Shift in Online Behavior May Be Evident
March 4, 2009
Enid Burns, ClickZ, wrote “More Time Spent Online Communicating than Getting Entertained” here. I think the data summarized in her article may be harbingers of a shift for some demographic sectors. You can read her article here. She summarizes a report from Netpop Research, so I don’t want to recycle her analysis. The most important point for me was this statement:
Time spent communicating online went from 27 percent of time online in 2006 to 32 percent in 2008. Communication, in the survey, includes activities such as e-mail, instant messaging, posting to blogs, and photo sharing. “We’re really looking to create personal relationships and communicating with people,” said Josh Crandall, managing director of Media-Screen Crandall.
Three observations:
- The Internet technology is absorbing broader human and communication functions. The pace will accelerate and saturation will occur in the foreseeable future in developed nations. Landlines are goners and the new net-based comm modes will ignite considerable change and innovation
- The demographic push on organizations means that social functions of those connected will move to cyberspace. Implications and consequences are difficult to pinpoint. I think the impact will be significant, leaving some traditional online companies behind quickly unless these outfits adapt.
- These services will want to coalesce into what I call a natural monopoly. This too has significant implications for users, regulators, and organizations competing in this emergent ecosystem.
In short, if these data are accurate, the next revolution is underway. Save the Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo T shirts. These items may become collector items if these firms don’t adapt to the traffic speeding down the information superhighway. Think roadkill.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
Beyond Keyword Search
March 4, 2009
An interesting tie up between LinkedIn and Twitter caught my attention. The story appeared in Search Engine Journal. Dev Basu’s “LinkedIn Teams Up with Twitter through Company Buzz” reported here that the networking service LinkedIn and the micro blogging service Twitter have teamed to offer an enterprise service. Mr. Basu wrote:
Every second thousands of people are sending out messages about topics and companies through twitter. Company Buzz lets you tap into this information flow to find relevant trends and comments about your company. Install the application and instantly see what people are saying.
This is an interesting development. Confusion about the meaning of the term “search” is commonplace. In a telephone conversation yesterday, two people on the conference call used the word “search” to describe what their organization needed. I asked each to define their understanding of the word “search”. One said, “We need to find specific data in our research reports. Not the whole document. Just the pertinent chunk.” The other said, “We need to know who knows what about a specific topic.”
The word “search” is used without much thought given to what different people mean when they throw the buzzword around.
This deal between LinkedIn and Twitter comes close to what quite a few people in the last couple of months have been describing as “search”. Key word retrieval has a place, but users want more. Will LinkedIn and Twitter dominate this market space? Hard to say. I think the deal is one to watch.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
Criticism of Google Search in the Enterprise
March 4, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Bexhuff.com’s article “Why Google Will Never Be Good At Enterprise Search” here. The author did a good job of identifying the specific items of information available about users within an enterprise. For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
Don’t just help people find information; help them find somebody who understands what the information means.
Several of the comments were on point as well. This post makes clear that the consultant asserting that enterprise search is stable is essentially incorrect. Search is hard. What’s needed in the enterprise is not a list of results. One size does not fit all.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
MapReduce in a Browser: A Glimpse of the Google in 2011
March 4, 2009
I have no idea who is behind Igvita, but I will pay closer attention. You will want to read “Collaborative Map-Reduce in the Browser” here. When I read the write up and scanned the code, I thought, “Yep, this is the angle the Google is taking with Chrome, containers, and a bunch of other Googley patent documents’ “inventions”. I won’t spoil your fun. For me, the most important information in the write up is the diagram. A happy quack to Igvita. Heck, have two quacks.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
Twitter Facebook Analogy
March 3, 2009
Elad Blog’s “Twitter Is to Facebook as Google Was to Yahoo” is an interesting article. You may want to read it here. I think the idea that Facebook represents an older service and Twitter a newer one is interesting. I am not sure that I agree. Facebook is a step above MySpace.com which strikes me as a variant on a personal Web page service. These have been around for a long time. I think Yahoo bought GeoCities about 10 year ago. The progression in my mind is: GeoCities to MySpace.com and then Facebook. The “social phenomenon” that has some azure chip consultants foaming at the mouth is a consequence of more people using these services and incremental tech jumps that allow a Web page to be hooked into alerts, rich media, and various communication functions.
Twitter, on the other hand, started as a text messaging service and was crafted into a broadcast and follow service. At its core, a tweet is small text which can be created and sent at any time. The notions of mobility, brevity, and a single person’s utterance at a point in time are the text version of the old Nextel push to talk function. In my opinion, the sequence is mobile phone to SMS to Twitter.
Mr. King’s analogy (cited in the Elad Blog but no valid link when I checked) may work for an ex-Googler or Xoogler, but it doesn’t work for me. The next part of the analogy breaks down as well. Yahoo was not a search engine. Yahoo was a directory. Yahoo got into search when someone realized that the slowness, the cost, and headaches of the directory could be complemented and later replaced with a search system. Enter Inktomi. Yahoo has never been much of an innovator. The company bought other companies and allowed those companies to operate as separate entities. Yahoo got into the ad business in the way my mother got into hats. She just bought them, wore a hat once, and then put it in a box. Yahoo never integrated ads across its services. Yahoo bought Overture and never enhanced the service. The rest of Yahoo’s history is a loop of these basic business methods. Collect, fail to integrate, put on shelf, and move on to the next thing. Here’s the Yahoo progression in my opinion: Yahoo directory to Inktomi search to portal to acquire separate companies to loosely federated conglomerate. Yahoo is not integrated yet.
Google, on the other hand, focused on search. Skipped the portal craziness. Google bought and borrowed, paying Yahoo about $1 billion to make an Overture related legal matter go away prior to the Google IPO. The Google progress, in my opinion, was search to advertising to application platform to information utility.
As a result, there’s not much similarity between Yahoo and Google other than both have offices near one another and both operate online services. Yahoo is fragmented and Google is more homogeneous. Yahoo will have a tough time becoming Google no matter how many Bain consultants scurry around thinking blue chip thoughts.
Despite my objections, I think the analogy is important for three reasons:
First, the analogy was crafted by a Xoogler, and that tells me some folks close to Google understand that Twitter and Facebook have found traction where Googzilla has not. I have pointed out in this Web log that Google seems unable to act with the resolve it demonstrated in the 2004 to 2006 period. Now the company seems to be morphing into a Microsoft style outfit. I think the GOOG is falling behind in real time search. The splash page at http://blogsearch.google.com is stale compared to what I can find at http://search.twitter.com. I am floating the idea now that this failure to respond to real time search is the
Second, the growth curve for Twitter and Facebook are solid. These services do not as yet directly compete if you accept my point of view. Both are vulnerable to a service that fuses the two functions in a useful, interesting way. Right now I don’t see either Facebook or Twitter able to do much more than try to keep up with here and now opportunities. That makes both outfits vulnerable to some extent.
Third, the analogy shows that what once were separate services are, at their core, probably ripe for fusion. These functions–Yahoo grab bag, Google search, Facebook Web pages, and Twitter micro blogs–can be rolled up into one big digital ball. I think that will probably happen. Furthermore, I don’t think any of the companies I just mentioned will be able to pull this off.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
Autonomy IDOL Metrics
March 3, 2009
I was updating my files and noticed that the company had added metrics to its IDOL write up. You can find the information here. Among the information I noted were these points:
- Support over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms
- Accurately index in excess of 110 GB/hour with guaranteed index commit times (I.e. how fast an asset can be queried after it is indexed) of sub 5ms
- Execute over 2,600 queries per second, with subsecond response times on a single machine with two CPUs when used against 70 million pieces of content, while querying the entire index for relevant information
- Support hundreds of thousands of enterprise users, or millions of web users, accessing hundreds of terabytes of data
- Save storage space with an overall footprint of less than 15% of the original file size.
These metrics are quite amazing. To buttress the argument, the company quotes a number of consultants. Happy customers include Satyam, a firm that has been in a bit of a swamp. The write up about Autonomy IDOL’s security support is equally remarkable. I did a calculation based on public data about Google. You can find that write up here. Notice that Autonomy’s system processes more queries per second than Google’s, if these data are accurate. If you have other metrics about Autonomy or any other search engine, feel free to post these data in the comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, March 3, 2009
Googlers on Twitter
March 3, 2009
The voices (approved and vetted) on Twitter appeared in “The Ultimate List of Google and Google Employees on Twitter” here. I scanned the list and was delighted to see that Michael Wyszomierski, search quality team, chose the Twitter name wysz. If the list is useful to you, post a comment to this blog explaining what you have done with these names. Headhunt? Follow? Not out their comments?
Stephen Arnold, March 3, 2009
Google: Win One, Lose One
March 3, 2009
Mixed day for the GOOG. The Obama White House shifted the president’s Saturday “radio” address to Akamai.com from YouTube.com. The Register’s take is here. The reason? Privacy concerns. My sources suggest that there were little voices whispering about Google, and these voices were heard. “Little voices” in Washington, DC influence quite a lot of politics.
On the bright side, TGDaily reported that “Google Rules Mobile Search.” You can read the story here. The data come from Net Applications, even though the url is for Hitslink.com. The key data which we don’t know much about were:
In February [209], Google handled 97.5% of all searches conducted via mobile devices. Yahoo handled just 2.03% of all mobile searches, followed by Ask (0.21%) and MSN, AltaVista and AOL, each with miniscule numbers.
AltaVista. Now that’s a surprise to me.
Christian Zibreg suggested that Microsoft’s deal with Verizon might have an impact on Google’s market share. I have heard this line of reasoning before. Let the data do the talking. Google has been quite successful in search, and there is little information that suggests it will muff the bunny in mobile search at this time. But, who knows?
Stephen Arnold, March 3, 2009
SEO: Good, Bad, Ugly
March 3, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the February 20, 2009, article by George for Insiders View: Insurance Blow here. “More and More SEO Scams” made the statement:
It seems that there are few whitehat agencies these days. I always advocate some gray hat to stay on top and some blackhat to determine what others are doing. But this is getting ridiculous. The economic climate has pushed people out of the city so instead of brokering toxic investments, they’re now brokering SEO services.
Strong words. I had seen the About.com posting “How to Avoid Being Taken by SEO Scams and Bad SEO Companies” here, but I was not sure how widespread the problem was. Dave Taylor here made this comment in his “SEO Company Promises Top Three Positions: A Scam?”:
Of all the aspects of the Internet, none seems to be so full of con artists and purveyors of dubious businesses than so-called search engine optimization companies. The reason for this is that the basics of SEO (which I’ll call it for simplicity) are simple and can be explained in five minutes. Heck, Google even has a free guide to SEO best practices.
Image source: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jhSlOGUoB5k/R-1-flxJm0I/AAAAAAAAE40/y1pVNDBfyXE/s400/scam.jpg
Several thoughts:
- As the economy slides toward a financial black hole, some companies hope their Web sites can be a source of sales leads and revenue. Managers turn to their marketing advisors and Web professionals to deliver a return on the Web investment. Pressure increases.
- The dominance of Google in Web search means that a company not in the Google index does not exist in some cases. A company whose product or service does not come up on the first page of Google results may not get much traffic.
- The quality of Web sites (content, coding) becomes increasingly important. But quality takes thought, time, and effort.
When one mixes these three ingredients together, search engine optimization becomes a must. If a company can afford to buy Google AdWords, then the Web site must have compelling landing pages and the technical plumbing to make it easy for the person landing on a link to take the desired action.
Electronic Readers Can Save Newspapers, Pundit Asserts
March 3, 2009
You must read David Coursey’s “How Electronic Readers Could Save Newspapers” here. The headline pulled me to the story. The argument pushed me away from agreement with Mr. Coursey. The guts of his argument were:
Washington would give every American taxpayer an amount of money that could only be spent on newspapers and magazines delivered electronically. The amount might be keyed to the amount of taxes paid, but it needs to be in a form that is immediately spendable, such as an online voucher. You could also use the money for a Kindle or a next-generation newspaper reader such as the one Hearst is proposing. Maybe even for a laptop, though that is probably a stretch. The key thing would be supporting new hardware platforms and developing a new business model that supports paid content. I anticipate this will be a multi-year program, but not a forever one. Properly supported, the transition to electronic distribution could be complete in a few years and our newspapers and magazines would be around to see it.
The US government is in debt. Giving money to companies with products Americans are not buying strikes me as a questionable solution. The news business has changed. That change in my opinion is decisive. Give aways can’t roll back demographics, consumer taste, and time.
Stephen Arnold, March 3, 2009
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