Bing Search Volume Drops Following Social-Focused Updates
September 7, 2012
Few search engines have the capacity and the reach to compete with Google, But Microsoft’s Bing had slowly become a threat to the search giant. However, Hitwise reported that Bing had reportedly lost 4% of a drop in search volume this July. Neowin.net reported on the loss in the article, “Bing Search Volume Drops 4%,” and the possible reasons behind the small fall.
We learn:
“Hitwise says that July’s estimated 4% drop in searches came on the heels of a 5% gain in May, which is around the time Microsoft launched Bing’s ‘Sidebar’ feature, alongside a major social-focused update to the search engine. Even though Hitwise speculates that the update could be behind Bing’s loss, we’re not so sure, since it really wasn’t that significant of a change, in terms of Bing’s basic function.”
Numbers like this fluctuate regularly, and Hitwise’s results were based on estimates, but the number should still be a concern for Microsoft. What does Microsoft have to do to build consistently its share of search traffic? We think the heavy integration into new Windows products will help, but perhaps the company should take note and listen to users who were unhappy with the switch to social.
Andrea Hayden, September 07, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
EntropySoft Offers SharePoint Users Aid
August 31, 2012
SharePoint is a big name in the semantics tech world, but unfortunately it is not a one-stop shop. For businesses who are trying to utilize SharePoint’s features, the not so savvy user might need to access the program information, making things complicated to say the least. The article, Search and Act in SharePoint explains how using extra tools like EntropySoft’s FAST Search makes for a better user experience:
“EntropySoft’s FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST ESP Connectors allow documents from external content repositories to be included within their indexes. This means users can securely search and find documents from these external ECM systems directly from the native search bar in SharePoint…Users can access document versions and metadata, and with the appropriate permissions, they can also edit meta data or delete versions.”
The solutions to some of SharePoints most pesky user issues definitely allows for a more enjoyable experience using the program. In an ideal world our BI technologies would be advanced enough that there wouldn’t be a need for extra tools like EntrophySoft’s Fast Search or their other child EntropySoft Content Hub SharePoint Edition, a tool that allows an easy to use single point of access – but, we will take what we can get.
Edie Marie, August 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
MetaVis Leaders in SharePoint Migration Web Site Launch
August 30, 2012
MetaVis Technologies are innovation leaders in the semantics industry. They are well known for their SharePoint Migration and data managing tools. Their company just recently announced the launch of their new web site, http://www.metavistech.com. The site is said to offer new solutions for migration, administration, and have different tools for SharePoint users. The article, MetaVis Technologies Launches New Website goes into more detail:
“Our new Website reflects the tremendous growth we have seen with sales growing more than 175 percent year over year,” said Peter Senescu, President and Co-founder of MetaVis Technologies. “Our new product suites are built on the MetaVis platform providing one user interface to manage all your migration, security, backup and information architecture needs in SharePoint or Office365. Customers no longer need multiple third-party vendors or products.”
MetaVis Technologies is a household name in the SharePoint migration world and nothing but the newest technologies and highest grade is expected from their latest installment. You can expect to see things like their Migration Suite, Administration Suite, Tools for Office 365, and Tools for SharePoint Users on the new site. As an added bonus all products from this company already come SharePoint 2013 ready.
Edie Marie, August 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Microsoft Issues Exchange Sharepoint Related Security Advisory
August 24, 2012
Possible a first in the industry, Microsoft Security Research Center published Microsoft Security Advisory (2737111), which describes how possible vulnerabilities in Oracle Outside In libraries affect the WebReady Document Viewing functionality of Microsoft Exchange and FAST Search Server. Oracle also released their own Critical Patch Update Advisory. Here are more details about the security risk:
“The vulnerabilities exist due to the way that files are parsed by the third-party, Oracle Outside In libraries. In the most severe case of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, it is possible under certain conditions for the vulnerabilities to allow an attacker to take control of the server process that is parsing a specially crafted file. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or take any other action that the server process has access to do.”
If you think you may be affected by this, look at this blog post that recommends the workarounds to be done.
Take note that there are 24 other companies – some of them industry giants – that also make use of the said Oracle library. Some of them are IBM, Cisco, Symantec, and McAfee. Hopefully, these companies will soon be able to assess the impact of the said vulnerability on their platforms and issue a security update soon.
Lauren Llamanzares, August 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search: A Persistent Disconnect between Reality and Innovation
August 17, 2012
Two years ago I wrote The New Landscape of Search. Originally published by Pandia in Norway, the book is now available without charge when you sign up for our new “no holds barred” search newsletter Honk!. In the discussion of Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer SA in 2008, I cite documents which describe the version of Fast Search which the company hoped to release in 2009 or 2010. After the deal closed, the new version of Fast seemed to drop from view. What became available was “old” Fast.
I read the InfoWorld story “Bring Better Search to SharePoint.” Set aside the PR-iness of the write up. The main point is that SharePoint has a lousy search system. Think of the $1.2 billion Microsoft paid for what seems to be, according to the write up, a mongrel dog. My analysis of Fast Search focused on its age. The code dates from the late 1990s and its use of proprietary, third party, and open source components. Complexity and the 32 bit architecture were in need of attention beyond refactoring.
The InfoWorld passage which caught my attention was:
Longitude Search’s AptivRank technology monitors users as they search, then promotes or demotes content’s relevance rankings based on the actions the user takes with that content. In a nutshell, it takes Microsoft’s search-ranking algorithm and makes it more intelligent…
The solution to SharePoint’s woes amounts to tweaking. In my experience, there are many vendors offering similar functionality and almost identical claims regarding fixing up SharePoint. You can chase down more at www.arnoldit.com/overflight.
The efforts are focused on a product with a large market footprint. In today’s dicey economic casino, it makes sense to trumpet solutions to long standing information retrieval challenges in a product like SharePoint. Heck, if I had to pick a market to pump up my revenue, SharePoint is a better bet than some others.
Contrast the InfoWorld’s “overcome SharePoint weaknesses” with the search assertions in “Search Technology That Can Gauge Opinion and Predict the Future.” We are jumping from the reality of a Microsoft product which has an allegedly flawed search system into the exciting world of what everyone really, really wants—serious magic. Fixing SharePoint is pretty much hobby store magic. Predicting the future: That is big time, hide the Statue of Liberty magic.
Here’s the passage which caught my attention:
A team of EU-funded researchers have developed a new kind of internet search that takes into account factors such as opinion, bias, context, time and location. The new technology, which could soon be in use commercially, can display trends in public opinion about a topic, company or person over time — and it can even be used to predict the future…Future Predictor application is able to make searches based on questions such as ‘What will oil prices be in 2050?’ or ‘How much will global temperatures rise over the next 100 years?’ and find relevant information and forecasts from today’s web. For example, a search for the year 2034 turns up ‘space travel’ as the most relevant topic indexed in today’s news.
Yep, rich indexing, facets, and understanding text are in use.
What these two examples make clear, in my opinion, is that:
Search is broken. If an established product delivers inadequate findability, why hasn’t Microsoft just solved the problem? If off the shelf solutions are available from numerous vendors, why hasn’t Microsoft bought the ones which fix up SharePoint and call it a day? The answer is that none of the existing solutions deliver what users want. Sure, search gets a little better, but the SharePoint search problem has been around for a decade and if search were such an easy problem to solve, Microsoft has the money to do the job. Still a problem? Well, that’s a clue that search is a tough nut to crack in my book. Marketers don’t have to make a system meet user needs. Columnists don’t even have to use the systems about which they write. Pity the users.
Writing about whiz bang new systems funded by government agencies is more fun than figuring out how to get these systems to work in the real world. If SharePoint search does not work, what effort and investment will be required to predict the future via a search query? I am not holding my breath, but the pundits can zoom forward.
The search and retrieval sector is in turmoil, and it will stay that way. The big news in search is that free and open source options are available which work as well as Autonomy- and Endeca-like systems. The proprietary and science fiction solutions illustrate on one hand the problems basic search has in meeting user needs and, on the other hand, the lengths to which researchers are trying to go to convince their funding sources and regular people that search is going to get better real soon now.
Net net: Search is a problem and it is going to stay that way. Quick fixes, big data, and predictive whatevers are not going to perform serious magic quickly, economically, or reliably without significant investment. InfoWorld seems to see chipper descriptions and assertions as evidence of better search. The Science Daily write up mingles sci-fi excitement with a government funded program to point the way to the future.
Sorry. Search is tough and will remain a chunk of elk hide until the next round of magic is spooned by public relations professionals into the coffee mugs of the mavens and real journalists.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
New Acquisition Pressures Newsgator
August 14, 2012
A recent Microsoft move may be bad news for NewsGator, ComputerWorld reveals in “Microsoft’s Yammer Buy Raises Questions About NewsGator’s Future.” Yammer and NewsGator are competitors in the SharePoint enterprise social add-on market. Does Microsoft’s acquisition of one spell trouble for the other?
Social Sites is the name of NewsGator’s SharePoint add-on. Since it launched in 2007, it has accumulated an impressive roster of clients. If Microsoft integrates the similarly successful Yammer into SharePoint, that could change. NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston remains optimistic, though, insisting that the two products attract different types of customers. Writer Juan Carlos Perez explains:
“While Yammer is a multi-tenant, cloud-based software, Social Sites is designed for on-premise and dedicated hosted environments, offering IT more controls, [Holston] said.
“‘The fact that Microsoft now owns Yammer doesn’t change the reasons why our clients came to us originally,’ he said, adding that most NewsGator customers aren’t comfortable using this type of software in a multi-tenant cloud. ‘Our customers are hyper-focused on security, governance, scalability and privacy.'”
Not only that, but NewsGator stands out as a developer of applications for specific industries. Will these unique qualities be enough to protect the company? We won’t know for a while, Perez says, since it would take a couple of years for Microsoft to mimic Social Sites with Yammer functionality. If it even chooses to do so at all; Holston thinks Microsoft only loves Yammer for its successful “freemium” business model. Hey, he can hope.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, NewsGator proclaims a passion for customer satisfaction. The company asserts that they are (so far, I’d add) the social software vendor most deeply integrated into the Microsoft stack.
Yammer launched in 2008, and seems to be very proud to be joining the Microsoft universe. They assert that, with former Facebook innovators on their team, their social products have the advantage of “Facebook DNA.” Interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, August 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Server 2013 Preview
August 13, 2012
Microsoft posted two documents which we believe merit any SharePoint licensee’s attention. The principal features of the latest SharePoint appear on the Microsoft SharePoint site.
Search will be particularly important because SharePoint 2013 will make it easier to incorporate social content and support mobile access. The new SharePoint will be available later this year or early in 2013. Getting a head start is important if you plan to upgrade.
The SharePoint Server 2013’s enterprise search model provides information we found quite useful. The diagram’s PDF is 560 Kb and available from the Microsoft download center. The PDF covers:
- Search Components, including the application components and the search databases
- Example topologies. The illustrated use case is a medium-sized search farm with 40 million items or content objects in the system
- Scaling out. The diagram includes a proposal model for a search farm which handles 100 million item or content objects.
Of particular value are the details for the hardware required to support the 100 million item farm. A series of tables covers the scaling considerations, detail about the application servers recommended, and a table layout the hardware requirements necessary to handle upticks in the volume of content to be processed.
In the general guidance section, Microsoft points out that one additional crawl database is needed per additional 20 million items. One link database is recommend per additional 60 million items. The schematic’s detail recommends that the system include redundancy.
Bottom line, there is no mistaking the Fast-like functionality described here. Search Technologies has delivered more than 30,000 consultant-days of search implementation services to Fast and SharePoint users since 2005. We believe that this new search functionality will be widely adopted over the next few years, and we look forward to helping our customers to implement it.
Iain Fletcher, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Microsoft and Google go Social with Search
August 9, 2012
There is good news for those information seekers who want the social rabble to provide insight on their results. Microsoft and Google are both rolling out features to extend social networking capabilities in their search services.
Bing will now include tips and recommendations from Foursquare users in search results and Google will be allowing searchers to include a link to share results directly to their Google+ page.
An article on ComputerWorld, “Bing and Google Deepen Social Integration in Search,” explains the developments of the continuing social integration. About Google, the article states the new share button will allow users to post links to their Plus page without leaving the results page. The changes in Bing’s world are explained as well:
“Bing will display tips and recommendations shared publically to Foursquare about businesses or other locations relevant to a user’s search query and location, Microsoft said. The search engine displays the Foursquare content in its social sidebar, which launched this spring. The tips and recommendations will be included in the ‘people who know’ section, which doesn’t require the Bing user to be signed in to his or her social networks.”
The changes show that all companies, including the big guys, are struggling to determine how to best integrate social content with search. The competition is strong and no clear winner seems to be emerging. Perhaps that is because some people are not prepared for the full integration of social networking within the rest of their online business.
Andrea Hayden, August 9, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Track the Output of SharePoint Fast Search Crawl Logs
August 7, 2012
Do you need to pull SharePoint Fast Search crawl logs? We do. We read with interest an item on Microsoft’s TechNet Web site. “Get SharePoint Search Crawl Logs” provides an almost ready-to-run script which will accept a search service name and display the associated crawl logs. If there is a crawl log with an error, the script flags that instance. To script can be edited so that it returns different information from the crawly logs. In order to make this tweak, the $crawlLogFilters can be edited.
SharePoint Fast usually does an excellent job of processing content. However, some documents can be malformed or an unexpected network issue can arise. As a result, certain content can be skipped or ignored. A visual inspection of crawl logs is not practical when SharePoint is processing large volumes of content.
If you want to view the crawl logs, TechNet provides a wealth of information. A good place to begin your investigation is in the TechNet Library. If you want to expOrt the SharePoint 2010 search crawl logs, you will find a useful Powershell script in Dave Mc’s Blog in the article “Export the SharePoint 2010 Search Crawl Log.” MSDN also provides information about exporting SharePoint 2010 search crawl logs. To access this information, navigate to the SharePoint Escalation Team’s blog.
Search Technologies’ team of experienced engineers can provide automation tools which eliminate the need to search for solutions to common problems. To learn more about our SharePoint and FFast Search implementation services, navigate to http://www.searchtechnologies.com/microsoft-search.html or contact us at info@searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, August 7, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
How I Know Facebook Faces Challenges
August 6, 2012
The big tip off is the story in USA Today, “4 Reasons Investors Don’t Like Facebook.” The story appeared in the dead tree edition on August 2, 2012. Another clue is the clumsy handling of Facebook developers. This fumble was given that “real” journalism twist in “Schadenfreude, Anyone? In Wake of Facebook Bullying Claims, Google+ Chief Vic Gundotra Woos Developers.” In case you don’t remember, schadenfreude suggests enjoying another’s discomfort. But for me, the bright yellow flashing light is the Barron’s story “UBS Hit by Facebook Loss; Vows Legal Action Against Nasdaq.” Definitely not a good thing when cousins shoot at one another with real bullets.
Can Facebook get its act together? My hunch is that social media push back is likely to take a toll on Facebook and probably some other social media companies. When one is sitting in the dorm without much desire to study coefficients of friction, fiddling with Facebook is a nifty distraction. Working as an intern allows some time to connect with friends. However, once one realizes that time is a scarce resource, Facebook and other social media lovers may start looking for a new hook up.
What I find fascinating is that Google and Microsoft Bing don’t want to accept that social media may not be the innovation to ignite these firms’ online revenues. Google has suggested that Google Plus is the new Google. Microsoft is a me-too outfit, so social content is getting attention in Redmond. What happens when social drops to a utility function?
The search giants are going to have to focus on relevance and finding high value content. Facebook’s challenges, therefore, are going to be on deck to cause headaches for the search services in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
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