Archive for February, 2010
Explicit conversations
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
What are you wearing right now? No, I didn’t mean NSFW conversations.
Newbies often assume the term “conversational search,” aka HCIR, refers to explicit conversations, like expert systems, or Clippy.
As we know, the bulk of an HCIR conversation is implicit. Faceted navigation links, clusters, visualizations and the like give people all the information scent they [...]
It has not eaten you yet
by Paul Sonderegger
Paul Sonderegger
The Boston Globe recently ran a fascinating article titled “Easy = True”. The basic gist is that people prefer things that are easy to think about, to the point that if something is easy to understand, people are more likely to think it’s true. The implications of this are huge. Cognitive [...]
Three flavors of vertical search: Bing / Supercook / Food Network
by Vladimir Zelevinsky
Vladimir Zelevinsky
It’s no secret that a good number of people who work at Endeca are foodies (I hereby confess the authorship of the bagel in the last photo). So it’s highly exciting to hear that a major search engine (Bing, probably not related to a cherry variety) is adding vertical search for recipes.
This [...]
For Search and interactive BI, what’s the new disk?
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Since the recent New England Database Summit at MIT I’ve been thinking a lot about Storage Class Memory (SCM) – technologies like Flash and PCM that are vying to become the next persistent storage technology of choice. Buzz on this definitely picked up substantially last year with product announcements from many of the data [...]
UX matters and BI matters at new IEEE site
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
The new IEEE Xplore Digital Library site just launched and it has an interesting type of numeric range filter, worth discussing from both a user experience and business intelligence angle. This filter is among several noteworthy faceted search designs at IEEE, including the choice to give each facet its own search box and breadcrumb.
IEEE [...]
Search is the enemy of IA, redux
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
My original post on this topic generated a lot of interest that made me want to unpack the question, “Is search the enemy of IA?”
# # #
Back in the early aughties, Jared Spool and his User Interface Engineering team were testing retail websites when they noticed a strange result. Their methodology certainly wasn’t [...]
The Super Bowl of Information Architecture
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
The Explain Information Architecture contest (blogged earlier) ends this Thursday, and here are three more entries I enjoyed. (Disclaimer: Endeca is a sponsor of the contest, though for a price significantly lower than Google’s Super Bowl commercial.)
The first two pair nicely. Each entrant — working independently — tried to explain IA in terms simple [...]
The official future of search
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Here’s another passage I love from the free first chapter of Search Patterns:
“The official future of search — artificial intelligence with a dash of information visualization — hasn’t changed in decades. Most search startups just add new wrinkles to an old face. We’re stuck on the original Star Trek, seeking technological singularity and the [...]
A moment of discovery
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Here’s a fun anecdote that I just have to share. I spent Tuesday in Toronto with some of our clients, so the timing worked out nicely for me to present an info session at the University of Waterloo for students considering joining Endeca. (Very cool to see a full crowd, and my thanks to [...]
The answer changes the question
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
The new O’Reilly book Search Patterns: Design for Discovery just came out, and they’re offering the first chapter free.
It’s by Peter Morville, the co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of O’Reilly’s information architecture bible, the “polar bear” book. Many of our Endeca readers will recognize him as the keynote of our 2008 Discover conference, where he [...]
