http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-sfx-Discuss-Fwd-DuckDuckGo-tp6502174p6505630.html
fall short. I'd argue that the best and most wanted material (in a
traditional, more-or-less analytical approaches. That is, the most
hardly there long enough to generate rank. Therefore, I think the
forming a meritocracy. To continue with your landscape metaphor, I'm
> Owen -
>>
>> I thought this might be of broader interest:
>>
>> This article:
http://dontbubble.us/ discusses the "bubble effect" of
>> search engines, where you slowly evolve into a bit of a ghetto. Your search
>> usage creates a profile that can paint you into a corner.
>
> After reading the DuckDuckGo article, I was (mildly) puzzled (offended?) by
> their rhetoric. They act as if deleting a feature (personalized search
> results based on prior searches) is a big plus. At best, it might be a
> preferred default? Their strategy seems to be to prey on the naivete and
> the paranoia of the masses to make their less capable search engine seem
> more capable? I don't doubt they are working hard on other features but to
> make their *lack of personalization* out to be the prime feature seems...
> duplicitous.
>
> Search engines are essentially "recommender" systems. One strategy for
> improving the recommendation *is* to track searches and customize results.
> If you don't sign into Google, I don't think they apply this to your search
> results at all (at best for the subnets where you access?). You can also
> clear your history, selectively edit it, and turn it off (Pause they call
> it).
>
> I happen to have multiple google IDs but remain logged out of Google most of
> the time. For those of you who have given over to letting Google manage
> your mail, this is probably too inconvenient (logging out/in all the time).
> I log in for google docs and for blog management now and again, with my
> different IDs. Each of the IDs roughly corresponds to one of my alter egos
> or personalities. For example, my personal interests overlap my
> professional interests, but only to a modest extent. In principle, my
> personal account profile and my professional account profile will be
> informed differently and produce different results.
>
> 3 years ago when one of our new kittens was dying and I was searching far
> and wide for information, I was annoyed (offended?) by the many ads popping
> up trying to sell me catfood, cat leashes, cat nip, cat toys, even cat pet
> insurance. They knew I had a cat and was interested in cat things, but
> didn't know that the very same cat was nearly dead and wouldn't be needing
> any of the stuff they were peddling. If there was a human in the loop, it
> would have been quite rude.
>
> I also think referring to it as a bubble is part of their duplicitous
> rhetoric (any marketing, self-promotion is going to use this). If
> anything, I would compare it to canalization on an epigenetic landscape. Of
> course that metaphor would be lost on most of their (potential) users. I
> use the term because it feels more accurate... essentially, there is an
> "erosion" of the search landscape going on, informed by the searches that
> have gone before.
>
> I had tried to pitch Google maybe 7 years ago on the idea of studying search
> in this context... I never heard back... but I would not be surprised if
> this isn't effectively what they are doing anyway.
>>
>> When Steve and I were working on a project to visualize SFI working
>> papers, we stumbled across search engine mashups that gave you categories of
>> responses .. which seemed more useful than a single long list of results.
>> Yahoo also seems to me, anyway to have a better display of search results.
>
> Your noticing that a set of categories is more interesting/useful than a
> simple ordered list of course, begs the question of how does one arrive at
> the categories? Are these human-derived? Are these derived by the
> structure of their relations? Are they derived by *your use*?! I
> suppose your comments are making a case for *exposing* more of the qualities
> used to personalize your search... help expose *why* the list is ordered the
> way it is, or the categories of reasons they are offering you things in
> those categories, etc.
>
> In my vernacular, it would be to show you the erosion patterns of your own
> search landscape I suppose. And I agree, and this is what I was vaguely
> trying to propose to the Googleteers... to help us see the basins of
> attraction carved out not only by our own personal searches but by the
> linking and general search and followup patterns. I haven't tracked their
> tech work in years, but at the time, Spectral Graph Theory was an important
> part of the game it seemed.
>
> The problem (one of them) is really that this is a high dimensional
> problem... and reducing it to one dimension (ordered list) is only a little
> worse than reducing it to a (2d) landscape by some measures. I am often
> surprised that google doesn't offer multiple sorts on their results.
> Sometimes I am interested in *recent* things (I'm now using Google Realtime
> sometimes and wondering what happened to Collecta... currently offline?) and
> other times I *might* be interested in ordering *without* personalization
> and *with* personalization... or personalization weighted different ways,
> etc.
>
> Visualizing complex multi/hypergraphs is a holy grail for me. I've done a
> bit with various real-world problems but it remains an interesting and hard
> one. More to the point, in this context, it is not the actual *graphs* one
> needs to visualize but rather the systems and data that are encoded in the
> graphs. In this case, the networks of interconnected web sites/links and
> the search patterns and utilization over those networks are what Google (or
> DuckDuckGo) has to work with, and a structured ordering/layout of the
> available resources, possibly annotated, is what we want returned when we
> enter a query.
>
> I like the landscape metaphor for many reasons. In general I believe all
> visualizations are rooted in metaphors, even simple (usually geometric)
> ones. The landscape is a familiar one (geometrically it is a simple
> single-valued function) which human brains were evolved to parse well. The
> Topic Maps of PNNL's Spire and Sandias VxInsight are a beginning of this.
> In this case, they only really encode proximity and density. In the case
> at hand, one would also like to encode erosion, accelerated wear, and
> possibly growth and diversity. The "height" of the landscape is one
> interesting and primary measure, but the relative height and the raggedness
> and the size of an "ideashed" , etc. are also interesting/useful.
>
> I guess I wandered into the other thread started by Tom Johnson on Data
> Visualization in general.
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
>
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