Category Archives: Search technology

Elasticsearch 1.6 upserts and partial updates

Posted on June 18, 2015 by willwhim

To partially update an Elasticsearch document in 1.6, you’ll need to create a script for the partial update, and potentially use an upsert. For example, you want to add tags to a blog post here’s an example of a document … Continue reading →

Posted in Science and Tech, Science and Tech, Search technology | Leave a comment

Dynamic typing and testing

Posted on July 7, 2011 by willwhim

As kind of a 10-finger exercise, I decided to write a small inverted index library in Ruby today, since I had the day off. This is just a few thoughts about what it was like to write tests for this … Continue reading →

Posted in Science and Tech, Search technology | 3 Comments

What is missing? Watson, AI and search technology

Posted on February 16, 2011 by willwhim

All geekdom, and much that is outside our realm, is abuzz with news and discussion of the contest by IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson, vs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In last night’s game (the second half of a game started … Continue reading →

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Science and Tech, Search technology | 1 Comment

Is Bing cheating at search? Redux: It’s all in the clicks

Posted on February 4, 2011 by willwhim

[Disclaimer: I work for Bing as a senior research software developer, but I do not speak for Bing] Matt Cutts has a thoughtful follow-up article on the controversy over whether Bing is copying Google’s search results. There has been a … Continue reading →

Posted in Search technology | 18 Comments

Is Bing cheating at search?

Posted on February 2, 2011 by willwhim

Disclaimer: I work for Bing as a senior research software developer, but I do not speak for Bing; I am writing this on my own time and behalf. Google has accused Bing of cheating, of copying Google’s results (Danny Sullivan’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Search technology | 20 Comments

Some Bing N-gram notes on tokenization

Posted on October 26, 2010 by willwhim

Brendan O’Connor asked me on Twitter what I knew about Bing N-gram tokenization conventions, and I said I would ask someone who knew. The N-gram team plans a future blog post on this, but here’s some things I was told … Continue reading →

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New Bing NGram data

Posted on October 26, 2010 by willwhim

Bing (my employer, but here a different area) has announced new publicly available NGram data, current to April 2010. It includes 1 through 5-grams for title, anchor and body streams (that is, HTML page titles, text in anchor links, and … Continue reading →

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Computational lexicography on the cheap using Twitter

Posted on October 11, 2010 by willwhim

Let’s say you want to investigate the use of “tweet” as a verb (see “Tweet this” at Language Log), and you want to collect, oh, 10,000 examples or so and do some concordance work, for example: What iss the most … Continue reading →

Posted in Language, On the Cheap, Science and Tech, Search technology | 3 Comments

Nip it in the butt

Posted on September 20, 2010 by willwhim

I’ve seen two references to “nip it in the butt” for “nip it in the bud” recently, which reminded me of the “avoid like the plaque” post. It’s a little harder to get statistics for this based on the public … Continue reading →

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Avoid like the plaque

Posted on September 14, 2010 by willwhim

I noticed that the expression “avoid like the plaque” showing up in some search results I was doing. This is “plaque” with-a-queue, not “plague”-with-a-gee. This seems like an odd misspelling to me, and I was curious how often this occurs. … Continue reading →

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