Privacy Vs. Logging

Bit of a dilemma this. In a rather interesting article, Bin Tan and Zhai talk about the problems in providing both privacy and recording information to assit personalised search. Bit like having your cake and eating it!

There was a famous (infamous) case of a New York times reporter who identified somebody using their searches from a log AOL released without thinking about the privacy issues completely t e.g. properly anonymising data. Really, really silly!

Ask have taken a different view. They allow users to choose an option not to save their searches. This is fine, but how do you use information from the user to improve searches and personalise them? I'm not sure that Ask have fully throught through the implications.

References

Bin Tan, X.S. & Zhai, C. (2007). Privacy Protection in Personalised Search, SIGIR Forum, 41(1), November, 4-17.

You know when you've been tango'd

Been thinking about video search on youtube recently, particularly as more and more searches on Google seem to pick up videos from the source. I wondered if some Classic Ad's from the 1990's where available, and found them very quickly on youtube with the search string 'tango ads'. Here is the first classic 'orange man' one:

Much further down the list was the clown's Tango ad, you know the one with the narrator who sounds like John Major:

All accessed via a simple search string. Does depend however on good indexing on the part of the user - wonder how long it will take before real video indexing takes place on very large collections such as these. Finally heres another video from that search:

Weird!

Making music with veg

Now heres a novel application of Vegetables - music!. An example (any vegetarians of a nervous disposition are advised not to watch the video):

Wonder what they can do with a bit of broccoli? Brings in a whole new problem for Music IR - on organic material!