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Semantic Equivalence of e-Commerce Queries
From The Noisy Channel

Semantic Equivalence of e-Commerce Queries

I am proud to share the slides for “Semantic Equivalence of e-Commerce Queries”, which my eBay colleague Aritra Mandal presented this morning at the KDD 2023 Workshop...

Upcoming Search Classes this Fall
From The Noisy Channel

Upcoming Search Classes this Fall

I hope that everyone has been enjoying the summer. I took a sabbatical from teaching, but I’m looking forward to new students this fall.Are you excited to learn...

What is Searcher Happiness?
From The Noisy Channel

What is Searcher Happiness?

As a search specialist, my main goal is to improve searcher happiness. Sure, companies pay me to improve business metrics like conversion rate and revenue, butprobability...

Surprise! Surprise?
From The Noisy Channel

Surprise! Surprise?

We have reached the stage of generative AI where artists, authors, and performers are convinced that AI is stealing their lives — and, perhaps more importantly,...

Search Result Snippets, Revisited
From The Noisy Channel

Search Result Snippets, Revisited

Search result snippets, also known as query-biased summaries, are the additional context included with each result on the search results page. They are an essential...

Implicit Query Reformulation
From The Noisy Channel

Implicit Query Reformulation

Let me start with the disclaimer that this post describes an embryonic idea, not an approach that I have validated through analysis or experimentation. With that...

Facets: Constraints or Preferences?
From The Noisy Channel

Facets: Constraints or Preferences?

When my colleagues and I at Endeca started working on faceted search in 1999, our model of the search journey was that most searchers start with broadly expressed...

How I Became a Micro-Celebrity
From The Noisy Channel

How I Became a Micro-Celebrity

In the 1979 movie “The Jerk”, there is a hilarious scene where Navin (played by Steve Martin) becomes excited at the discovery that his name is in print — in the...

Affordances for Conversational Search
From The Noisy Channel

Affordances for Conversational Search

In application design, affordances are cues that help users discover and explore how to interact with the application. Typical affordances for search applications...

From Today, Creating Is Dead!
From The Noisy Channel

From Today, Creating Is Dead!

From Today, Creativity Is Dead!A common theme in the concerns about generative AI is that it will replace human-generated art and end creativity as we know it.daguerreotype...

Trust Through Provenance
From The Noisy Channel

Trust Through Provenance

The recent advances in generative AI have led many people to fear all manner of deepfakes — particularly text, images, audio, and video. People like Yuval NoahAI...

The Compressibility of Thought
From The Noisy Channel

The Compressibility of Thought

In a recent Tom Fishburne cartoon, one employee says “AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote,” while another says, “AI makesgenerative...

Welcoming Our New Robot Overserfs
From The Noisy Channel

Welcoming Our New Robot Overserfs

These are early days for generative AI, but it already feels like we are at the dawn of a revolution in human-computer communication. Practically overnight, wefacets...

Is AI-Generated OK?
From The Noisy Channel

Is AI-Generated OK?

For as long as we have had needs, long before servers started asking us “Sorry, we don’t have Coke, is Pepsi ok?”, we have accepted substitutes for the products...

Maximal Marginal Creativity
From The Noisy Channel

Maximal Marginal Creativity

In 1998, Jaime Carbonell and Jade Goldstein proposed maximal marginal relevance (MMR) as way to balance the concerns of relevance and diversity. This measure is...

Minimalist Models for Search Ranking
From The Noisy Channel

Minimalist Models for Search Ranking

Search application developers put a lot of effort into optimizing the ranking of search results, especially in areas like ecommerce, where incremental ranking improvements...

The Ultimate Question
From The Noisy Channel

The Ultimate Question

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years of calculation to determine that the answer to the “ultimate question...

Giving Bard a Coding Interview
From The Noisy Channel

Giving Bard a Coding Interview

Thanks to this post by Behdad Esfahbod, I’ve been reminiscing about an interview problem I used to use at Google and LinkedIn. Google just announced that Bard can...

Exploring Search Intent as a Duality
From The Noisy Channel

Exploring Search Intent as a Duality

Most of us who work on search focus on its engineering or product aspects. But I feel it’s valuable to also look at search philosophically. I’m no expert on philosophy...

Effective Query Triage
From The Noisy Channel

Effective Query Triage

Search evaluation requires a variety of strategies.Evaluating search experiments, such as A/B tests, should focus on the size and direction of their impact.Alerting...
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