Savvy Avi

Instructions for using a search engine: Type in a keyword. The search engine comes back with results. Then scan through them one by one until you find what you’re looking for.  That’s how search engines are used, right? And it works fine. In most cases. Kinda.  Really, a search engine user has only two options. Reject a result “it’s not what I’m looking for” and scan on. Or accept a result “that’s it” and press on it.  How about results that are close to what you’re looking for but not quite it. What if you could cue the search engine “this result is relevant, show me more like it”? How much better will search become?  All major search and recommendation engines are one dimensional with a single direction. Scan from top to bottom or on a carousel from left to right. Kluster presents search on two dimensions and the users can move in multiple direction. It can be used for any type of visual search: pictures, gifs, book covers, paintings, merchandi...

Search engines and recommendation engines display results ranked by relevance, in a list or a thumbnail layout. That’s useful in many cases but sometimes it’s more useful to explore the relation between results. Consider the human mind. When we try to remember something we hop between bits of memories, one memory leads to another, and using associative thinking we eventually find what we are looking for.  Here’s a joke about associative thinking. Two couples meet for dinner and while the women leave for the living room the men stay at dinning table and talk. “Hey” says one “I ate at a great restaurant the other day. What was the name? Something to do with flowers. Daisy, Blossom. No I got it.” Then he shouts to the living room: “Rose, what was the name of that restaurant?” For that propose Roi , Natali and I built Kluster a search tool for associative exploration. The name comes from a combination of cluster and K-means, a popular clustering algorithm that we used in an ...

The online industry is struggling to strike a balance between ad revenue and user experience. In reaction to "heavy" and aggressive ads many users began using ad blocking. Despite conflicting interests, eventually publishers, readers and ad-tech share a common goal of accessible and entertaining content online. With that common interest in-mind I published an editorial piece in MediaPost on what publisher and ad-tech companies should do to keep online video ads without deteriorating user experience:  With the threat of ad blocking looming ominously over both publishers and ad-tech companies, it would be an easy way out to pin the blame on Flash or rich media — the very tools whose ad revenues have long allowed publishers to thrive. Although this easy scapegoat exists, the ad-tech industry seems to understand that the real key to maintain the advertising monetization model is improving the user experience -- doing something along the lines of the new L.E.A.N. approach by th...