In 2015 we conducted an experiment to see how well people performed searching for geoscience information in an organization using search engines. In total 26 experienced staff from several countries in an exploration company participated using their own company information and subsurface search engine. To our knowledge, it was the first and remains the only,... Continue Reading →

Over 25 years ago Collins and Poras (1994) studied successful companies and noted their ability to often embrace what appear to be competing constructs. This may be akin to machine learning (statistical) and knowledge engineering (linguistics-taxonomies). On many occasions I've seen one 'camp' explain all the pitfalls of the other, without acknowledging the limitations of... Continue Reading →

Thirty years ago I started my MSc in Computing in Earth Sciences. Since then much of my time has been spent applying computing & data science to geoscience in industry. For the past ten years or so, my focus has turned to academia; further developing the information science to underpin Natural Language Processing (NLP), Taxonomy,... Continue Reading →

Interesting to compare Google search trends worldwide for different renewables over the past 3 months. The future appears bright.

People overestimate how good they are at searching using search engines. Whilst many search engine deployments have improved, issues remain that many searchers are oblivious to. For example, today (16th May 2020) I made the query 'peru ignimbrite' (a volcanic rock) to a well known scholarly search engine, 270 results were returned. I made the... Continue Reading →

Over the past few years, geoscience and data science knowledge was used to label over one million diverse geoscience sentences from public domain Internet sources (papers, reports, presentations etc.). The purpose was to identify clues for source rock, maturation, migration, hydrocarbon occurrence, reservoir, trap and seal as mentioned in unstructured text; in such a way they... Continue Reading →

Interesting to see the Google search volume patterns by country over the past 7 days, comparing the topics of health (blue) versus economy (red). Comparing through time, it appears that Italy and Vietnam have switched proportionally from 'health' to 'economy' in the last few days. Malaysia and Indonesia appear to have gone in the opposite... Continue Reading →

It may be possible that remote working from home becomes 'the norm' in some areas, with travel to the workplace 'the exception' (flipping the pre-lockdown practice for many). A resulting change in behaviour where people do indeed search their company resources and external literature 'more' could have implications on a number of levels. There is... Continue Reading →

With many countries in Lockdown for over a month, the kick up in Internet Search usage trend appears to show no sign of levelling off.