Wednesday 28 July 2010

Trusting Googles rankings

Students trust it to much apparently. My view is that for informational, as opposed to navigational or transactional searches, you need to look at more than one page of results (users tend to view only the first page of results, and in fact very rarely scroll down to look at all of them). Students take note! Quality and source of information provided in your assignments is very important (e.g. try not to use Wikipedia to much). Academic study is available here.

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Challenges in Building Large-Scale Information Retrieval Systems

Jeff Dean of Google provides a very interesting talk on the companies infrastructure and its development on a video recorded at WSDM'09. It rather annoyingly stopped on several occasions, but you can go back to the slide you were watching as the video and slides are presented slide by slide - keep with it, its very well worth it (particularly if you are a techy)!

Monday 19 July 2010

Monday Blues

Here's a double header of Lenny Kravitz:



Are you gonna come my way?



(no embedding..) and:



Fly away.



no .......

Monday 12 July 2010

Monday Blues Cure

In celebration of Spain winning the World cup for the first time, here's a video of the magnificent Paco De Luca: