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
On Search Leadership
As a high-class consultant, I don’t just talk to companies about the technical aspects of search. I also help them them address organizational challenges.For example...
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The Free Advice Club
The first rule of the Free Advice Club is: you talk about the Free Advice Club! Not like that other club.But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve had an extremelyMedium...
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Using AI to Understand Search Intent
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post advocating the use of AI for query understanding. I argued that holistic query understanding with embeddings and deep learning...
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The Eternal Quest for Meaning
In 1668, John Wilkins published An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. In it, he proposed a universal language that would represent every...
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Ranking vs. Relevance
Most folks who work on search worry about relevance. But it’s surprisingly difficult to find a useful definition of relevance.Defining RelevanceMerriam-Webster ...
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Putting Search Ranking in Perspective
For feeds and recommendations, ranking is critical. All the inputs are implicit, so machine-learned ranking is the only practical way to optimize engagement.Search...
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New Choice
In improv, there’s a fun game called “new choice”. At any point during the improvised scene, the host can call for a “new choice”. The player who last spoke has...
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AI for Query Understanding
In the past decade, the incredible progress in word embeddings and deep learning has fueled an interest in neural information retrieval. An increasing number of...
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Query Understanding
This publication is a series of posts devoted to query understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them...
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Recall: Size Isn’t Everything
Recall is a key measure of search quality that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. But how does a search engine recognize when recall is a problem?Size...
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The 3 Rs of Search: Relevance, Recall, and Ranking
In grade school, we were taught the three Rs: reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. In search, we can be thankful that the three Rs actually start with the letter R...
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In Search of Recall
Search developers tend to focus most of their efforts on the first page of results. As a result, they prioritize investment in ranking models, with the goal ofprecision...
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Putting Users Back In Control
Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel recently published a piece in Foreign Affairs, which they ambitiously titled “How to Save Democracy From Technology...
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Facets of Faceted Search
Faceted search is a fascinating topic. It’s a standard feature of site search, and one could write an entire book on the subject. In this post, I’ll focus on some...
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Expanding on Explore-Exploit
A few years ago, I proposed a non-adversarial ad-supported model: an explore-exploit model, applicable to search engines and feeds, that aligns the interests of...
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Wolf, thank you for these additional points.
Wolf, thank you for these additional points. I agree that Peter Norvig’s post, while very educational, is a starting point to learn about spelling correction but...
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Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!
In 1984, Robin Williams starred in Moscow on the Hudson as a Russian saxophonist who decides to defect from the USSR during a shopping trip to a New York department...
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Learning from Friction to Improve the Search Experience
When we design search applications, we aspire to make the user experience frictionless. A search engine should “just work”, enabling searchers to easily express...
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Thanks. And sorry that slide was cryptically brief.
Thanks. And sorry that slide was cryptically brief. What I mean is that spelling correction should not restrict itself to correcting each token separately. Many...
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