Andrei Broder on personalized information

Andrei Broder (former VP of Research at Altavista, former CTO of IBM Research, now VP of Emerging Search Technology at Yahoo) has some interesting thoughts on personalized information in an interview on the Yahoo Search Blog:

I believe that we are now entering an entirely new phase [in search]. I call this next phase "search without a box" ... information to come in a context without actively searching ... information on an "as needed, when needed" basis without explicitly asking for it.

Essentially we'’re going from 2.7 words per query to 0.

Andrei is talking about personalized information streams. Andrei says we should be showing people the relevant news, interesting new products, and useful new documents they need to see. We need to surface the information that matters automatically and implicitly.

See also my previous post, "Organizing chaos and information overload".