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

better say: "classical" instead of "historical"? one argues: it leaves more room for the non-linear in this world.

when we seek, finding something isn't that important. our "seeking system", as jaak panksepp calls it, doesn't seek for reward per se.

Its prototype is foraging behaviour, the search for resources – food, shelter, a mate etc. Its chemistry is characterised by dopamine, a neurotransmitter described as the ‘power switch’ because it turns on, energising and invigorating the individual in relation to their environment. Dopamine is similar in chemistry to cocaine, and it has the same effect on the individual – creating states of high arousal and focus. In animals it is quickly spotted: sniffing and persistent forward locomotion are indicators of the SEEKING system in action. | panic, seeking and playing

jaak panksepp, interesting yet controversial research and books, ie affective neuroscience

the seeking system is sensitized by (1) regulatory imbalances to yield general arousal and persistent forward locomotion (terry winograd once also talked about locomotion) and (2) external stimuli that can be either have strong or weak interactions with this emotional system and (3) it helps mediate appetitive learning so that the animals will become eager and exhibit expectancies in response to cues that have been previously associated with arousal and disarousal of the system. | p 146

we don't know what we are seeking for or: if rats go shopping:
suchen (audio/mpeg, 267 KB) , karl grammer