I agree that people should read Jeremy Pickens's post at IR Gupf--that's why I wrote a "quick bite" on my blog which a teaser excerpt and a link. Evidently Jeremy is getting a lot of readers today (including Mark Johnson, the program manager of Bing), which makes me happy.
It struck me as a backhanded compliment as well. Especially given that part of the Bing marketing push has been focused on relevance so say what is essentially "we're glad that someone is working on improving search in ways that aren't related to relevance" is definitely a compliment and a tweak at the same time.
If you look at relevance and search UI as if they are orthogonal issues, you are missing all the ways an interactive UI could be used to help the user get relevant results. One non-web example is Google's own Stock Screener (it is about limiting the results to the ones we are interested in):
This is part of Daniel's "Blogs I Read" category. The focus is indeed Jeremy's post. It's not TechCrunch, trust me. :) The Noisy Channel is a fantastic blog, and is among the few websites I read regularly.
I agree, but the "summarised" version at "The noisy channel" was alright and I didn't feel it was "blogspam". It felt like it helped get me interested to read more, the original article has quite some more text than the summary - might have put me off. This got me interested.
In this instance, my genuine hope was to get people to read Jeremy's post, and an unsolicited email from Jeremy about his spike in traffic--which is how I found out that HN had picked up my post--assures me that I accomplished that.
