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Helping Searchers Satisfice through Query Understanding
From The Noisy Channel

Helping Searchers Satisfice through Query Understanding

This morning, I had the opportunity to present an invited talk at Walmart’s AI Summit. Not surprisingly, a lot of folks were excited about the potential of ChatGPT...

A Guest Post from ChatGPT
From The Noisy Channel

A Guest Post from ChatGPT

Since Medium decided to allow AI-generated content as long as it’s clearly disclosed as such, I decided to give it a whirl.Prompt EngineeringMy first prompt was...

Throwing Needles Into Haystacks
From The Noisy Channel

Throwing Needles Into Haystacks

Searching for relevant results has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, most searchers have it easier than that, since haystacks don’t index...

Upcoming Search Classes
From The Noisy Channel

Upcoming Search Classes

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2023 is off to a great start for you.Are you excited to kick off the new year by learning more about search?If so, you’re in luck...

Is The Valley Getting Cannier?
From The Noisy Channel

Is The Valley Getting Cannier?

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase “uncanny valley” (不気味の谷 in the original Japanese) to denote the phenomenon that when a machine seems close-but...

Attention, Expertise, Trust
From The Noisy Channel

Attention, Expertise, Trust

I’m old enough to remember when the web was new, and honest enough to admit that I was a skeptic at the time. Fortunately, I was wrong, and I owe my career to the...

What is Not Search?
From The Noisy Channel

What is Not Search?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Search is unquestionably my hammer, so it’s easy for me to frame everything as a search problem. After...

Let’s Talk About Resume Screening
From The Noisy Channel

Let’s Talk About Resume Screening

With apologies to Bruno, we don’t talk about resume screening. But we should.Resume screening is usually the first step in the hiring process for active candidates...

Technical Interviewing: Be Better
From The Noisy Channel

Technical Interviewing: Be Better

Technical interviewing is hard, but that’s no excuse for it to be so terrible. Since candidates generally don’t have much leverage to negotiate the interview process...

Query Similarity
From The Noisy Channel

Query Similarity

I started writing about query understanding in 2016, working my way up from low-level concerns like language identification and character normalization to higher...

Information Extraction
From The Noisy Channel

Information Extraction

When we index content for search, it’s natural to think in terms of documents. But searchers aren’t necessarily looking for documents. They’re looking for information...

Content Understanding
From The Noisy Channel

Content Understanding

This publication is a series of posts devoted to content understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them...

Content Moderation
From The Noisy Channel

Content Moderation

Many platforms, particularly social media sites and ecommerce marketplaces, establish policies to determine what they consider acceptable content. These platforms...

Similarity-Sensitive Diversity
From The Noisy Channel

Similarity-Sensitive Diversity

In my work on search engines and recommender systems, I’ve thought a lot about entropy and diversity. I named my first blog, The Noisy Channel, after a seminalClaude...

Content Quality
From The Noisy Channel

Content Quality

Despite its importance, content quality is hard to define without devolving into circularity. What we mean by content quality is a measure or collection of measures...

Content Structure
From The Noisy Channel

Content Structure

One of the challenges facing search applications is that users aren’t necessarily searching for documents. To put it another way, the unit of content that a user...

Search is Fundamental
From The Noisy Channel

Search is Fundamental

Search engines are at the heart of the digital world. We interact with them on the outside, using search engines to find information, products, and more. But they...

Search: Teaching the Fundamentals
From The Noisy Channel

Search: Teaching the Fundamentals

Earlier this year, Grant Ingersoll and I kicked off a 4-week co:rise course on Search with Machine Learning. We covered search fundamentals, and then went on to...

Content Similarity
From The Noisy Channel

Content Similarity

Content classification and annotation offer useful approaches for content understanding, recognizing whether a piece of content is about a particular topic or mentions...

Content Annotation
From The Noisy Channel

Content Annotation

Content understanding requires both holistic and reductionist approaches, just like query understanding. The previous post focused on content classification asentity...
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