Google Trends & Information Retrieval & South Korea

Do you know Google Trends? As Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns, today I tried to search for “information retrieval” stats. The results are very interesting: Where: ZyLAB Unveils Major Enhancements to XML-Based Document Management and Information Retrieval Solution CMSWire – Mar 23 2004 A View On Google’s Patent: Information Retrieval Based On [...]

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Information Consumer Trends

UK internet users now spend 64% more time using search engines (31 million hours per month in April 2010) than they did 3 years ago. (UKOM, May 2010) We are currently crossing the 1 zettabyte mark for the total amount of the world’s digital information (That’s a million milion gigabytes!). Digital information grew by 62% [...]

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NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Can computers learn to read? We think so. “Read the Web” is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, a computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day: First, it attempts [...]

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Question and Answer Tools

Hi again, When you’ve got a question and no clue about the answer, you always ask the internet.But where do you start? For the  majority of our questions we use Google. It’s simple, fast, and most of all it’s very effective. Nevertheless, there are another not so well known solutions: Stack Exchange Stack Exchange is [...]

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Context & Question and Answering systems

Hi everyone! So, I’ve been working since a couple of days on a new feature for Question and Answering systems regarding context. The main idea is to keep the topic of discussion from one user, so that he can be able to query the QA system with shortened questions. Here is an example scenario: What is [...]

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Web Search Evolution

As new technologies and solutions tend to appear, the search queries also tend to evolute, as you can see with the voice search example. With voice interface, users tend to pose queries that resemble natural language with many function words than just a sequence of keywords: ‘starbucks in chicago’ vs ‘starbucks chicago’. In fact, some [...]

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Some Internet Stats

Global social network ad revenues make up about about 10% of worldwide online ad spending, or about $8 billion. (Financial Times , March 2011) 52% of internet users search for a brand on a search engine in response to seeing a TV adThinkbox and Decipher “Tellyport” (New Media Age,December 2010) Among people with internet access [...]

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Is Facebook getting bigger than Google?

According to Hitwise, social networks are getting more popular than search engines in some parts of the world. As we can see, social networks such as Facebook have been challenging against the biggest names in web search, including Google itself. The study reported that Facebook’s overall web traffic surpassed Google for the first time in [...]

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IBM’s Watson heads to medical school

There is a new chapter in the life of IBM’s super computer, named Watson: IBM’s Watson goes to medical school. In colaboration with Dr. Herbert Chase of Columbia University, Watson is learning how to treat and diagnose ailments in the human body. In fact, Watson is doing well enough that this might be the harbinger [...]

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