The use of mobile search through smartphones and tablets has been on an unrelenting march ever since it was reported in 2015 as overtaking desktop search. During the past month (March 2020) there is evidence for a reversal of that trend. The most plausible explanation possibly being the lockdowns caused by COVID-19 with more people... Continue Reading →

Assuming we now have a predominantly remote working sector in many areas, after an initial disruption period there appears to have been a dramatic rebound in literature search. In some cases there are even more searches being made this week than prior to the COVID-19 lockdowns. These data may be another piece of evidence to... Continue Reading →

Search usage data from Q1 2020 compared to 2019 over the same period (Jan-March 2020). Data is shown compared to the mean usage for Q1. On Monday 16th March 2020 in the evening, several Head of States made addresses to their nations implementing various forms of lockdown/social distancing.

I will be conducting research over the coming weeks and months on the impact COVID-19 is having on search behaviour. In my previous post usage data (from DuckDuckGo) showed a marked (unprecedented) increase in the use of Internet search engines as many people stay and work from home and uncertainty caused by COVID-19. Segmenting the... Continue Reading →

Figure 1 - Increased search query traffic likely due to Coronavirus effects It is well known through sites such as Google Trends that search queries such as 'coronovirus' see a surge in usage (frequency). What is less clear as Google do not release their daily search query volumes, is the effect on overall search behaviour... Continue Reading →

With more people working from home due to Covid-19, enterprise search engines may play a more prominent role to meet information needs. Having capable search engines has always supported the digital workplace complementing discussion groups, collaboration and peer to peer communication tools. Research I conducted in 2014 with 55 geoscientists in the workplace, provides evidence that... Continue Reading →

Infoscience Technologies https://infosciencetechnologies.com Headlining in OilIT

Looking forward to presenting at the Finding Petroleum conference on the 23rd March 2020 at the Geological Society of London. http://www.findingpetroleum.com/event/Investing-in-North-Sea-projects-and-technology/f1404.aspx Abstract Most of the published literature on text mining in exploration geoscience focuses on extraction of data or concepts typically in the sentence or document 'container'. There are no known approaches that look for... Continue Reading →

The Search Insights Report 2020 is out. This has been produced by The Search Network as a service to the search community. There is no charge and no sponsorship. I was honoured to be asked to contribute an article which opens the report. Download the 54 page PDF with the link below: Search Insights 2020_The... Continue Reading →

The pace of Natural Language Processing (NLP) developments continues to accelerate. Very interesting article and research from Google released this month using their massive Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4). Worth a read! Exploring Transfer Learning with T5: the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer. https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/exploring-transfer-learning-with-t5.html