Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From The Noisy Channel
All Else Equal
In The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin describes how an alien species drives scientists to suicide by making it impossible for them to produce consistent experimental...
From The Noisy Channel
Take Searchers Seriously, Not Literally
Search application developers manage numerous tradeoffs, foremost the tradeoff between precision and recall. Precision measures the fraction of search results that...
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Hallucinating a Post-Search World
When I first heard about 3D printing, I imagined something like a Star Trek replicator that could synthesize arbitrary objects — or at least meals — on demand.generative...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Global Internet Community Encouraged to Submit Event Proposals for UA Day 2025
Event proposals are now being accepted for the third annual Universal Acceptance (UA) Day, to be held on or around 28 March 2025 (between 1 March and 30 May 2025)...
From The Noisy Channel
Handling Facets With Many Values
The previous post addresses the challenge of selecting which facets a search application should present to searchers as query refinements. However, there is another...
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Facets, But Which Ones?
This post dives into a particular challenge of faceted search, exploring the challenge of selecting which facets a search application should present to searchers...
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Searching for Discovery
Search and DiscoveryIf search has one job, it is to help searchers find what they are looking for. However, many search application developers feel that searchHippocratic...
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Where Do LTR Labels Come From?
The most common goal that my search clients express is a desire to improve their ranking. I always start by managing their expectations and helping them understand...
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How to be a Search Consultant
If you have thought about hiring a search consultant or working as one, you may have asked yourself what exactly search consultants do. This post offers an opinionated...
From The Noisy Channel
Search and the Art of Conversation
What is the job of a search application? A common answer is that it needs to return the best results for a query, sorted in relevance order. While this answer sounds...
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Is Search Trying Too Hard?
Last year, the emergence of ChatGPT and its ability to generate volumes from short prompts led me to speculate about the compressibility of thought. In a related...
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Is Similarity Objective?
Some search problems have binary answers. We often frame these problems in terms of matching or equivalence. A simplistic formulation of relevance is that a canonicalized...
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Bags of Documents and the Cluster Hypothesis
My writing on AI-powered search promotes the “bag-of-documents” model, which represents a search query as a distribution of vectors for relevant documents. When...
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Bags of Queries as Sparse Document Representations
There is a duality between search queries and indexed documents: we can model a query as a bag of documents and a document as a bag of queries. This duality offers...
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Is Targeted Advertising Ethical
Is Targeted Advertising Ethical?Targeted advertising is a huge industry with a massive branding problem. On one hand, nearly all of the “free” digital productspromoted...
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Is Targeting Advertising Ethical?
Is Targeted Advertising Ethical?Targeted advertising is a huge industry with a massive branding problem. On one hand, nearly all of the “free” digital productspromoted...
From The Noisy Channel
Ranking vs. Relevance: 2 Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
A crucial distinction for search applications is the difference between ranking and relevance. In this post, I explain what happens when search applications fail...
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Sparse and Dense Representations
The heart of the AI-powered search revolution is the move from sparse bag-of-words representations to dense embedding-based representations. But reducing everything...
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AI-Powered Search: Embedding-Based Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
When search application developers consider replacing a traditional search architecture with AI-powered search, they usually have two things in mind. The firstbag...
From The Noisy Channel