I have a question:

Natural language search is: what is the population of Portland?
Boolean search is: salt AND pepper

So what do we call the sort of “regular” syntax that web search engines have made so popular and common as a way to query for information?

Not like I’m so smart or anything since I’m sure lots of people thought the same thing, but the first thing that went through my mind when I heard about Watson was that it was a search engine disguised as a Jeopardy contestant.

Watson is just a super search engine.

If you’ve ever wondered what search quality/editorial/analysis people like me do at search engines, a big part of our jobs is training and evaluating machine-learning systems like Watson.

I just saw that Ask.com is officially closing Bloglines. Read more here: Bloglines Update. I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been using Bloglines for 5 or 6 years. The first couple years I checked it obsessively for new articles about search and other interests. Now I check in much less frequently, maybe a couple times a month. But it’s still a good place to catch up on articles that where timeliness is not so important. I’ll have to decide whether to find a new RSS reader. Or not.

An interesting new search engine. Supercruil.

I’m one of those (OK, maybe I’m THE only one) internet librarian types who is coming late to the Library Thing party. Please help me use it. I like it but I’m not really sure why and not sure how exactly I should be using it to take full advantage of it.

So if you’re on there drop me a comment so I can add you as a contact and further explore the site.

thanks!