by Henry Farrell on August 27, 2005
“Laura Rozen”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002423.html on revelations that Able Danger contractors lost their jobs after fingering Condoleeza Rice and William Perry as part of a web of relationships between China and US defence/security types.
bq. Able Danger’s data mining results seemed more all over the board, a kind of tinfoil hat producing adventure better left to freepsters and google?
Not necessarily so. There’s a lot of confusion about what data mining can and cannot do. Both its proponents (who want to get fundng for it), and its opponents (who want to conjure up images of Big Brother) have an interest in hyping up its capabilities. The fact that Able Danger or other data mining programs may throw up false positives doesn’t mean that data mining isn’t potentially useful. The _most_ that data mining can do (and should be expected to do) is sometimes to highlight interesting and non-obvious relationships that might otherwise have escaped people’s attentions. In the words of Mary DeRosa’s “CSIS report”:http://www.csis.org/tech/2004_counterterrorism.pdf on data mining and counter-terrorism (the best thing I’ve read on the topic), data mining may provide a set of ‘power tools’ for law enforcement and intelligence, which may suggest interesting further lines of investigation. Inevitably, however, it’s going to provide a lot of entirely spurious leads (indeed, if it doesn’t provide some dead-ends, its filters are probably set too narrowly). Thus, it shouldn’t be treated as providing smoking gun evidence the one way or the other – all that it does is to analyse sets of relationships in a network of actors, and highlight some relationships that might otherwise have been non-obvious.
So the important question isn’t whether Able Danger and related programs came up with some network connections that seemed on the face of it to be ridiculous (although in the unlikely event that the Able Danger people portrayed Rice as some class of a Manchurian candidate it would obviously be a serious problem). In order to figure out the underlying merits and defects of Able Danger, we’d need to have a lot more information than seems to be publicly available at the moment. How good was Able Danger _overall_ at filtering out the wheat from the chaff? What was the overall ratio of false positives to genuine positives? Was the data mining exercise that spat out Atta’s name (assuming that the Able Danger people are telling the truth) one of a whole bunch of data mining exercises, most of which came up with garbage? Did the specific exercise that came up with Atta’s name highlight him as playing a central role in the network, or at least a role that merited further investigation, or did it have him on the periphery of the network? At the moment, we simply don’t know enough to evaluate – instead, we seem to be in a wilderness of mirrors, with “conflicting leaks”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_08/006988.php from pro- and anti-Able Danger types, all with their own agendas. The quick take as best as I can make out – if Able Danger singled out Atta as one of a small group of individuals who merited substantial further investigation, then the Pentagon has a problem. If Atta’s name was one of hundreds or thousands, the rest of whom were mostly false positives, or if the network analysis didn’t highlight Atta as someone who merited further investigation, then the Pentagon’s decision to close down the program is far more easily defensible _ex post_.
by Eszter Hargittai on July 28, 2005
Yahoo! responds to Google Video with The Yammys aka the Yahoo! Video Search Awards launched yesterday. Get those creative juices flowing in the following categories: Road Trips, Office Humor, Bloopers, Pets and Misc (so just about anything else). It’s a nice publicity idea to get some attention for their video search service. That is, assuming you – or anyone you know who likes to send around links:) – get a kick out of watching a dog on a skateboard. [thanks]
by Eszter Hargittai on February 8, 2005
by Eszter Hargittai on January 30, 2005
Among other things, my research looks at how people find information online. When I conducted in-person observations of people’s information-seeking behavior on the Web, it was interesting to see how well Ask Jeeves had done in marketing itself as the search engine that answers people’s questions. Even respondents in my study who otherwise relied on Google for almost all of their queries would go to Ask Jeeves to find the answer to the question about what steps they would have to take if they lost their wallet. People would type in their query in the form of a question even though in most cases – and especially if not specified with quotes, which is something few users do – including “what” or “where” in a query does little to improve the results of a search. It was an interesting example of how a search service could position itself in the search engine market by a particular marketing approach. The results to users’ queries on that particular search engine were no better than the results offered by other services, but due to the type of question people turned to that service regardless. Now I have come across something that seems quite unique to Ask Jeeves among the most popular search engines in terms of actual services rendered, for the moment at least.
Reading the Search Engine Watch blog I found out that using Ask Jeeves can cut down on the number of clicks required to find the answers to simple factual questions. Ask Jeeves will now give you a little box with the answers to some of your questions without having to click through to one of the results for the information. For example, wondering about this year’s date for Passover, I typed in when is Passover in 2005 and was given the exact info right there by Jeeves. (Yes, of course it’s enough to type in passover 2005 to get the same result, I was just playing along.) The service seems to cater to more popular forms of information. It will give you information about some celebrity birthdays (e.g. walter matthau birthday) and the names of Academy Award winners (up until 2002 for now, e.g. academy award best actress 2002), but it won’t display the names of Nobel Prize winners directly (e.g. see results for chemistry nobel prize 2002). It will be interesting to see to what other topical domains they expand the service (some geographical information is also available this way already). For now, other search services such as Google and Yahoo require additional clicks to find answers to the above questions. Perhaps in time they will come out with their versions of instant responses.[1]
fn1. Yes, I realize that Google has been supplying answers to some questions directly for a while. That’s what Kieran relied on in this post.
by Eszter Hargittai on March 4, 2004
It seems “googling” is now used by many as a synonym for online searches just like kleenex is used to refer to a tissue or xeroxing to using a copier. I have yet to see empirical evidence that suggests Google is used by the majority of Internet users, yet many people talk about it as though it was the only existing search engine. References to Google as the be-all and end-all of search engines abound at least among journalists and academics, and perhaps it is not surprising that such people know about and use Google. But not everybody does although you’d be hard-pressed to know that judging from the rhetoric.
I have a small piece in this month’s First Monday in which I discuss this issue and why it is problematic to assume everyone uses a certain service when that is not necessarily the case.
Actually, I only mention one concern in that piece. Another that I do not bring up there but have alluded to elsewhere is that it is problematic to have so much riding on a proprietary service. We do not know where it is headed and since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public we should not depend on it to guarantee equal access to all types of information indefinitely.