When I explain to people what are we working on, I try not to mention the term “exploratory search” because almost no one has any idea about what it is. I’ll try to collate some definitions and provide an example of a task when the exploratory search is needed.
One of the definitions I like was given in the recent paper from FXPAL (Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory) titled Interactive Information Seeking via Selective Application of Contextual Knowledge:
Exploratory search is often characterized by an evolving information need and the likelihood that the information sought is distributed across multiple documents. Thus the goal of the search process is not to formulate the perfect query or to find the ideal document, but to collect information through a variety of means, and to combine the discovered information to achieve a coherent understanding of some topic.
A good outline of this paper was posted by Jin Y. Kim.
The performance of story navigation using calendar has been improved. Now when you click a date on the story calendar, the time needed to show the relevant articles from that date is significantly shorter.
We are now working on the search functionality, which will allow you to search for stories based on key words. Additionally, if you register a profile, you will be able to add favourite words to your profile, and then see the stories most relevant to you in a separate tab, so you don’t need to search every time you come back.
We have decided to make Readrz.com website open for access by anyone. Not all of the features we wanted to implement before the first release are ready. The features still being in progress are:
However, we have decided to go ahead and open the current website to wider audience anyway. The current magazines available on the website are refreshed every 6 hours. In the future, this process can be made faster, including the option for live updates on user selected stories.
We also have a better algorithm lined up for funding the evolution of stories over time to capture more time-context-dependent articles (based on what was going on at a particular point in time). We expect the ranking of articles with regard to news stories over time will be more precise and context dependent with the new algorithm.
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Welcome to the Readrz Blog from the founders of Readrz.com.
Here we want to share some info about what has been done on the project so far. We would also highly value any feedback and thoughts about the future development.
The current vision for Readrz is that we are automating the creation of magazines from thousands of news articles available on the web. We use statistics to detect articles related to each other and group them into stories spread over time. We then try to use our modest UI skills to provide you a convenient user interface to navigate these stories.
We have a bunch of other ideas to build on top of this. I bet you can easily start to imagine them too. However, given limited resources, it is very hard to know at this time which ones we will pursue first. We will follow up on the developments as we go along.
This is the Readrz.com development blog. Feel free to get in touch is you want to discuss anything.
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