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.

Bing is playing around with some new visual search functionality. Check it out here: Bing Visual Search.

Have a look here at US Presidents. I like the layout - it’s clean and easy to see a lot of images at once. It’s cool how you can mouse over each thumb and the search box automatically populates; and under the search box there is a bit of structured data about each President. However, it’s not so easy to navigate through all the images if you’re looking for something in particular, especially if you look at something with a whole bunch of things like dog breeds.

As has been well publicized, Searchme shut off the lights last week. It’s sad for all of us who worked so hard over the past few years to build the engine. We came from nothing and made tremendous progress for such a small team. I’m really proud of everyone who built not only a functioning search engine, but a quality one that was constantly getting better. Our relevance was on the rise, we were increasing our coverage, we were adding new sources of multimedia content, we continued to refine and improve our classifiers, our advertising programs were growing, we’d made improvements to the UI, etc.

I’d like to give a special thanks to my team - The Search Quality Department - who did so many amazing and groundbreaking things, ranging from working day in and day out to look for ways to improve our search engine, to building the ontology and classifiers to classify billions of documents, to generating a ton of training and evaluation judgments for the ranking functions, to identifying spam and keeping one of the cleanest search engine indexes, to reviewing ads, and so many other things.

And thank you to all of you users who used Searchme and provided us with positive feedback and suggestions.