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Ho John Lee | November 30th, 2005 | 2 comments
Batelle’s Searchblog mentions an article by Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo citing 5 reasons why search personalization won’t work very well. Paraphrasing his list:
- Individual users interests / search intent changes over time
- The click and viewing data available to do the personalization is limited
- Inferring user intent from pages viewed after search can be misleading because the click is driven by a snippet in search results, not the whole page
- Computers are often shared among multiple users with varying intent
- Queries are too short to accurately infer intent
Vivismo (Clusty) is taking an approach in which groups of search results are clustered together and presented to the user for further exploration. The idea is to allow the user to explicitly direct the search towards results which they find relevant, and I have found it can work quite well for uncovering groups of search results that I might otherwise overlook.
Among other things, general purpose search engines are dealing with ambiguous intent on the part of the user, and also with unstructured data in the pages being indexed. Brad Feld wrote some comments observing the absense of structure (in the database sense) on the web a couple of days ago. Having structured data works really well if there is a well defined schema that goes with it (which is usually coupled with application intent). So things like microformats for event calendars and contact information seem like they should work pretty well, because the data is not only cleaned up, but allows explicit linkage of the publisher’s intent (“this is my event information”) and the search user’s intent (“please find music events near Palo Alto between December 1 and December 15″). The additional information about publisher and user intent makes a much more “database-like” search query possible.
I encounter problems with “assumed user intent” all the time on Amazon, which keeps presenting me with pages of kids toys and books every time I get something for my daughter, sometimes continuing for weeks after the purchase. On the other hand, I find that Amazon does a much better job of searching than Google, Yahoo, or other general purpose search engines when my intent is actually to look for books, music, or videos. Similarly, I get much better results for patent searches at USPTO, or for SEC filings at EDGAR (although they’re slow and have difficult user interfaces).
The AttentionTrust Recorder is supposed to log your browser activity and click stream, allowing individuals to accumulate and control access to their personal data. This could help, but not solve the task of inferring search intent.
I think a useful approach to take might be less search personalization based on your individual search and browsing habits, and more based on the people and web sites that you’re associated with, along with explicitly stated intent. Going back to the example at Amazon, I’ve already indicated some general intent simply by starting out at their site. The “suggestions” feature often works in a useful way to identify other products that may be interesting to you based on the items the system thinks you’ve indicated interest in. A similar clustering function for generalized search would be interesting, if the input data (clickstreams, and some measure of relevant outcomes) could be obtained.
Among other things, this could generally reduce the visibility of spam blogs. Although organized spam blogs can easily build links to each other, it’s unlikely that many “real” (or at least well-trained) internet users would either link or click through to a spam blog site. If there an additional bit of input back to a search engine to provide feedback, i.e. “this is spam”, or “this was useful”, and I were able to aggregate my ratings with other “reputable” users, the ratings could be used to filter search results, and perhaps move the “don’t know” or “known spam” search results to the equivalent of the Google “supplemental results” index.
The various bookmarking services on the web today serve as simple vote-based filters to identify “interesting” content, in that the user communities are relatively small and well trained compared with the general population of the internet, and it’s unusual to see spammy links get more than a handful of votes. As the user base expands, the noise in the systems are likely to go up considerably, making them less useful as collaborative filters.
I don’t particularly want to share of my click stream with the world, or any search engine, for that matter. I would be quite happy to share my opinion about whether a given page is spammy or not, if I happened to come across one, though. That might be a simple place to start.
Comcast just announced that they’re raising their monthly fee by around 7% starting in January:
The package price will rise by an average of $3.13 per month, or about $44.80 to $47.93. Prices vary depending on the community.
I already pay $49.61 per month (with tax) here in Palo Alto, so the new rate will be around $53 per month. The old rate seems too high for what little we watch in our household, and the new rate is worse.
“Comcast’s Bay Area market prices reflect increasing operating expenses,” said spokesman Andrew Johnson, “as well as investments that Comcast is making to improve the value of the service.” He cited improvements in customer service as well as more programming choices that have come through advances in technology and partnerships with new programming providers.
We haven’t noticed any service improvements, and had already been thinking about getting rid of the subscription. Last month our cable service went out for most of a week, and it didn’t really change our daily routine at all. Over the long weekend I also made some good progress on moving our DVDs and VHS videos onto the house server, so I had pretty much decided to reallocate something less than $600 per year to purchasing / buying video content and unplug the cable after December.
Another way to think of it is that for the same price, I can subscribe to Netflix, and also purchase 2 or 3 DVDs a month, and still end up ahead.
One sticking point is likely to be Emily’s cartoons on the weekends. Another is that nobody else in our household can get videos to play over the network reliably, which puts a big dent in the convenience factor.
In the meantime, the channel unbundling discussion seems to have come back to life at the FCC, although the a la carte services would probably be even more expensive.
They started tearing down Stanford Stadium after the football game this weekend. The replacement can’t help but be a nicer facility, but it won’t have a track any more.
Links:
Ho John Lee | November 26th, 2005 | 5 comments
This project seems like it could be a good fit for developing but urban settings where there is fairly high population density, a budget for deploying infrastructure, and enough community support to limit problems with vandalism or theft of the equipment.
Starsight (Starsightproject.com) is a project designed to supercharge street lighting and power in developing counties. Essentially it is a network of pylons, each with a solar panel, linked not by cables but by antennae which use wireless internet protocol.
The Starsight idea came out of the involvement of London-based sustainable development specialist the Kolam Partnership in an urban street lighting initiative in Cameroon.
Reliable street lighting can help a country to develop – a study by the Kenyan government recently found that street lighting reduced crime by 65 per cent. The benefits are even more widespread – aid workers and foreign businesses are more likely to stay on in a country if they feel secure.
One of the project partners is a Next-G, a Singapore-based wireless manufacturer which is building the pylons. If the project scales up, perhaps they can find a way to set up in-country fabrication of the poles, rather than importing them.
As an aside, solar panels are commonly seen at road intersections in Bangalore. If you look carefully at the top right of this photo, you’ll see one on the street sign pylon behind the tree branches.
Links:
Ho John Lee | November 25th, 2005 | 1 comment
I haven’t noticed getting one of these in my e-mail before:
Becouse of a lot of complaints about our malings
we need to buy expensive balk bullet-prof hosting
for our sites. It costs a lot, please, send us
small donation to:
Nordea Bank AB, Sweden, Surte, SWIFT: NDEASESS
to Isa Dzhabrailov, account number: SE 163 000000000 6510032599
I guess they don’t take Paypal…
I’ve added a local tag cosmos, which shows a tag cloud for posts on this site. Unfortunately, I’m also using tags and bookmarks scattered across del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, and other services, which aren’t integrated into the cloud, but this provides a different view of what’s been posted here since I’ve started tagging things.
I’m still evolving my personal use of tags. You can see that I’ve started tagging some posts with “web2.0“, although I’ve been reluctant to turn it into a site category. I don’t like the label, but I recognize that it’s the most popular tag for a lot of “new” stuff at the moment. So exposing the tag makes it more findable.
I’ve been debating reducing the number of post categories in favor of using frequently occuring tags for site navigation, so that recurring topics automatically make themselves more visible. It can be difficult to find things here, partly because I’m posting about a lot of different topics and partly because the categories don’t always organize the posts very well.
Tagging on this site is currently implemented using Jerome’s Keywords plugin for Wordpress to apply tags to posts and for generating the tag cloud.
Unlike Mr. Bean , turkey preparation is going smoothly at our house this morning. I’ve been making Thanksgiving meals nearly every year since coming out to California as a grad student. A Thanksgiving feast can be fairly simple to put together, primarily requiring planning and organization skills, as opposed to creative seasoning skills. Once the bird’s in the oven, there isn’t much to do for a few hours, leaving time to hang out, get in a good run, or catch up on feed reading while looking at the parade on television.
The hardest trick is getting everything to come out at the same time, since the bird has a somewhat variable 4-5 hour lead time on it, and there’s a limited supply of stove burners and pans for cooking the vegetables and side dishes during the last hour. We normally have salad, along with corn, peas, yams, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the traditional Thanksgiving kimchee (highly recommended, even if you aren’t Korean). Plus pumpkin and French apple pies for dessert.
The main procedural refinement over the past several years has been in reducing the size of the turkey so we don’t end up with perpetual leftovers. (I actually enjoy the leftovers more than the initial meal, but only for a couple of days). This year’s turkey is around 11 pounds, just a little more than the one this woman ate by herself yesterday.
I asked Emily to think about what she’s thankful for this year, here’s the list she came up with this afternoon:
- A loving family
- A warm house
- Delicious food
- Life in people
- My precious belongings
My list started out a lot more complicated, but I think I’ll go with hers.
…the business and technology magazines are getting thicker again. The latest issue of Wired magazine is 294 pages, Forbes is 280. Not in the phonebook-sized range yet, but noticeably heavier than they’ve been in a while.
Apparently, Adsense hasn’t sucked up all the advertising money. Plus there’s no way to put cardboard inserts and perfume samples onto a web page yet.
Update 12-03-2005 19:15 PST: This guy plotted Wired page counts vs the Nasdaq index, and some similar comments here as well.
Ho John Lee | November 22nd, 2005 | 2 comments
I dropped my subscription to the ACM Graphics SIG some time back, so this is the first I’ve heard of this project, which is very cool. Take your photos now, and decide what to focus on later.
From Wired News, via A Venture Forth:
A computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford University has outfitted a 16-megapixel camera with a bevy of micro lenses that allows users to take photos and later refocus them on a computer using software he wrote.
The system works by capturing information about the direction of the incoming light, as well as the intensity. This is then used to compute the image that would have been formed if the sensor was in a slightly different plane, effectively changing the focal length. The paper published by Ren Ng and team observes:
As an aside from the biological perspective, it is interesting to note that our optical design can be thought of as taking a human
eye (camera) and replacing its retina with an insect eye (microlens / photosensor array). No animal has been discovered that possesses such a hybrid eye [Land and Nilsson 2001], but this paper (and the work of Adelson and Wang) shows that such a design posseses unique and compelling capabilities when coupled with sufficient processing power (a computer).
The system works best with more data, 16 megapixels appears to work pretty well. They indicate that 8 megapixels would still work but with a narrower computed focus range. As shown in the schematic, the effective output resolution is limited by the microarray lens, not the sensor resolution, but it needs the high resolution sensor data to determine the direction of incoming light. The prototype is built in a medium format (Contex) body to make it easier to build the sensor assembly.
It doesn’t look like this is going to turn up in consumer devices any time soon, but I’m sure there are some interesting applications that can afford the cost and physical bulk of the system already.
Links:
Ho John Lee | November 22nd, 2005 | 2 comments
Today’s Wall Street Journal mentions that some hotels are offering to place exercise equipment in your room. For $20, the Westin will provide a treadmill or stationary bike, and several others will provide yoga mats and DVDs.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone has first hand experience with this. On the one hand, it might save a few minutes finding / getting in and out of the gym, as well as fixing the problem of gym hours not lining up with when you’re actually at the hotel during business travel. I routinely find that the published hours don’t reflect reality, although I can usually get someone to open the gym if it’s a real hotel (i.e. well equipped but overpriced).
On the other hand, a decent treadmill would occupy a large chunk of many hotel rooms, and I suspect that people in the adjacent rooms might not be thrilled about the “thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk” grinding along at 180 paces a minute for an hour or so (or three, if it’s a long run day on a marathon training cycle).
Ho John Lee | November 22nd, 2005 | 3 comments
During the initial planning and survey phase of the Kuppam project a few years ago, I discovered it was nearly impossible to obtain high resolution topographic maps (or any other sort) for rural India. The government-operated Survey of India has high quality data, but it hasn’t generally made its way into the equivalent of US Geological Survey 15-minute quadrangles on paper or the DTM / DEM data sets. The best I was able to come up with was some old Soviet military maps from the 1950s.
Hadn’t thought about it for a while, but I see someone else has found out about these:
Paul sez, “Soviets mapped the entire world at various scales between 1940 and 1990.In some areas the Russian maps are still the best available maps. Amazingly, none of the maps are copyright.
BoingBoing, Soviet Military Maps of Britain
Here’s a chart of this month’s unique site visits by continent, using data from Site Meter. I haven’t kept close watch on this, but I’ve noticed the readership here becoming increasingly far-flung during the past few months. This summer, the North America share was something like 75%, which has now declined to just over 50%.
Most of the overseas traffic originates from places you’d expect: Western Europe, Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, India, etc, but I enjoy the randomness of visits from places like Trinidad, Malawi, Zimbabwe, or Ullan Battor.
I see this morning I’m finally getting more than “waiting for data” from Google Analytics, after signing up last Monday. They seem to have been swamped with new users trying out the free service. I’ll let it run for a while and see what sort of information it can turn up as things get settled down over there.
I don’t have a good tool for analyzing data on feed usage. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.
At last month’s Mobile Monday, Jack Denenberg from Cingular Wireless commented that 411 calls accounted for a huge chunk of revenue to the US cellular carriers, with Cingular servicing around 1 million 411 calls per day at an average billing cost of between $1.25 to $1.40. All US carriers combined do around 3 million 411 calls per day, which works out to more than $1 billion per year in 411 fees!
They’re going to be really unhappy if these guys get some traction:
A few weeks ago I met Andre Vanier, CEO of 1-800-411-SAVE (my friend Ajay, the guy with the cool geek car, introduced us). I was intrigued by his new business and he’s on the phone with me announcing his new service that turns on tonight at midnight.
…
We are considerably cheaper, he says. 1-800-411-SAVE is a free call.
His service is using the same database that the carriers use to provide 411 information. This service is using the latest data the big phone companies use (they are forced to share that data with other phone carriers), while many of the Internet-based services are using much older and less complete databases.
What’s the business model? 1-800-411-SAVE pays for the cost of the 411 call. The model is to recover the cost from advertisers. Not just any advertisers but specifically advertisers that fit into the overall concept of “save.”
(via Scoble)
Update 11-16-2005 00:41 PST – The corollary to saving $1.50 for listening to an ad from a sponsor before getting the phone number from 411 is that the customer service lines for banks and credit cards should pay me for listening to their upsell message that gets played before getting to the automated response or being put on hold. At least with the free 411 I get to make a choice…
Ho John Lee | November 15th, 2005 | 1 comment
Asiatotal.net, a Hong Kong-based company, is planning to distribute “iT”:
iT is a compact, ultra-simple, portable desk top computer complete with everything necessary to connect to the Internet, home entertainment devices, printer, USB card reader for reading the memory cards of digital cameras and many other USB peripherals.
It has been developed, designed and manufactured to be distributed free in order to enhance the lives of the millions of people in the world who – for economic reasons – are not connected to the Internet. A way to move them out of the digital underclass.
The device is based on Windows CE, and comes preloaded with IE6.
From the Business Standard:
This device has a conventional keyboard with 14 additional keys, 10 of which will be sponsored by firms that want to tap rural markets, like a firm selling seeds or crop insurance. By pressing the relevant “hot key”, farmers can directly access firms’ websites where product information will guide them to making the right purchase.
A major near term challenge will be the absence of an internet connection in many of the target communities. Asiatotal is explicitly not providing the networking service. This might work in places such as Kuppam, where there is already wireless broadband service, but many other places would have on-demand service only, dial up or perhaps cellular data service, which is rapidly becoming available in many rural markets.
I’m not sure about targeting seed vendors or crop insurance though. Based on my recollection of the Kuppam web traffic logs, they could probably do better with horoscopes, cricket scores, and matrimonial services…
The firm says it intends to distribute 3 million iTs across developing countries like India, China, Brazil, Mexico, and those in eastern Europe. It will be shortly rolling out these devices in Brazil.
I hope they make some progress with this. If they’re able to make the business economics and user adoption work with this device, using the 100 dollar computer instead of a Windows CE device should be a piece of cake.
(via ContentSutra and Business Standard)
Marc van der Chijs observes some new signage in the Sanlitun diplomatic district in Beijing:
You are not allowed to blow up your car! Not sure if it is a temporary sign (Mr. Bush will visit Beijing this week) or whether it has been here longer already. Or does it mean something else?
There actually has been a warning from the US State Department regarding a threat against 4- and 5-star hotels in China. Hopefully nothing will come of it, though I’m sure there’s more under way than putting up these signs.
(via Asiapundit)
Ho John Lee | November 15th, 2005 | 10 comments
This ultrasound imaging system is designed as a peripheral to a standard notebook computer. The prototype unit has been developed by a group at the Japan National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, working with the Hiroshima Institute of Technology.
The unit can be used in health care or beauty facilities, or even in the home, to visualize the key components of the body (muscles, bones, subcutaneous fat) and give fat and muscle measurements. It is hoped that this technology will help to prevent elderly people from being confined to their beds.
Users connect Ubiquitous Echo to their personal computers and use the included software to collect detailed information about specific parts of the body. The ultrasonic echography equipment traditionally used in medical examinations is prohibitively expensive and too large to be used by health care and beauty facilities or in the home. This new machine is small, lightweight, and inexpensive and can even be put into a bag along with a laptop computer and carried around.
No pricing estimates are stated, but it is likely to be much less expensive than standalone ultrasound systems, in addition to being much more portable.
This might be a good addition to a mobile health unit or a field health center.
A newly created business called Global Health will work to bring it to market.
Links:
via Medgadget
Ho John Lee | November 13th, 2005 | 54 comments
I’ll use this week’s no-GYM theme to go with something completely different:
I’ve travelled between the US and India something like 20 times in the past few years. From the Bay Area, it’s roughly equidistant to go via Europe or via Asia. I often have other stops to make elsewhere in Asia, but one reason I like to go westbound is because of the facilities at the Singapore Changi Airport. (Another reason is that I find the Frankfurt airport vaguely creepy, but that’s another story.)
I typically fly on United from San Francisco, connecting in either Tokyo or Hong Kong, and arriving in Singapore at midnight. There’s a connecting flight to Bangalore at around 7:30am, which leaves just enough time for a few hours sleep, a workout in the gym, breakfast and e-mail at the business lounge, and picking up any last minute items at one of the many stores.
The Singapore airport has two transit hotels, a swimming pool, and two gyms on the terminal airside, meaning that you don’t have to go through security. This is a bigger win these days than a few years ago. I’ve also gone into town to stay at a “real” hotel, but while I’m on business travel I hardly do more than sleep, run, and wash at any hotel, and it hardly seems worth it.
The Ambassador Transit Hotel is bare bones, but offers much better sleeping conditions than any airplane bed, flat recliner or not. It can be difficult to book a reservation ahead of time, but there are a number of “economy” rooms, which are rarely fully booked, and even when they are, I have been able to get a room within an hour or so of waiting around at the desk. The regular rooms have between 1 and 4 beds, a small desk, television, and bathroom. The economy rooms are smaller, some do not have a television, do not have a separate bathroom, but are adjacent to the gym, where there are a number of shower rooms.
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Interestingly, the rooms have indicators pointing to Mecca, for the convenience of their Islamic clientele. There is also a small children’s play area on the ground floor, but I’ve never seen any families at the transit hotel. It usually seems to be business travellers, and people are just trying to sleep. International flights are coming and going around the clock, so the hotel books blocks of six hours at a time, which can be extended by the hour. It’s about US$35 for a room.
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Use of the terminal 1 transit hotel gym, showers, and swimming pool are included in the room charge, but can also be purchased separately. The transit hotel gym has a fairly new Precor treadmill (was finally replaced this spring), a stationary cycle, and a few weight machines, and a rack of dumbbells. The shared gym showers are much nicer than the ones in the rooms. They’re equipped with glass doors and soap dispensers, while the ones in the rooms have just a curtain, with a drain in the floor (so the whole bathroom floor gets wet), and little packets of soap (which are hard to open).
The swimming pool is on the roof of the building, and is accessible through the Terminal 1 gym. The pool doesn’t open until something like 9am, so I’ve only used it on a couple of occasions when my outgoing flight was delayed.
The Terminal 2 transit hotel doesn’t have a gym, but the separately operated Plaza premium lounge and gym nearby is much nicer than the Terminal 1 gym. The desk can also supply you with exercise clothes, although you still need to bring your own running shoes. Their gym has several nice treadmills, along with a newer weight machine, hand weights, and mats for yoga. They also have showers, nap rooms, oxygen therapy, and a lounge with snacks.
The view from the treadmill at Terminal 2 is more interesting, as you can watch all the people coming and going at the food court across the concourse. (They are also watching you, of course, while they munch on their noodles and french fries, and wondering at the fact that you were there when they arrived, and still there when they left…) In contrast, the view from the terminal 1 treadmill looks out onto part of the runway.
Terminal 2 is newer in general, and has all the Singapore Airlines gates. United and others are mostly on Terminal 1, which is older, but has been updated somewhat over the past few years.
Singapore is also the best place in the world to be stranded by a missed flight connection. It has cheap and reliable phone service, free wireless networking, and the equivalent of a midsized shopping mall along the concourses. Even without the transit hotels, you could quite easily live in the airport and get a lot of work done for days or weeks, sort of like Tom Hanks in The Passenger, except with credit cards and communications services.
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A number of airlines contract their business lounge service to the SATS premier lounge. This causes some confusion sometimes, as SATS is a unit of Singapore Airlines, but there are two separate (and much nicer) lounges for travellers flying SQ. If you’re on United and have access to an international lounge, you will be able to use the SATS lounge for free. It has a supply of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, chairs, and mostly pretty bad food. I usually bring my own food for travelling, and skip their snacks except for some nuts and chips. There are a couple of PCs for internet access (free), along with a large television and several telephones. I’ve never succeeded in getting the lounge phones to work for me, although I don’t have any trouble with the ones out on the concourse.
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The telecom rates to the US from Singapore on the pay phones are comparable to my US domestic cell phone service. Some of the phones have card stripe readers which accept normal credit cards, such as American Express, Visa, or Mastercard, while others take only cards from local phone companies. A 5 minute call to the US ends up costing around US $3.
Some other notes:
- There is also a small shower in the bathroom at the SATS lounge. I’ve never used it, as I always shower at the transit hotel. There’s also a new “Rainforest” lounge in Terminal 1, which looks pretty nice, and has showers, massage, aromatherapy, and some treadmills, but I haven’t had occasion to use it.
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Elsewhere in the airport, there are “quiet areas” where you can sleep, power points for recharging phones and computers, a theater for free movies, many electronics shops (good for buying connectors and cables before heading into India), a cactus garden, a free bus tour of Singapore, and lots of free wireless. Just be sure you’re running a VPN or something.
- During the SARS crisis, each gate at SIN had a thermal imaging scanner to quickly screen passengers that were running a temperature, which kept incoming traffic moving along. SQ was also distributing kits of information and a disposable thermometer to their passengers. Hopefully we won’t see the return of the process with an avian flu outbreak, but they’ve had practice now.
- There are armed patrols of Singapore troops all over the airport. It can be a little surprising to walk off your flight to be greeted by people with submachine guns, especially if they’re juxtaposed with some of the wacky entertainment (singing, dancing, variety) that turns up on the stage in the middle of the concourse bar area.
- The airport has a tram system running between T1 and T2. It takes around 20-25 minutes to walk at a normal pace, but if you run you can make it in 10, even with hand luggage. I’ve been the last person allowed to make my connecting flight out of Singapore more than once…
More photos
Quick notes from SearchSIG last night:
This month’s SearchSIG featured John Batelle along with Dan Farber and a panel discussion on vertical search by Gautam Godhwani (SimplyHired), Pete Flint, (Trulia), Adam Beguelin (Truveo), and Tony Gentile, (Healthline). If you look carefully at the photo above, it’s nearly self-documenting, as the web page with the speakers and agenda is projected behind the stage. If only they had sat in order…
Best quote of the evening, from Gautam Godhwani: “I have yet to see Google do applications well”. This in response to a question to all panelists about why Google / Yahoo / Microsoft wouldn’t end up squashing them like bugs at some point. In the background, John Batelle ran a search for “search company ceo” on SimplyHired, which came back with 1020 matches…
Tony Gentile from Healthline had a more defensible reason for existence, in that they’ve built a domain specific taxonomy and onotology for mapping consumer names for health-related topics into the professional medical namespace, and has a quote from Eric Schmidt to the effect that “health and law are two areas that they wouldn’t approach now as they require too much domain knowledge” or something like that. Truveo has a lot of branded content, and claims to do an excellent job of digging out metadata, thus letting you quickly filter for recent gossip, sports highlights and adult content. Trulia works with real estate agents to map their listings onto a Google map, with filters by price, zip code, etc. I have a hard time keeping Truveo and Trulia straight.
A quick show of hands turned up something like 1/3 of the attendees were involved in building a new search engine, most of them not Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft employees. Hmm. This might be correlated with the large number of search company CEOs.
Update 11-12-2005 16:10 PST – more from John Batelle, Dan Farber, Om Malik, plus a pointer to an Information Week article with the quote from Eric Schmidt regarding domain knowledge requirements for law and health search (via Tony Gentile)
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