Has it become any easier to find a needle in a haystack or just buy a new needle in the information age?
The surface Web consists of tens of billions of pages in over 80 languages and is growing rapidly. Beneath this surface Web, lies a deep Web of much greater size. Tens of thousands of merchants offer millions of products. Complexity, size, and rate of expansion combine to make finding information and products on the Web a significant challenge. The ‘user,’ now participates as an ‘innovator’ and ‘contributor,’ adding to the size and content, but not necessarily the structure, of the Web.
Today, we are still in the early stages of the digital information age, with few opportunities to greatly improve the ways in which the information seeker finds information.
This Request for Proposals is done in partnership with Microsoft adCenter in support of its collaboration with the academic research community.
Submission deadline
The RFP due date is November 1, 2007, 5pm PDT (-8 UTC/GMT)
Awards
The total amount available under this request for proposals (RFP) is $1,000,000. Microsoft anticipates making approximately 20 awards averaging $50,000, with a maximum of $100,000 for any single award.
RFP highlights:
To advance academic research and publication in the area of Internet Research and, in particular in data mining, information finding, information supply, and internet economics, Microsoft intends to make available to the RFP awardees a Microsoft adCenter Search query log excerpt with 100 million search queries along with ad click logs sampled over a few months, and a Live Search query log excerpt with 15 million search queries with per-query search result click-throughs. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will provide advertiser accounts to all winners.
This RFP has two tracks:
+ Track 1 - Semantic Computing
+ Track 2 - Internet Economics
Microsoft encourages proposals for either track which describe innovative research using the adCenter, Live Search, and SDK assets in bold, novel, and unconventional approaches to further Internet Research and related technologies, including interdisciplinary research.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
