Financial Waves Swamp SurfRay
January 17, 2009
Just a quick update on SurfRay, the search roll up in Copenhagen. SurfRay bought Speed of Mind, Ontolica, and Mondosoft. You can run a query on Beyond Search and read the previous posts about this company. One of my readers in Europe alerted me to a bankruptcy notice. A happy quack to that person. We did some checking and found a document from Bolagsverket’s Official Register, the announcements for January 16, 2009 contained this information:
If your Swedish is rusty, the snippet says that Surfray has been declared bankrupt at Solna court. Future announcements will be issued to some newspapers. I will keep chasing this story. I have no other details as of 3 36 Eastern on January 16, 2009.
Stephen Arnold, January 16, 2009
Internet and Moore’s Law
January 17, 2009
Physorg.com here published “Internet Growth Follows Moore’s Law Too”.The article points out that information, according to Chinese researchers, “has discovered that Moore’s Law can also describe the growth of the Internet. The key point in the write up for me was that “the Internet will double is size every 5.32 years.” I find a number like this interesting, but it does not match the data that my team has been gathering over the last few years. We focus on the enterprise, and our data suggest that digital information in an organization doubles every six to nine months. If these data are accurate, then the Internet is not growing as rapidly as digital information in organizations. Anyone have any other data? The Chinese estimate seems on the low side.
Stephen Arnold, January 17, 2009
Leapfish Launches
January 16, 2009
LeapFish is a metasearch engine. The company calls its system “a multi dimensional engine.” LeapFish Inc. is a privately held corporation headquartered out of CARR America Corporate Center in Pleasanton, California. The company’s metasearch technology uses a proprietary hyper threading technology. The Marketwatch.com story here said:
LeapFish pushes search to 2.0 and states “out with the search button.” LeapFish’s revolutionary new click free search interface gives life to a fast, fluid and dynamic search experience that extracts the variety of data from major online destinations such as Google, YouTube, eBay and others in a single search query. Consolidating a knowledge base of relevancy and variety from major online authorities, LeapFish effectively renders more comprehensive results than those returned by its providers.
The addled geese at Beyond Search find metasearch systems useful. Our favorite–EZ2Find.com–has exited business. Unlike EZ2Find.com, Leapfish uses an uncluttered splash screen. The naked screen of Ixquick.com is more spare, but Leapfish strikes a good balance between point and get started and the Google-type search box of Ixquick.com.
We liked the ability to limit the query to content type. Leapfish has done some work to tame the not-so-good search experience we have encountered on Google’s blogsearch service. The mouse action was a hair trigger when viewing results from a shopping query.
Leapfish is an interesting service, and we will add it to our list of systems to monitor. More information about the company is at http://www.leapfish.com/AboutUs.aspx.
Search in the Bartz Era at Yahoo
January 16, 2009
The Beyond Search geese have been honking speculatively today about Yahoo search in the post-floundering era. We decided that it was a miracle that Yahoo has been able to keep its revenues where they are and maintain a 20 percent share of the Web search market. Several of the Beyond Search goslings use Yahoo for mail, photo browsing, and bookmark surfing. Others don’t think too much of Yahoo for various reasons. These range from lousy performance over some wireless services to features that seem clunky compared to alternatives available from other vendors.
We read closely Rebecca Buckman’s “The Exacting Standars of Carol Bartz” and found the Forbes article interesting. You can read it here. Unlike some of the critical articles about Carol Bartz, Ms. Buckman focuses on her accomplishments. One interesting parallel is that the “freewheeling culture” of Autodesk and the wild and crazy approach at Yahoo may share some similarities. Ms. Bartz made staff changes and “professinalized” some departments. Yahoo may benefit from this type of management.
Our Beyond Search discussion focused on search, specifically what we perceive as the “problem” with Yahoo search. In order to make Yahoo search more useful, Yahoo has to find a way to address such shortcomings as the spotty relevancy for Web queries that are not about popular topics. The search available for Yahoo shopping is not very useful. In fact, it is on a par with eBay’s current system, and that is quite disappointing. Even convenience services such as finding currency conversion data becomes an exercise in navigating multiple pages. “Search without search” is something that Yahoo needs to master.
In order to remediate Yahoo search, we think that some serious engineering must be done and completed quickly. At lunch we ran several test queries. For example, one was “enterprise search”. The results were surprising. Here’s the display we saw:
We liked the search suggestions, but we found that the first four results were skewed to Microsoft. For example, there is the Microsoft paid ad in the blue box. That’s the second result. In the organic results, we saw a link to the Yahoo and IBM free search system, which is a boosted result. The Wikipedia result is okay. But the third and fourth results are for Microsoft search pages. The results are not “bad”; the results were just not what we expected. You can run your own queries and see how the Yahoo search results work for you.
A test shopping query was “discount quad core”. The system returned computer sytems from brand name vendors. I thnk each of these systems is tagged with the word “discount”. These are not discount systems, however.
How can these search issues be fixed? Is tweaking enough? Will Yahoo’s many different search initiatives ultimately lead to a system that is “better” than Google’s in the eyes of the users?
Here’s the Beyond Search lunch time view:
- Yahoo has to work on relevance. Google has made a significant investment in technology to determine context and react to what other users find helpful. Yahoo seems to lag in these areas.
- In terms of mobile serarch, the Yahoo system requires menu navigation. Because of the clunkiness of the approach, it is difficult to determine if Yahoo is doing much more than dumping informaton into buckets and showing stories as those stories arrive.
- For shopping, Yahoo gets a user close to a product, but Yahoo makes it difficult to find a specific product. We don’t think eBay or Google have cracked the code on shopping search. Yahoo might be able to leapfrog some of the competitors with an innovative approach.
The problem with addressing all or some of these challenges is that it will take time to come up with a solution that is not a one-off, stand-alone island. Yahoo has not focused on search as part of the core fabric of the company. At Google, search and advertising are tough to separate. At Yahoo, search is one thing. Advertising is another. Yahoo, therefore, must think of ways to integrate so the two functions yield an advantage over Google.
Yahoo has the talent and the funds to address these issues. What Yahoo does not have, we concluded, is time. In fact, time may be Yahoo’s biggest single problem. Floundering can be rectified with time. Without time, Yahoo will remain a shadow of its former self. Even a deal with Microsoft can’t change that.
Meantime, the Google maintains its lead in search and advertising. A decade of search missteps cannot be fixed over night. Ms. Bartz may have the expertise, but does she have the time? We quacked loudly, “We don’t think so.”
Stephen Arnold, January 16, 2009
Online Social Systems: Flirting Is Popular
January 16, 2009
Jemima Kiss, writing in the Guardian, crafted a fetching headline: “Facebook Is… A Place for Flirting, Says Research.” You can read the original story here. She snags one of the Pew Internet and American Life studies and highlights this “finding”:
One in five users of MySpace and Facebook have admitted they use the Web sites to flirt, according to new research on US social networking trends. Most networking activity, around 89%, is focused on contacting existing friends, while 57% use sites to make plans with friends and only 49% use them to make new contacts.
For me, the key point is that 20 somethings arrive at their job already connected. Pew Internet’s own news release on this study and its findings provides another interesting factoid here:
The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now…
Let me think through what’s going on in my addled goose mind. More adults are jumping into social networks. Some of those adults are using these sites for recreational purposes. Three out of four young people in the 18 to 24 age group are connected. An organization now faces the distinct possibility that its policies about Internet access may need revisiting. The de facto use of social networks, if the Pew data are correct, is for recreation. An organization that deploys its own social network must make certain its assumptions about the use of the organization’s social network align with the usage habits of its 18 to 24 year old staff. The older workers embracing the social network may require coaching to reduce their concerns about security. At a time when budget pressures are rising, a social system–for example, social search with collaboration built in–may incur costs that the licensees’ have not anticipated. Vendors and consultants pushing social search and related systems pooh pooh the concerns that I am considering. I don’t anticipate social system cheerleaders altering their sales pitch in the near term.
Stephen Arnold, January 16, 2009
Aster Data: $12 Million More in Funding
January 16, 2009
Aster Data is one of those companies that interests me. Although not directly in the search and content processing sector, the company’s technology has significant implications for organization struggling with petascale data flows. On January 13, 2009, the company announced here that it has raised an additional $12 million in Series B funding. The Aster technology, based on my analyses, is Googley. In my 2005 study The Google Legacy, I pointed out that Google’s engineering would influence other companies. In short, I argued, whether Google succeeded or failed, the Google legacy would be to make it easier for other innovators to build on the Google learnings and examples. (You can order a copy of The Google Legacy here. Its content is germane today because Google’s recent moves are anticipated and their effects described in this 2005 analysis.) The Aster Data news story said:
Aster nCluster provides an always-on, always-parallel MPP architecture with the In-Database MapReduce programming framework for business-critical applications. Unlike traditional analytic databases, Aster’s online fault tolerance and hands-free administration allows it to run on low cost, commodity hardware. Aster delivers automated one-click scaling, recovery, backup, restore, and upgrades – enabling enterprises to maintain current staffing levels, even as data sizes multiply each year.
The total funding for the company is now over $20 million. In addition to JAFCO, Sequoia and several other high profile funding sources have supported the company. More information about Aster Data is here.
Google Shutters Trondheim Office
January 15, 2009
According to Adressa.no here, Google has closed its office. The reason is that the company wants to streamline its operations. Google itself has not said, “The Trondheim office is closed.” Pia Martin Wold and Kristoffer Furberg’s story here suggests that the lack of skilled labor may be a contributing factor. A story by Marius Jørgenrud and Ander Brenna here adds some color to this development. Their story appeared in Digi.no. Trondheim is not a large operation for Google, but the city has a solid technical reputation, particularly in search. Google’s office in Luleå, Sweden, may be on the same track as well. Beyond Search believes that small Google offices add to costs, so concentration in larger cities makes financial sense. Microsoft may be able to snag some of the former Googlers. A happy quack to the Beyond Search reader who alerted us to this second alleged reduction in force at the Google. The first wave of cutbacks affected contractors. The second allegedly cut loose 100 recruiters. Now comes, if true, closures of small offices.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
Googzilla: Subtle No More
January 15, 2009
TechCrunch ran a very interesting article called “Gmail Grew 43 Percent Last Year. AOL Mail And Hotmail Need To Start Worrying” here. The story provides meat on the bone of the headline. I loved the chart showing the GOOG moving on, keeping on. After reading this article, you will want to pop over to this official Google page and read about the GOOG’s utility to migrate Web logs from one service to another. Like Gmail, the migration tool will wow the Python heads and leave others cold. Over time, the migration tool will probably get some tweaks and then one day, the GOOG is the big dog in the blog house. Competitors who ignore Google’s emulation of American revolutionaries in buckskins will find themselves on the wrong end of the bayonet. The tactics are explained in more detail here.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
Dead Tree Publishers in Italy Build a Hadrian’s Wall
January 15, 2009
Hadrian’s wall is an interesting tourist stop. Archaeologists continue to thrive as rubbish pits are exhumed and effluvia from the garrisons reveal the secrets of a miserable life far from Rome. Now Italian publishers (yep, the dead tree crowd entrenched in paper, ink, and 15th century business processes) are creating a digital Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps one day far in the future, scholars will twiddle bits to figure out the secrets of traditional publishers nine years into the 21st century. You can read about this development in the International Herald Tribune (a thin thing I scan whilst in an airport outside the US) here. The article is called “Italian Publishers Form Online Alliance.” There’s no author on the version I scanned online. The source is another dead tree outfit, Thomson Reuters. The idea is that big newspapers are going to team up to create “an online alliance.” The article points out that newspapers have been affected by the downturn in readership, advertising, rising costs, etc. Not much of a surprise in my opinion.
For me the most important comment in the article was:
In the United States, several newspaper publishers have already formed consortiums to take advantage of rising online advertising. About 800 U.S. newspaper Web sites in the Newspaper Consortium have arranged a partnership with Yahoo, and several top U.S. newspaper publishers have formed an advertising sales network called quadrantONE.
The idea that there are 800 newspapers working in concert in the US was news to me. This means that there is another digital Hadrian’s Wall probably running through the wilds of Kentucky. My ignorance knows no bounds, but I am an addled goose. If there is a consortium, what is the group doing to generate significant revenues for its members. The Chicago Tribune is introducing a tabloid version of the newspaper and retaining the traditional “big” paper. Okay, that’s one way to make sales I suppose. In Detroit one newspaper is producing a hard copy three days a week. That will thrill advertisers and readers who want sports news for a game played last night. Well, the newspaper will provide the news in a couple of days. That will work too, right? If the Courier Journal (the local newspaper) gets any smaller, I won’t be able to wrap trash in it.
Italy is building a digital Hadrian’s Wall. The US newspaper publishers already have one. The problem is that the walls won’t do much if anything to reverse what is a problem brought about by a change in the way in which people think about timely information.
I would wager that Hadrian himself would point out the folly of a digital wall. He used troops who killed intruders. Now the enemy is the children of the newspaper media wizards. My hunch is that the progeny of the newspaper barons use iPhones and the Google, not hard copy documents to keep up with what’s happening.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
IBM Wins the Patent Derby
January 15, 2009
Reuters posted a story on Yahoo News about the 2008 patent derby. You can read the story here if it has not been deleted by the Yahoo team. Yahoo News articles can be tough to find sometimes. IBM, according to the article, was awarded 4,186 patents by the often criticized US Patent & Trademark Office. Runner up Microsoft obtained 2,030 patents, and chip giant Intel snared 1,776. What I found interesting was that according to my tally of Google patents, Googzilla generated a total of about 200 US patent documents, based on my quick look on January 14, 2009. That’s fewer than about four patent applications and granted patents each week compared to IBM’s stunning 80 patents granted a week in 2008. Several questions come to mind:
- Is Google asleep at the switch? IBM obviously is focusing quite a bit of effort on invention. Google seems retrograde in innovation, or is it? Could Google patent only important innovations that require some protection?
- IBM’s patents are literally all over the technical map. Is Google more focused on search and advertising than IBM or Microsoft for that matter?
- Will Google decrease its patent application output because of the rumored reform that will be coming to the USPTO?
My own review of Google patent documents suggests that the GOOG has a strategy that relies on specific technical inventions. The focus is the strength and, of course, the weakness of Google’s approach. But when making a league table, IBM, Microsoft, and the other high output companies are the winners. Google is up for relegation if one relies only on a raw count of volume. I think quantity is not as important as quality when it comes to Google’s approach to patent documents.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
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