sitting in a room with a lot of information and interesting people, yet they stay silent. most of the time. left with the feeling i just got to hear the tip of the iceberg. 09wsdm, a split-off of the www conference serial, i was told (this year in madrid), reminded me that there are real world problems of all sort to dig for information. someone told me he spotted greg linden, so i hoped he would write a summary. guess i have to wait.

susan dumais from ms research does interesting work and is quite a source of information.

from her and her colleagues studies you can learn that for more than 40% of clicks don't lead to satisfaction.

ranking: date by far the most common sort field. 50 - 80% of page visits are re-visits | thinking outside the (search)box

google is aiming to translate any language on the web. well, this reminds me of the discussion of arial and unicode: 50.000 glyphs are enough. anyhow, it has been a long time i have heard someone from google excepting questions after his/her talk. a tip of the hat to jeff dean.
interesting historic parts in his talk about the history of google and the development of its data centers: if you have to update that many machines do it at once and not partically; if something goes wrong you harm less people this way.

yahoo is into translating, too. mostly aiming for the ads market.

privatized search has been a topic. take a look at j. teevan, s. dumais and d. liebling: to personalize or not to personalize: modeling queries with variation in user intent.

just realized that i missed the "best student paper" by eytan adar, who worked on zoetrope, teevan, dumais and jonathan l. elsas. well, the paper is online. | via jeff dalton

... or imaginary hat? I sure hope the latter!

"yet they stay silent" -- there was (curiously?) little web coverage as well (all the more: thanks for yours!); if things continue like that I'll end up having to start to go to conferences again ;-).