Yahoo! BOSS and Google SearchWiki

Search engines are realizing they can earn more revenues by allowing users to manipulate their indexes. Yahoo! BOSS and Google SearchWiki are efforts in that direction.

Essentially these two search platforms provide search refrits of whatever the search engines already have in their indexes, but with some features added for resorting, editing, and making annotations.

We can see some value for using these as aggregation layers for third-party search technologies and for some type of searchers prone to personalization. Such type of searches might be useful for conducting annotated Web Intelligence.

Still these are not platforms designed for searching the Deep Web.

Don’t yang about it. Goodbye, Yang.

Finally, Yahoo!’s CEO Jerry Yang is gone. Unfortunately, statements like the following show he was so disconnected from reality:

“despite the external environment we face, the fact remains that yahoo! is now a significantly different company that is stronger in many ways than it was just 18 months ago.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10100809-38.html

Ha, Ha.

The only thing strong about Yahoo! is that:

they are a strong sale.

they are a strong target.

they are strongly looking forward at pre-Christmas layoffs.

I have seen this so often: make a buy offer to a competitor. If he refuses to sell, just wait and buy it later for less.  Microsoft is good at playing this game.

Outstanding IR Theses

Thank you to all new researchers that have signed to receive IRW, now in its new format. The following theses are listed in the Outstanding Graduate Theses column:

DNIDS: A Dependable Network Intrusion Detection System Using the CSI-KNN Algorithm
PDF

A Hybrid Knowledge-based/Content-based Recommender System in the Bluejay Genome Browser
PDF

Exploitation of Redundant Inverse Term Frequency for Answer Extraction
PDF

Improving the effectiveness of information retrieval with genetic programming
PDF

BTW our next issue is closed and will go out by the first of December. The featuring article is about identity theft through search engines.

PC + Digital TV + Search Engines

I’ll be today presenting at Interamerican University on search engine technologies and on a research project. I plan to cover how the PC + Digital TV fusion will provide an interesting platform for search engine marketing and research in general.

This is going to be fun.

Vector Space Model and Protein Retrieval

I came across an interesting paper, A Modified Vector Space Model for Protein Retrieval, where in the second page of it they reproduced material from my tutorial article The Classic Vector Space Model: Description, Advantages and Limitations of the Classic Vector Space Model.