There’s a lot of writing about search — especially about ranking and relevance. And recently there’s been an increased focus on the particular challenges of query understanding. But, surprisingly, there hasn’t been much discussion of content understanding. This post will be the first of many to address this gap. Content understanding is the foundation of the search process. Let’s…

This publication is a series of posts devoted to query understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them all, start with the first one.

In application design, affordances are cues that help users discover and explore how to interact with the application. Typical affordances for search applications include buttons and links. Users do not need to be experts to recognize these interface elements and understand how they work. The excitement around conversational interfaces and…

A common theme in the concerns about generative AI is that it will replace human-generated art and end creativity as we know it. Reflecting on this concern inspired me to research how painters reacted to the invention of photography (specifically the daguerreotype) in the 19th century. Not surprisingly, many painters…

The recent advances in generative AI have led many people to fear all manner of deepfakes — particularly text, images, audio, and video. People like Yuval Noah Hariri feel that AI threatens the future of humanity. On one hand, I feel that these fears are well-grounded: even if AI-generated fakes…

In a recent Tom Fishburne cartoon, one employee says “AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote,” while another says, “AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I pretend I read.” Fishburne follows up by noting how we have…

These are early days for generative AI, but it already feels like we are at the dawn of a revolution in human-computer communication. Practically overnight, we can communicate with machines conversationally, with both parties using natural language rather than keywords, facets, or SQL. So, what’s next? Search as Communication In my two decades…

As an independent consultant, instructor, and alleged thought leader, I am keenly aware that generative AI is coming after my livelihood. Why read my writing — let alone pay for my time — when ChatGPT is happy to answer all of your particular questions for free, and in real time? …

For as long as we have had needs, long before servers started asking us “Sorry, we don’t have Coke, is Pepsi ok?”, we have accepted substitutes for the products and services we seek. Indeed, fungibility is so universal that non-fungibility, digital or otherwise, is the exception. Today, however, there is…