Zeitgeist Google Borders - mapping the borders of google’s autocomplete (note: the site is disabled now)
2 months ago
April 15, 2013
Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. A few years ago, I characterized users’ research skills as “incompetent,” and they’ve only gotten worse over time. “Pathetic” and “useless” are words that come to mind after this year’s user testing.
3 months ago
March 18, 2013
reblogged via 
Massive Fiber-Optic Installation Lights Up Library Queries
Getting a glimpse into the curious minds of others has never been so beautiful – or so bright.
Designers Brian W. Brush and Yong Ju Lee of E/B Office New York created an extensive fiber-optic installation for the Teton County Library grand opening in Wyoming that visualizes library searches in flashes of colored light. Dubbed Filament Mind, the installation, which opened at the end of January, uses over five miles of fiber-optic cables and 44 LED illuminators to collect, categorize, and render searches from libraries all across the state of Wyoming into glowing bursts of color.
» via Wired
3 months ago
March 6, 2013
reblogged via 
David Rumsey: Geographical Searching with MapRank Search (beta)
search large map collections with the magic of maprank, an optimized algorithm to return georeferenced documents based on a given search extent
1 year ago
October 15, 2011
1 year ago
August 29, 2011
Google Correlate - find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series
(3rd result = zombie survival)
2 years ago
May 25, 2011
2 years ago
May 7, 2011
2 years ago
December 11, 2010
“New shit has come to light”: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski
The methods employed when a person seeks information and incorporates it into her existing knowledge base often determine how well she will grow in her understanding of a specific information need, or more broadly, in life itself. Put another way, the self-defined process of seeking meaning is the very basis of the human condition, and one that is a central fixture in The Big Lebowski. As Ethan Coen related, watching a seemingly inept person struggle with a complex situation was ‚the conceit‛ of the film (‚Making‛ 1:47). This paper analyzes the information seeking behaviors of Donny Kerabatsos, Walter Sobchak, The Dude, and Maude Lebowski through the lenses of a variety of information seeking theories and models. This analysis of The Big Lebowski illustrates the concept of sense-making as a richer, more contextualized process than simply collecting facts.
2 years ago
August 27, 2010
How Google manages data.
1. Collect
MapReduce doesn’t depend on a traditional structured database, where information is categorized as it’s collected. We’ll just gather up the full text of every book Google has scanned.2. Map
You write a function to map the data: “Count every use of every word in Google Books.” That request is then split among all the computers in your army, and each agent is assigned a hunk of data to work with. Computer A gets War and Peace, for example. That machine knows what words that book contains, but not what’s inside Anna Karenina.3. Save
Each of the hundreds of PCs doing a map writes the results to its local hard drive, cutting down on data transfer time. The computers that have been assigned “reduce” functions grab the lists from the mappers.4. Reduce
The Reduce computers correlate the lists of words. Now you know how many times a particular word is used, and in which books.5. Solve
The result? A data set about your data. In our example, the final list of words is stored separately so it can be quickly referenced or queried: “How often does Tolstoy mention Moscow? Paris?” You don’t have to plow through unrelated data to get the answer.
Wired
3 years ago
May 29, 2010
reblogged via 
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