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
I agree that the search engine can only do so much to make up for poorly structured data.
I agree that the search engine can only do so much to make up for poorly structured data. If you look at one my “shopping is hard” post, you’ll see that my top...
From The Noisy Channel
Why is it so hard to sort by price?
A common use case for online shopping is searching for products — say, coffee makers — and then sorting the results by price, from low to high, in order to find...
From The Noisy Channel
Analyze This!
Product development work should be data-driven — or, to be more precise, data-informed. We live in an age of science, which means that we should use data to resolve...
From The Noisy Channel
Shopping is Hard, Let’s go Searching!
In 1992, Mattel released the infamous Teen Talk Barbie, most known — and rightfully mocked — for saying “Math is hard, let’s go shopping!” Actually, that’s a paraphrase...
From My Biased Coin
Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms, Submission Server
A reminder that the deadline for SOSA 2019 is August 16. The submission server is live and running (and we already have some submissions!). The easychair link...
From The Noisy Channel
I’d hope that a job description would align with these kinds of questions.
I’d hope that a job description would align with these kinds of questions. It’s one of the reasons to publish questions — the interviewing process shouldn’t be...
From The Noisy Channel
Interview Questions for Search Relevance Engineers and Product Managers
Technical interviewing is hard, and it’s a subject I’m very passionate about personally.But this post isn’t about technical interviewing in general. It’s specifically...
From The Noisy Channel
A/B Testing for Search is Different
A/B testing is a critical tool for improving search products. While A/B testing has limitations and shouldn’t be the only analytical method you use, it’s the single...
From The Noisy Channel
You’re welcome, Dima!
You’re welcome, Dima!The best technique I know for encouraging users to enter natural language searches is to promote them through autocomplete. For example, on...
From My Biased Coin
STOC Lunch Sign-ups, and Reminder
Just a reminder that next week is the 50th STOC in Los Angeles! You can still come and register on site, so please come -- the program is STOC-full of good stuff...
From The Noisy Channel
Query Understanding and Chatbots
In this series, I’ve focused on the context of traditional search applications, which are the main beneficiaries of better query understanding. But given the rapid...
From The Noisy Channel
Query Understanding and Voice Interfaces
On the surface, using a voice interface for search doesn’t seem that different from typing text into a search box.Converting speech to text and vice versa is aAmazon...
From My Biased Coin
Sympoisum on Simplicity in Algorithms, 2019
Jeremy Fineman and I are co-chairing the 2019 Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms, the second year of this new endeavor. It's nicely co-located with SODA, and...
From My Biased Coin
STOC 2018, Early Reg Deadline
Just a reminder that the early registration for STOC 2018 is June 1. Besides wanting that early registration discount price, you really want to also make your...
From The Noisy Channel
Indeed, there are lots of challenges with faceted search in practice.
Indeed, there are lots of challenges with faceted search in practice.With regard to the three problems you raise:1) I agree that faceted search has a way of unlocking...
From My Biased Coin
SIGACT-Related Stuff
Some SIGACT related-stuff of import:First, there's an election going on!!! If you're an ACM/SIGACT member, you've probably gotten an e-mail about this, and it's...
From The Noisy Channel
Question Answering
When we talk about search, we have traditionally thought in terms of search results being documents or products. Searchers, however, increasingly think of search...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Introducing the First UA Ambassadors
By Don Hollander, Secretary General of the UASG The issue of Universal Acceptance of all domain names and all email addresses is well understood by members of the...
From The Noisy Channel
Search Results Clustering
Search queries that express broad intent often return intractably large result sets. We’ve already discussed faceted search as a way to help users narrow theirScatter...
From My Biased Coin