A few weeks ago we discussed a monograph by M. Wilson, et al., which elucidated the failings the modern search engines when it comes to exploratory search. Wilson and associates concisely characterize exploratory search as revolving around needs that are “open-ended, persistent, and multifaceted, and information-seeking processes that are opportunistic, iterative, and multitactical.” Back in [...]
Continue Reading...Why the Big Search Engines are Not Exporatory Search Engines
May 16th, 2011Current Search Interfaces are Inadequate for Exploratory Search
April 5th, 2011The monograph From Keyword Search to Exploration: Designing Future Search Interfaces for the Web by M. Wilson et al. lucidly reviews the current state of search interfaces that move beyond the traditional list of results. We’ve included some choice quotations below.
On why we need better search interfaces and systems:Even more recently, though, researchers have identified just how inadequate the familiar keyword search paradigms, provided by environments such as Google and Bing (Microsoft’s search engine), might be for users who need to do more than just find a website that answers a factual question. (p.9)
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It’s a Glog!
March 30th, 2011The Helioid Team has launched a new tool to share and comment upon Google searches that fall short of satisfactory, and to take a look at other Googlers’ struggles.
We affectionately call it the Glog.
Helioid Team Launches First Snaggle Demo
March 22nd, 2011Update: we’ve added icons distinguishing each category.
Snaggle is a bartering site, through which users can buy, sell, or trade items online. Users will be able to create lists of things they want and things they have, and Snaggle will recommend related items that the user is likely to be interested in. Clearly the exploration of the online trading community facilitated by Snaggle opens up a whole new world of possible ways for users to get the stuff they want.
Helioid Preview Now Open
March 4th, 2011This version of Helioid is a meta-search engine offering category based personalization. Below is a partial screen shot of the outputs.
By interaction with the categories on the left you can choose the results to be shown on the right. Please let us know if you have any suggestions, comments, criticisms, complaints, anything. Try out the Helioid preview now.
Continue Reading...Satisfying Needs by Diversifying Topics
February 24th, 2011When retrieving documents for a search query, a simplistic approach that ranks the most relevant documents highest will leave users completely unsatisfied if it incorrectly interprets the query. Incorrect interpretation is an inevitable possibility when dealing with ambiguous queries, which in some experiments were shown to represent over 16% of all queries. To address this we can apply a topic modeling algorithm to the fetched search results and then use a reordering algorithm to ensure we highly rank both relevant documents and topics with a high probability of being in different topics.
Search Visualized
February 10th, 2011When Helioid launched in 2008, the field of search startups was peppered with other search and metasearch engines that used various forms of information visualization to facilitate search refinement. From Quintura’s concept maps to KartOO’s Venn-reminiscent topic diagrams to Grokker’s hierarchical topic clusters, there seemed to be a thriving community of entrepreneurs who agreed that the time was nigh to move beyond the traditional strictly linear format of displaying search results.
Are our Preferences in a Sub-Space?
January 30th, 2011The web is really big, but when one searches for information the topics they are looking for exist within a much smaller portion of the web. A system that knows our individual preferences can optimize its document search, by starting its search from documents that we likely prefer.
