Aspiration:
Deliver seamless user experiences in search-powered environments [+] Deliver seamless user experiences in search-powered environments [−]

I see Search as what enables you to connect things together. The question and the answer. The intent and the options at play. The obvious and that little extra.

The user experience is as much about finding as it is about discovering, connecting and organising. Search should suggest. And have you suggest back, so it can improve and so you.

Seamless is to get the basics right. Right balance between precision and recall. Between commercial and organic results. To make things useful and simple.

You'll want to track all this, including ROI. But not only ROI.

Expertise:
Web Search • Local • Text Mining • Information Retrieval • NLP [+] Web Search • Local • Text Mining • Information Retrieval • NLP [−]
Search & Local
Six-year tenure as Product Manager for Yahoo Search, covering the deployment of various Consumer-facing features to the EMEA markets. In charge of Local Search and Product Search (PLA) in the UK, FR and DE.
Text Mining & IR
Pre- and Post-Sales Consultant on major industrial IR applications, as the French Yellow Pages online service, the setup of in-house terminology databases at Airbus and EDF or the implementation of Controlled English Checkers (Airbus, Shell).
Natural Language Processing
Linguistics is my college background. I started as a developer of core linguistic tools (dictionaries, grammars, lemmatizers) used in various database querying and text analysis environments. This is also how I got initiated to the worlds of Unix, Bash and Perl. A true eye-opener.

Technical skills: Agile/Scrum, Unix/Linux, Perl, PHP, Python, R, MySQL, JS, XML, HTML/CSS

Currently attending a 9-module MOOC on Data Science Specialization by Johns Hopkins University on Coursera.

Roles:
Product & Operations • Localisation & I18n • QA & User Voice [+] Product & Operations • Localisation & I18n • QA & User Voice [−]
Product & Operations
Exchanging with the various functional teams in a given org is a true privilege, and probably what I like best in the role, even when conversations turn uneasy. As a former dev myself, I truly appreciate what goes into a development cycle. As much as I appreciate the tasks of operating a product in the real life.
Localisation & I18n
My core mission during my first years at Yahoo! — Deploy the US products to the French market, localise the User interface, set up the Help pages. And advocate for Internationalisation (I18n) at the core of the design of the products.
QA & User Voice
There's no product without users. And getting to know your users takes a bit of time and practice. For sure, QA must track bugs. But efficiency, relevancy, simplicity of the experience is the real goal. You'll need data to iterate. Plus actual feedback from the users.

I am a certified Professional Scrum Product Owner at Scrum.org.

Service Offer:
Advisory missions to enhance Site Search usability and boost user engagement [+] Advisory missions to enhance Site Search usability and boost user engagement [−]

Implementing a Site Search seems obvious when the volume of information on your site exceeds what simple procedural approaches (e.g. menus) can cope with. What is less obvious is the ability of the Search solution to (a) properly meet the expectations from the visitors, and (b) demonstrate an actual increment to the overall site value.

autonoia, logotypeThrough the autonoia project, I offer advisory services to maximise the usability of your Search solution in order to grow the engagement of your audience. More details can be found on this page [in French].

Plus:
Occasional Publisher [+] Occasional Publisher [−]

Partner at Ollendorff & Desseins, a publishing house devoted to Philosophy and Music. Mostly in French.

Last release, March 2018: Nueva Germania – Theo Lessour's deep dive into Bernhard Förster's pathological project of establishing an “aryan” colony in Paraguay in the 1880s. A deadly journey from Wagner to the inhospitable jungle.

Lake Baikal. February 2008.