A New and Improved Content Delivery System
September 7, 2017
Personalized content and delivery is the name of the game in PRWEB’s, “Flatirons Solutions Launches XML DITA Dynamic Content Delivery Solutions.” Flatirons Solutions is a leading XML-based publishing and content management company and they recently released their Dynamic Content Delivery Solution. The Dynamic Content Delivery Solution uses XML-based technology will allow enterprises to receive more personalized content. It is advertised that it will reduce publishing and support costs. The new solution is built with the Mark Logic Server.
By partnering with Mark Logic and incorporating their industry-leading XML content server, the solution conducts powerful queries, indexing, and personalization against large collections of DITA topics. For our clients, this provides immediate access to relevant information, while producing cost savings in technical support, and in content production, maintenance, review and publishing. So whether they are producing sales, marketing, technical, training or help documentation, clients can step up to a new level of content delivery while simultaneously improving their bottom line.
The Dynamic Content Delivery Solution is designed for government agencies and enterprises that publish XML content to various platforms and formats. Mark Logic is touted as a powerful tool to pool content from different sources, repurpose it, and deliver it to different channels.
MarkLogic finds success in its core use case: slicing and dicing for publishing. It is back to the basics for them.
Whitney Grace, September 7, 2017
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IBM Watson Performance: Just an IBM Issue?
September 6, 2017
I read “IBM Pitched its Watson Supercomputer As a Revolution in Cancer Care. It’s Nowhere Close.” Here in Harrod’s Creek, doubts about IBM Watson are ever present. It was with some surprise that we learned:
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM’s goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
The write up beats on the lame horse named Big Blue. I would wager that the horse does not like being whipped one bit. The write up ignores a problem shared by many “smart” software systems. Yep, even those from the wizards at Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. That means there are many more stories to investigate and recount.
But I want more of the “why.” I have some hypotheses; for example:
Smart systems have to figure out information. Now on the surface, it seems as if Big Data can provide as much input as necessary. But that is a bit of a problem too. Information in its various forms is not immediately usable in its varied forms. Figuring out what information to use and then getting that information into a form which the smart software can process is expensive. The processes involved are also time consuming. Smart software needs nannies, and nannies which know their stuff. If you have ever tried to hire a nanny who fits into a specific family’s inner workings, you know that the finding of the “right” nanny is a complicated job in itself.
Let’s stop. I have not tackled the mechanism for getting smart software to “understand” what humans mean with their utterances. These outputs, by the way, are in the form of audio, video, and text. To get smart software to comprehend intent and then figure out what specific item of tagged information is needed to deal with that intent is a complex problem too.
IBM Watson, like other outfits trying to generate revenue by surfing a trend, has been tossed off its wave rider by a very large rogue swell: Riffing on a magic system is a lot easier than making that smart software do useful work in a real world environment.
Enterprise search vendors fell victim to this mismatch between verbiage and actually performing in dynamic conditions.
Wipe out. (I hear the Safaris’ “Wipe Out” in my mind. If you don’t know the song, click here.)
IBM Watson seems to be the victim of its own over inflated assertions.
My wish is for investigative reports to focus on case analyses. These articles can then discuss the reasons for user dissatisfaction, cost overruns, contract abandonments, and terminations (staff overhauls).
I want to know what specific subsystems and technical methods failed or cost so much that the customers bailed out.
As the write up points out:
But like a medical student, Watson is just learning to perform in the real world.
Human utterances and smart software. A work in progress but not for the tireless marketers and sales professionals who want to close a deal, pay the bills, and buy the new Apple phone.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2017
Google and Information: Another Aberration or Genuine Insight??
September 1, 2017
I read “Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me.” How many “damore” of these allegations, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations will flow into my monitoring systems? It appears that a person who once labored for Forbes, the capitalist tool, is combining memory, the methods of Malcolm Gladwell, and a surfboard ride on the anti-Google wave.
The write up recounts this recollection of conversations with marketing and PR people, allegedly real, live Googlers:
I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes. After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google. With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting.
If accurate, the method of determining search results runs counter to the information I presented in the Google Legacy,* which I wrote in 2003. In that monograph, I tallied about 100 “signals” that Google used to provide data to its objective algorithm for determining the importance of hits in a results list.
As part of my research for that monograph, I read patent documents stuffed with interesting discussions of what was wrong with certain approaches to search and retrieval issues. (You can find some juicy factoids in the discussion of the background of an invention. The pre-2007 Google patent documents strike me as more informative than Google’s most recent patent documents, but that’s just my opinion.) I recall that Google went to great lengths to explain the objectivity of the methods. I pointed out that judgment was involved in Google’s ranking methods because humans selected which numerical recipes to use and what threshold settings to use for certain procedures. In my lectures about the exploitable “holes” in the most common numerical recipes used by Google and other, the machine-based methods could be fiddled. But overall, the Google was making clear that automation for cost reduction and efficiency was more important than human editorial fiddling.
If the statement extracted from the Gizmodo write up is accurate, Google seems to have machine-based methods, but these can be used by humans to add the lieutenant’s favorite foods to the unit’s backpacks.
The Gizmodo article reveals:
Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.
With this non algorithmic interaction, the Gizmodo story depicts Google as a frisky outfit indeed. The objective system can be punitive. Really?
When I step back from this bit of “real” reporting, enlivened with the immediacy of an anecdote which seems plausible, I am thinking about the disconnect between my analysis is the Google Legacy and the events in the Gizmodo story.
Several questions arise:
- If the story is accurate, how “correct” are other articles about Google? Perhaps Google influenced many stories so that the person doing research is working with a stacked deck?
- If I assume that my research was correct in the 2002 to 2003 period when I was actively compiling data for the Google Legacy, what has caused this “objective method” to morph into a tool suitable for intimidation? If the shift did happen, what management actions at Google allowed objective methods to relax their grip?
- Why, after 20 years, are “real” news organizations now running stories about Google’s power, its machinations, and the collateral damage from Google employees who are far removed from the messy cubicles and Foosball games among Google’s elite engineers? Hey, those smart people were the story. Now it is the behavior of sales and public relations types who are making news? What’s this say about “news”? What’s this say about Google?
My hunch is that a large, 20 year old company is very different from the outfit that hired folks from AltaVista, refugees from Bell Labs, and assorted wizards whose life’s work was of interest to 50 people at an ACM special interest group.
Perhaps the problem is a result of Google’s adding people with degrees in art history and political science? There may even be one or two failed middle school teachers among Google’s non technical staff. Imagine. Liberal arts or education majors in Google satellite offices. I can conjure a staff meeting which involves presentations with low contrast slides, not the wonky drawings that Jeff Dean once favored in his lectures about Big Table.
Google’s staffing has shifted over the years from 99 percent engineers and scientists to a more “balanced” blend of smart people. (I don’t want to say “watered down”, however.) One possibility is that these “stories” about the Google’s alleged punitive actions may be less about the Google technical system and methods and more about what happens when hiring policies change and the firms’ technical past is lost in the haze of success.
Could Google’s sales, marketing, and PR professionals, not the engineers and scientists, are the problem? The fix is easy. More math, more algorithms, more smart software. Does Google need staff who can be easily be categorized as “overhead”? I want to think about this question.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2017
* If you want a pre publication copy of the Google Legacy from 2003, just write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. Something can be worked out. Yes, this monograph still sells, just slowly.
Decoding IBM Watson
August 14, 2017
IBM Watson is one of the leading programs in natural language processing. However, apart from understanding human interactions, Watson can do much more.
TechRepublic in an article titled IBM Watson: The Smart Person’s Guide says:
IBM Watson’s cognitive and analytical capabilities enable it to respond to human speech, process vast stores of data, and return answers to questions that companies could never solve before.
Named after founding father of IBM, Thomas Watson, the program is already part of several organizations. Multi-million dollar setup fee, however, is a stumbling block for most companies who want to utilize the potential of Watson.
Watson though operates in seven different verticals, it also been customized for specialties like cyber security. After impacting IT and related industries, Watson slowly is making inroads into industries like legal, customer service and human resources, which comfortably can be said are on the verge of disruption.
Vishal Ingole, August 14, 2017
After Voice, Visual Search Is next Frontier for Search
August 9, 2017
From text to voice, search business has come a long way. If Pinterest co-founder is to be believed, the future of search is visual.
In an interview to BBC Correspondent and published as the video titled Pinterest Co-Founder Says Photos Hold the Future of Search, co-founder Evan Sharp says:
There are billions of ideas on Pinterest and users search an equal number of them on Pinterest. Our primary source of revenue is advertising wherein we help business promote their products and services through Pins
There might be some substance to what Sharp is saying. Google recently revealed Google Lens and Google Deep Dream. While Google Lens helps users to identify and search objects around them, Deep Dream is a creative tool used for creating composite images using various sources. The intent is to encourage users to use visual tools that the company is building.
VR and AR are the buzzwords now and soon marketers will be placing virtual ads within these visual mediums to promote their products. Though Google Goggles failed to take off, it was probably because the product was ahead of its time. How about a second take now?
Vishal Ingole, August 9, 2017
Ask Me Anything by Google
August 7, 2017
In a recently released report by Google, the search engine giant says that out of billions of queries searched by its users, around 15% are unique or new queries.
Quartz in an article titled However Strange Your Search, Chances Are Google Has Seen It Before says:
His research shows that people turn to Google to learn about things prohibited by social norms: racist memes, self-induced abortions, and sexual fetishes of all kinds. In India, for example, the most popular query beginning “my husband wants…” is “…me to breastfeed him.
Google has become synonymous with the search for any kind of information, service or product all over the planet. Websites that can cater to audience demand for information thus have an opportunity to capitalize on this opportunity and monetize their websites.
A recent report suggests that SEO, the core of digital marketing is a $90 billion industry and soon will surpass $150 billion in revenues by 2020. It’s thus an excellent opportunity for anyone with niche audience to monetize the idea.
Vishal Ingole, August 7, 2017
New Enterprise Search Market Study
August 1, 2017
Don Quixote and Solving Death: No Problem, Amigo
I read “Global Enterprise Search Market 2017-2022.” I was surprised that a consulting firms would invest time and energy in writing about a market sector which has not been thriving. Now don’t start sending me email about my lack of cheerfulness about enterprise search. The sector is thriving, but it is doing so with approaches that are disguised as applications which deliver something other than inflated expectations, business closures, and lawsuits.
I will slay the beast that is enterprise search. “Hold still, you knave!”
First, let’s look at what the report covers, then I will tackle some of the issues about which I think as the author of the Enterprise Search Report and a number of search-related articles and analyses. (The articles are available from the estimable Information Today Web site, and the free analyses may be located at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
The write up told me that enterprise search boils down to these companies:
Coveo Corp
Dassault Systemes
IBM Corp
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP AG
Coveo is a fork of Copernic. Yep, it’s a proprietary system which originally was focused on providing search for Microsoft. Now the company has spread its wings to include a raft of functions which range from the cloud to customer support / help desk services.
Dassault Systèmes is the owner of Exalead. Since the acquisition, Exalead as a brand has faded. The desktop search system was killed, and its proprietary technology lives on mostly as a replacement for Dassault’s internal search system which was based on Autonomy. Most of the search wizards have left, but the Exalead technology was good before Dassault learned that selling search was indeed a challenge.
IBM offers a number of products which include open source Lucene, acquired technology like Vivisimo’s clustering engine, and home brew code from its IBM wizards. (Did you know that the precursor of PageRank was an IBM “invention”?) The key is that IBM uses search to sell services which have a higher margins than providing a free version of brute force information access.
Google Ups the Ante for Local SEO
July 14, 2017
Google is now allowing small businesses to insert content directly into search results. The content can be a special event or anything related to business that will appear as featured snippet in the carousel.
As reported by The Verge in an article titled Local Businesses Can Now Feature Content Directly in Google Search Results, the author says:
The new posts show up below the company card in search results, where information like the location, phone number, web address, and hours of the company are already aggregated. The Posts feature is available starting today for verified companies using Google My Business.
As more business move their marketing activities online, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to reach out to their customers. Google, being the leader in this space does not want local business to miss out on this and is rolling out services like these for small businesses.
Digital marketing already is too competitive for small businesses with limited budgets. With these changes, Google expects that local businesses will try to introduce digital marketing into their marketing mix. Google gains by procuring data of local businesses. What else does it want?
Vishal Ingole July 14, 2017
Google: What For-Fee Thought Leader Love? And for Money? Yep
July 13, 2017
Talk about disinformation. Alphabet Google finds itself in the spotlight for normal consulting service purchases. How many of those nifty Harvard Business Review articles, essays in Strategy & Business (the money loser published by the former Booz, Allen & Hamilton), or white papers generated by experts like me are labors of thought leader love.
Why not ask a person like me, an individual who has written a white paper for an interesting company in Spain? You won’t. Well, let me interview myself:
Question: Why did you write the white paper about multi-language text analysis?
Answer: I did a consulting job and was asked to provide a report about the who, what, why, etc. of the company’s technology.
Question: Is the white paper objective and factual?
Answer: Yes, I used information from my book research, a piece of published material from the “old” Autonomy Software, and the information gathered at the company’s headquarters in Madrid by one of my colleagues from the engineers. I had a couple of other researchers chase down information about the company, its products, customers, and founder. I then worked through the information about text analysis in my archive. I think I did a good job of presenting the technology and why it is important.
Question: Were you paid?
Answer: Yes, I retired in 2013, and I don’t write for third parties unless those third parties pony up cash.
Question: Do you flatter the company or distort the company’s technology, its applications, or its benefits?
Answer: I try to work through the explanation in order to inform. I offer my opinion at the end of the write up. In this particular case, the technology is pretty good. I state that.
Question: Would another expert agree with you?
Answer: Some would and some would not. When figuring out with a complex multi-lingual platform when processing text in 50 languages, there is room for differences of opinion with regard to such factors as [a] text through put on a particular application, [b] corpus collection and preparation, [c] system tuning for a particular application such as a chatbot, and other factors.
Question: Have you written similar papers for money over the years?
Answer: Yes, I started doing this type of writing in 1972 when I left the PhD program at the University of Illinois to join Halliburton Nuclear in Washington, DC.
Question: Do people know you write white papers or thought leader articles for money?
Answer: Anyone who knows me is aware of my policy of charging money for knowledge work. I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and a number of other equally prestigious firms. To my knowledge, I have never been confused with Mother Teresa.
| Mother Theresa | A Person Who Works for Money |
 |
 |
I offer this information as my reaction to the Wall Street Journal’s write up “Google Pays Scholars to Influence Policy.” You will have to pay to read the original article because Mr. Murdoch is not into free information.The original appeared in my dead tree edition of the WSJ on July 12, 2017 on the first page with a jump to a beefy travelogue of Google’s pay-for-praise and pay-for-influence activities. A correction to the original story appears on Fox News. Gasp. Find that item here.
Google, it seems, is now finding itself in the spotlight for search results, presenting products to consumers, and its public relations/lobbying activities.
My view is that Google does not deserve this type of criticism. I would prefer that real journalists tackle such subjects as [a] the Loon balloon patent issue, [2] Google’s somewhat desperate attempts to discover the next inspiration like Yahoo’s online advertising approach, and [3] solving death’s progress.
Getting excited about white papers which have limited impact probably makes a real journalist experience a thrill. For me, the article triggers a “What’s new?”
But I am not Mother Teresa, who would have written for Google for nothing. Nah, not a chance.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2017
Marketers Need to Have a Bot Strategy in Place
July 13, 2017
The future of eCommerce will depend largely on bots and how they are deployed across various channels. The marketers, however, need to be in place and be ready to tap into its full potential.
Martech Today in an article titled An Introduction to Conversational Commerce and Bots says:
Bots are sweeping the digital landscape, giving consumers even more ways to interact with their favorite brands. It’s high time for marketers to think about how to incorporate bots into their digital strategies.
With the advent of natural language processing and machine learning, it is becoming increasingly easy to deploy bots, chatbots and digital assistants across various devices and platforms. As more users embrace the technology, the majority of purchases will be influenced by these bots. Thus, marketers need to be ready with a strategy to capitalize it.
Domino’s is already reaping the benefits of bots that it has deployed across various channels. Big names are already competing for placing their digital assistants in everybody’s pockets and homes. The problem is like search engines and a plethora of cloud service providers; these bots will know too many personal details of users. Privacy concerns thus still need to be addressed.
Vishal Ingole, July 13, 2017
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