Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From The Noisy Channel
Minimalist Models for Search Ranking
Search application developers put a lot of effort into optimizing the ranking of search results, especially in areas like ecommerce, where incremental ranking improvements...
From The Noisy Channel
The Ultimate Question
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years of calculation to determine that the answer to the “ultimate question...
From The Noisy Channel
Giving Bard a Coding Interview
Thanks to this post by Behdad Esfahbod, I’ve been reminiscing about an interview problem I used to use at Google and LinkedIn. Google just announced that Bard can...
From The Noisy Channel
Exploring Search Intent as a Duality
Most of us who work on search focus on its engineering or product aspects. But I feel it’s valuable to also look at search philosophically. I’m no expert on philosophy...
From The Noisy Channel
Effective Query Triage
Search evaluation requires a variety of strategies.Evaluating search experiments, such as A/B tests, should focus on the size and direction of their impact.Alerting...
From The Noisy Channel
Helping Searchers Satisfice through Query Understanding
This morning, I had the opportunity to present an invited talk at Walmart’s AI Summit. Not surprisingly, a lot of folks were excited about the potential of ChatGPT...
From The Noisy Channel
A Guest Post from ChatGPT
Since Medium decided to allow AI-generated content as long as it’s clearly disclosed as such, I decided to give it a whirl.Prompt EngineeringMy first prompt was...
From The Noisy Channel
Throwing Needles Into Haystacks
Searching for relevant results has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, most searchers have it easier than that, since haystacks don’t index...
From The Noisy Channel
Upcoming Search Classes
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2023 is off to a great start for you.Are you excited to kick off the new year by learning more about search?If so, you’re in luck...
From The Noisy Channel
Is The Valley Getting Cannier?
In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase “uncanny valley” (不気味の谷 in the original Japanese) to denote the phenomenon that when a machine seems close-but...
From The Noisy Channel
Attention, Expertise, Trust
I’m old enough to remember when the web was new, and honest enough to admit that I was a skeptic at the time. Fortunately, I was wrong, and I owe my career to the...
From The Noisy Channel
What is Not Search?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Search is unquestionably my hammer, so it’s easy for me to frame everything as a search problem. After...
From The Noisy Channel
Let’s Talk About Resume Screening
With apologies to Bruno, we don’t talk about resume screening. But we should.Resume screening is usually the first step in the hiring process for active candidates...
From The Noisy Channel
Technical Interviewing: Be Better
Technical interviewing is hard, but that’s no excuse for it to be so terrible. Since candidates generally don’t have much leverage to negotiate the interview process...
From The Noisy Channel
Query Similarity
I started writing about query understanding in 2016, working my way up from low-level concerns like language identification and character normalization to higher...
From The Noisy Channel
Information Extraction
When we index content for search, it’s natural to think in terms of documents. But searchers aren’t necessarily looking for documents. They’re looking for information...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Understanding
This publication is a series of posts devoted to content understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Moderation
Many platforms, particularly social media sites and ecommerce marketplaces, establish policies to determine what they consider acceptable content. These platforms...
From The Noisy Channel
Similarity-Sensitive Diversity
In my work on search engines and recommender systems, I’ve thought a lot about entropy and diversity. I named my first blog, The Noisy Channel, after a seminalClaude...
From The Noisy Channel