The Pain in Spain Is Tending to the Inane
May 15, 2009
Read “Recording Industry Tries To Shut Down Search Engine In Spain Without Allowing It To Defend Itself” here. If true, the Internet she be changin’. Search requires content processing. Robots index and point. Software becomes the problem.
Stephen Arnold, May 15’ 2009
Videosurf Update
May 15, 2009
Since VideoSurf’s birth in mid-2008 (Beyond Search reviewed it at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/09/23/videosurf-video-metasearch/), it’s offered up a beta version (I wrote about it at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/10/18/videosurf-looking-for-wave-of-new-users/), and now it’s opened up the API so developers can install “visual search” on their own sites. VideoSurf promotes itself as the only video search engine that can search and “see” inside videos to index content rather than depending upon tags and descriptions that can produce spam. The API allows accress to videos that can be selected to relate to site content; site can also tailor the displays to their promotional needs. See more about the API availability at http://www.videosurf.com/blog/search-and-video-lookup-apis-1039/. This could be a smart choice for sites looking to rev up their content while keeping it relevant.
Jessica Bratcher, May 15, 2009
YAGG: Bytes of Clay
May 15, 2009
Googzilla stubbed its paw today. You can read the official explanation here. YAGG means yet another Google glitch. The once alleged online uptime champ turned chump. Millions inconvenienced. Enough said.
Stephen Arnold, May 15, 2009
Brands as Gravity
May 14, 2009
In the online world, there are Jupiters, suns, and asteroids. Traffic sorts itself out in ways that are gravitational. A big brand gets lots of traffic. The asteroids generate less customer pull. Why’s this important? Online sites without pull are not likely to pull the traffic. Sad but true. Quality may be defined as lots of clicks. IT Pro here reported data that underscores the gravitational pull of 10 brands in the UK. The headline told the tale: “Top 10 Web Brands Get Half of UK Traffic.” The top three online brands were Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. The most interesting comment in the report was this remark:
Second-ranked MSN/Windows Live slid nearly a percentage point to 9.2 per cent, but added over a billion minutes in the past year. Third-ranked Google gained 0.4 per cent market share to 5.3 per cent, adding 950 million minutes.
Facebook appears to be the winner, which may have implications for the host of social challengers now available. In the UK, social seems to be the pull.
Stephen Arnold, May 14, 2009
Web Wide API: The Battleground
May 14, 2009
If you wondered what was the driver for the API snowstorm, read “Can Amazon Be the Default Payment API for the Web?” here. The author aaronchua did a good job of explaining the logic behind a single Web API for online payments. The issue is not multiple payment systems. The call is for a single payment system. Assume this happens. Monopoly, right? The APIs are important to Amazon, Google, and others. Winner takes all is logical, right?
Stephen Arnold’ May 14, 2009
Google, Micro-Blogging: Makes Perfect Sense
May 14, 2009
Google, the tarantula of the web, purchased Jaiku in October 2007, a service that allows it’s users to gather micro-blogs from other Web sites. The content can be viewed via the Web or by mobile phone. Google open sourced Jaiku in January 2009, just as Twittermania was gaining momentum.
Google’s decision could be a vote of confidence for open source, or it could be a response to Google’s failure to gain traction among the Twitterati.
Sites like Twitter, Flickr and MySpace each offer their own twists and user-friendly ways of appealing to mass amounts of micro-bloggers and furthermore, potential customers, but using a site that collects each feed and makes it accessible through one’s cell or computer, just makes sense.
In a business world where it’s crucial to keep in contact and notice emerging trends, it would be easy to spend your entire day signing-in and utilizing the sites previously mentioned. Google, despite its success in other search spaces, recognized the importance of real time search in its recent Searchology mini-camp.
The reality may be that Twitter, despite the hype, may be a challenger to Facebook. Facebook’s recent redesign nods in the direction of Twitter. Google, on the other hand, acknowledges the importance of real time search, making a distinction between Twitter’s indexing of tweets and the larger, Google-scale challenge of real time search of Web content.
“Less talk and more indexation” is the goose’s cry.
Hunter Embry, May 15, 2009
Some Google in the White House
May 13, 2009
A month ago, I received a call from a journalist asking about the Obama White House’s uses of Google. I did not answer the question because big time journalists ask me question, and I am not a public library reference desk worker any more.
One insight can be found here. Google said:
App Engine supports White House town hall meeting
In late March, the White House hosted an online town hall meeting, soliciting questions from concerned citizens directly through its website. To manage the large stream of questions and votes, the White House used Google Moderator, which runs on App Engine. At its peak, the application received 700 hits per second, and across the 48-hour voting window, accepted over 104,000 questions and 3,600,000 votes. Despite this traffic, App Engine continued to scale and none of the other 50,000 hosted applications were impacted. For more on this project, including a graph of the traffic and more details on how App Engine was able to cope with the load, see the Google Code blog.
How Googley is the Obama White House? Pretty Googley I hear.
Ste3phen Arnold, May 13, 2009
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Google Time
May 13, 2009
Searchology strikes me as a forum for Google to remind journalists, the faithful, unbelievers, and competitors that the GOOG is the big dog in search, You can read dozens of reports about Google’s search enhancements, A good round up was “Google Unveils New Search Features” here. Don’t like AFP, run this query on Google News and pick a more useful summary. For me, the key announcements had to do with time. The date of a document and the time of an event are important but different concepts. Time is a difficult problem, and Google’s announcements underscore the firm’s time expertise. Timelines? No problem. Date sort? No problem. For me what’s important is that time prowess is a tiny tip of much deeper underlying technical capabilities. The Google has some muscles it is just starting to flex.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
Wolfram Alpha and Beta PR
May 12, 2009
At the airport this morning, I flipped through a beta wave of publicity for the Alpha search system, actually the soon-to-be-released search system. I found
Christopher Dawson’s write up a useful example of beta PR. The article “More Details Emerge on Wolfram Alpha” here representative. For me, the most interesting comment in Mr. Dawson’s story was:
Google has also attempted to add semantic search capabilities (and I’m sure will get there sooner than later; they’re Google, after all), but so far, this doesn’t give you much.
The view seems to me to be that Google is not in the semantic search race. Wolfram Alpha, with its demo and previews, is.
My research for my three Google studies suggests otherwise. You can scan information about my Google studies here. I can’t easily summarize the research I have conducted over the last six or seven years. Making the situation more tricky is the fact that some of my work has been published by BearStearns’ and IDC as client-only reports.
Nevertheless, the notion that a demo makes Wolfram Alpha ahead of Google strikes me as incorrect.
The interesting question that i have been thinking about is, “Why are observers so keen on finding an alternative to Google?” What surprised me was the high expectations for Cuil.com by former Googler Anna Patterson and her team. Cuil.com has improved, but I have picked up hints that the GOOG has not been far from the Cuil.com project, particularly with regard to some tests on message collections.
What’s happening is a bit of cover your tail combined with wishful thinking. The pundits saw Google as Web search and ads for a decade. Now that anyone with a willingness to look at its mobile, shopping, maps, and other services can see that Google has been a platform and is now sufficiently diverse to make the Web and ads crowd look, well, anachronistic.
Enter a new search system.
The pundits claim that it is a Google killer without setting forth much in the way of a yardstick by which one can measure the progress of Google death. Here are some examples:
- Cost of infrastructure, to date, to grow, over five years
- Number of users of sophisticated search outputs. (Remember only about five percent of search users take advantage of advanced search features)
- Number of documents processed by time unit, including transformation, parsing, and indexing
- Business model (ads are okay but will advertisers pay Google scale cash flows to reach a sophisticated service)
These four points need some consideration. But when speculating about “to be” products and services, one has the advantage of working with modest evidence.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
Information Architecture and Search
May 12, 2009
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s “Top 10 Information Architecture Mistakes” here is a useful list of issues to consider. What struck me as particularly useful was his second point “Search and Structure Not Integrated.” He wrote:
search and navigation fail to support each other on many sites. This problem is exacerbated by another common mistake: navigation designs that don’t indicate the user’s current location. That is, after users click a search result, they can’t determine where they are in the site — as when you’re searching for pants and click on a pair, but then have no way to see more pants.
Within the last 10 days, I have had four separate discussions with “search experts” who were in the midst of trying to use search to fix deeper information problems. One content management wizard told me in Philadelphia, “Search is not able to deal with the complicated information stored in an industrial strength CMS.” No kidding. You expect a third party solution to resolve the glitches in these linguini code monsters? A person at a big money consulting firm opined, “We see search as a Web 2.0 solution to our heterogeneous content.” Yep, and I see myself as 15 years old. Fantasy, sheer fantasy.
You will find Mr. Nielsen’s other nine points equally insightful.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
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