spam efforts. But what if you want to do this Firefox or Internet Explorer? Or on Yahoo! or Bing? Kynetx to the rescue! When we saw the Google extension we thought "great idea" but we can do better with KRL. KRL is a language that lets
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Taking Search to New Frontiers: Dr. Harry Shum (Microsoft)

Wed Apr 23 19:32:00 2008

Harry Shum(click to enlarge) The Web can be divided into three components: content (pages, images, videos, blogs, feeds), people (readers, writers, creators, commenters), and actions (queries, clicks, pageviews). Current search engines have taken advantages of "keywords" to link those three components together. But the keyword model has reach it's limits. One phenomenon that's challenging keywords is the explosive growth of content. Multimedia content is especially difficult The scale requirements are huge. Another challenge is that the Web is becoming more dynamic: people want to interact. Search engines have a long way to go to satisfy user needs. To make
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Technorati's Dead Too

Thu Dec 6 16:31:00 2007

Crap ad seen at Technorati.com on Dec 6, 2007(click to enlarge) As long as I'm commenting on things that are dead, allow me to add Technorati to the list. They have descended into the dark depths of crap advertising "You've been chosen to get a free laptop computer. Click to accept!" Sheesh. If things are that bad, just shut off the servers, turn off the lights, lock the door, and go home. As long as I'm on my soap box, do you imagine that the intersection of the kinds of people who use Technorati and the morons who'd actually
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Technorati Wins and Losses

Tue May 29 15:03:00 2007

Technorati is one of the tools I use everyday. One of the most important parts of blogging is participating in conversations that are going on the 'Net. Technorati helps me find out when people are responding to something I've written. The good folks at Technorati are a busy bunch. It seems like the site is different almost everyday. Sometimes radically. Recently the layout for what Technorati now calls "reactions" changed. I like the new look and think that much of the important the information easier to find. It's also not as "busy" with ads. Frankly some of the ads
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Finding Quality Blogs

Thu May 10 14:22:00 2007

This talk entitled "Exploring in the Weblog Space by Detecting Informative and Affective Articles" by researchers from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University (see full paper) describes the use of machine learning techniques to classify blogs and blog articles according to the amount of "informative" and "affective" information in the blog. Affective here is a fancy word for "touchy-feely." The authors use various discrimination techniques and give results on which are the best for their purposes. The propose that being able to find blogs and blog articles they classify as "informative" leads to information, usually by experts, and is the kind of
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Podcast Transcripts Via CastingWords

Tue Aug 15 19:11:00 2006

Jon Udell is transcribing his podcasts using CastingWords. (Also see Jon's earlier review of the service.) His bill? $260 for 620 minutes of audio. That's darn cheap. Jon reports that the results are surprisingly accurate, but he edits them to make people read better than they sound and to make them more readable. This process takes an hour or so per episode--almost one-to-one on a time scale. Of course Jon's also spent time editing the audio for the podcast as well. That's a considerable time investment, but the results show quality. Why do this? One answer is that Google
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You Don't Need Your Government Today

Thu Jun 15 10:20:00 2006

Speaking of Utah.gov, it's offline and returning a 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) error. Anyone know what's up? In the meantime, you don't need your government today--go away and come back tomorrow. And as long as we're talking about eGovernment, Google launched a specialized search engine for US Government information. The page can be personalized, if you log in. The personalization includes feeds from various government and non-government news sources as well as the ability to add random RSS feeds.
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Detecting Cloaking in Web Pages

Thu May 25 05:06:00 2006

Baoning Wu from LehighUniversity(click to enlarge) Here's something I'd never heard of before: cloaking. Cloaking is the process of returning different pages to a search engine crawler for a given URL than you return to other users. You can imagine why people intent on getting higher search engine rankings than they deserve might want to do this. When you change the meaning of the page (rather then merely its structure) it's called "semantic cloaking." So, how can you detect semantic cloaking? Baoning Wu from Lehigh University presented work aimed at answering this question. (See the paper.) You can't reliably detect
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Improving Search Results Inside the Enterprise

Thu May 25 04:31:00 2006

Pavel Dmitriev from Cornell(click to enlarge) Organizations often use search engines as part of their corporate information infrastructure. The problem is that inside corporations creating Web pages is typically much more difficult than it is on the Web at large and consequently, links to pages are a much less useful indicator of page relevance. How do you solve this problem? I attended a presentation by Pavel Dmitriev from Cornell that discusses one such solution. (See the paper.) Within an organization, users are much more likely to be interested in improving the results from a search engine. Dmitriev and his co-authors
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Navigating with Tags

Tue Apr 18 19:30:00 2006

Jon Udell has pointed to a new set of services that InfoWorld is using to help people navigate the information on their Web site. They're beta right now, but Jon expects they'll go live on the main InfoWorld site sometime in the future. The place to start is with iws and search for something you're interested in. Once you've got results, clicking on any of the tags will limit the search results to just those with those particular tags. This uses the second tool, iwx. This is a very fast way to narrow in on the relevant articles for
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Christopher Payne on Windows Live (ETech 2006)

Wed Mar 8 13:41:00 2006

Christopher Payne from Microsoft is giving a demo of Microsoft's new live.com services. He's standing on stage in a suit. The visual discontinuity of that is jarring. His assistant, Frederick, is adding new widgets to a page, very AJAXy. The visuals are pretty slick. Live search let's you search within the results. There's a smart scroll bar that dynamically grabs information as needed so that you don't have to click "next" and "prev" to get other results. Image search has been completely rebuilt. Nice slider bars allow you to reduce or expand the size of thumbnails in image search.
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Hans Peter Brondmo on Plum (ETech 2006)

Wed Mar 8 12:35:00 2006

Hans Peter Brondmo is speaking on "First You Google, But Then What?" When you have a question, you direct it to the great oracle: the search engines. The problem is that you can't make those results personal, collect them, rearrange them, and share them. Plum is a system for building collections of things that you find on the 'Net and share them. You can also collect from applications on your machine, including email, photos, music, etc. Has Peter demos how the tool (called a plummer) can automatically build a playlist of songs you're listening to. Plum also creates a
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