Semantic Clusters or Search Engine Head Hunting?
The main thing Jim's flipping about over at Ask right now is what he calls their Zoom feature, which enables searchers to zoom in and out semantically.

One of the Ask searches he was proudest of was for Civil War. Look on the right where Ask lists related names (third section down). Those are all pulled algorithmically, based on Teoma's understanding of semantic networks.

So I was just thinking that maybe Google's not actually advertising to hire Susan Dumais, but rather associates her name with NLP and posts ads based on its semantic understanding of the NLP "community".

A test for this? Searches on other MSN NLP folks.

Takako Aikawa - no ads

Anthony Aue - no ads

Chris Brockett - no ads

Simon Corston-Oliver - no ads

OK this manual research is getting boring. Someone please write an app that can pull the names from MSN's researcher directory and check to see if there are any ads for Google jobs.

And my unscientific preliminary conclusion is that yes, Google's advertising on Susan Dumais' name.

I didn't see any "we're hiring" ads for [NLP] or [NLP jobs].

Significant? Only in the lengths to which Google will go to hire talent (which reminds me of Jim's theory that hiring is marketing - look, Google just got ANOTHER post about how they hire the best scientists around - and the PU post on how everything is marketing.)

via TW
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |