Google Cost Cutting
January 14, 2009
The GOOG is implementing its New Year resolutions to reduce costs and focus. Beyond Search has learned that Google is trimming the sails of some weak sister services; to wit: Google Video, Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Google Mashup Editor, and at long last the deflated Dodgeball. You can get links on ArnoldIT.com’s Overflight service here or navigate to the official Google announcements on Catalogs here, Notebook here, and Video here. Details are Googley, so the Beyond Search team is poking around for more information. “Stopping development” does not mean the services are no longer online… yet.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Symantec Taps Autonomy
January 14, 2009
Autonomy landed another big deal, according to this Reuters’ item at TradingMarkets.com and at Forbes.com. This time Autonomy beat out a number of search and content processing vendors at the security and information management outfit, Symantec. The company owns the Norton Antivirus product, but it has been pushing into the enterprise with acquisitions and internal development. Details are sketchy, but it looks to me that Symantec will use the Autonomy system to process content stored in its enterprise back up, email, and repository systems. Information about Symantec’s full range of products and services is located here. The company’s Enterprise Vault 8.0 product is in need of a search and retrieval system. Autonomy is a player in the enterprise data management sector as well. Autonomy acquired several firms that have provided a client base and upsell opportunities. One example is Autonomy Zantaz, a company that is well known in the email and eDiscovery sector. Symantec is a $6.0 billion a year company; Autonomy is considerably smaller. However, Symantec faces significant challenges, including increased competition in the consumer sector. Enterprise data management is emerging as an increasingly important market sector. Will the Autonomy technology provide the boost that Symantec needs to maintain its growth and profit margins in these tough financial times? I think that data management requires more than search. Google, in my opinion, is one of a handful of companies with the “as is” technology necessary to handle petascale email flows, low-cost scaling, and content processing options. Symantec may have to look beyond today’s competitors and start thinking about the implications of an aggressive move by Google into this sector.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Nexplore: Another Google Challenger
January 14, 2009
Nexplore Search here is a Web search system with some interesting functions. A reader alerted me to the firm’s sharp increase in Web traffic. I had looked at the system last year, and I wanted to revisit the Web search company’s service.
The company said:
It starts with Nexplore Search Redefined a visually engaging user friendly, interactive multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete.
The company indexes 50 billion Web pages. According to the company here, its system:
redefines the search experience. A visually engaging, user-friendly, multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete. Computer intelligence combined with human community fosters greater relevancy — in both search results and ad displays. Intuitive refinement tools and advanced personalization features make search faster, easier and more enjoyable for everyone — from Web newbies to average users to accomplished surfers.
My test queries returned useful results. For example, for “enterprise search” returned links to Vivisimo, Coveo, and Endeca as “sponsored results”, which is okay. The first hit–somewhat surprisingly was to Microsoft.com enterprise search page here, not to the Fast Search page here. The Fast Search page seems a bit spare these days, so Nexplore seems to have indexed the Microsoft page as the number one enterprise search hit. I find this surprising, but I don’t have a good enough feel for what Nexplore is doing to determine relevancy.
Nexplore results for the query “enterprise search”.
The interface provides hot links to suggested or related queries, a feature Nexplore calls “Pop Search”. The system includes a link to a “Wiki Search”, which is okay, but the number two result in the hit list is a Wikipedia link. The sponsored results contained a surprise. There was a direct link to Ontolica, a unit of Surf Ray. Surf Ray has been the subject of considerable speculation. In fact, if you run a query for “Surf Ray” from this page on the Beyond Search Web log, you can follow the conversation about the company’s various managerial and financial ills. Obviously someone paid to put the Ontolica ad on the Nexplore results page, so this cannot be an error. So0me of the firms in the Sponsor Results were equally interesting; for example, I don’t think too much about Abbrevity, Accenture, or EMC as big players in the enterprise search sector. But someone is paying to reach eyeballs for the query “enterprise search”. Two results struck me as peculiar in the main results list. First, the inclusion of the Enterprise Search Summit 2009. I heard the show attracted 60 paying customers, so the owner of the show must be working overtime to pump up the search engine optimization to get the program to appear among vendors of search systems. The second anomaly is the exclusion of Google and its Google Search Appliance. Odd. Google has more than 16,000 licensees of its enterprise search appliance, which puts it on an equal footing or slightly ahead of Autonomy, another company not in the results list.
One useful touch is that the results for a news search are run against the query in the query box. No annoying retyping required. The video link did not return a direct link to any videos on the Google Channel. Majority of the videos came from Blinkx, a company touting itself as the largest index of video content. The exclusion of Google may be due to Google, not Nexplore, however.
The image search in response to the query “enterprise search” was not useful. The illustrations did not include the images that I know are available on the Web sites of the leading vendors. For example, the Google search appliance pages include screen shots. Similar images may be found on the Web sites of Autonomy, Coveo, and Endeca, to name just three companies who make visual content available for potential buyers. The inclusion of the defunct Enterprise Search Report was an anomaly. More recent reports such as the Gilbane Beyond Search study and the Galatea Successful Enterprise Search Management were not included on the first page of the results. The image search for this test query was not useful to me. The blog search was not useful either. The majority of the links were not directly about enterprise search. Presumably, the Nexplore indexing system does not handle synonyms for “enterprise search” at this stage of the content processing subsystem’s development. I will monitor this function going forward. A similar statement may be made about enterprise search podcasts. The inclusion of enterprise networking in the results set requires me to listen to a podcast to determine if the information would be of interest to me. My hunch is that “enterprise search” as a podcast subject is too narrow to be of much indexing traction.
The company offers several search related services:
- MyCircle–an application agnostic social computing platform
- AdCircle–Ad creation and management tool
- HitLabel–contents, prizes, and tools for aspiring music stars
The company’s president and founder is Edward Mandel and Dion Hinchcliffe the chief technical officer. Mr. Mandel was in 2004 a distinguished as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Prior to Positive Software Systems, Mandel ran a successful technology consulting firm, IIT Consulting. Mr. Hinchcliffe served as president and chief technology officer of Alexandria, Virginia-based Hinchcliffe & Company, a premier Enterprise Web 2.0 consulting and advisory Firm.
has added a former Microsoft vice president (Rowland Hanson) to the firm’s advisory board.
Nexplore has stated that the company is attracting more than five million unique monthly visitors and that the search system ranks in the top 5,000 internationally ranked Web sites, based on Alexa data. You can read the news story here. The company is publicly traded under the symbol NXPC. Ask your broker to pull the data from the “Pink Sheet” listings. You can read the company’s 2008 financial news release here. I scanned the information on the three page document. Several points jumped out at me:
- The company describes itself as “a development stage company”. I interpreted this phrase that the firm will be seeking additional funding.
- The company’s net loses through June 2008 were about $17 million. Most of this money is probably due to the investment in the system and software
- Through June 30, 2008, the company generated almost $700,000 in revenues. The next financial statement will make it easier to determine how the present economic environment is affecting this company
The $64 question is, “Is Nexplore the next Google?” If you want to bet on Nexplore, contact the company here. I will add this search system to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
Exalead Profile Now Available
January 14, 2009
The Enterprise Search Report is no more. Thank goodness. A good idea in 2003 when work on the first edition began, the tome became an antique. I wrote the first three editions. I don’t know who did the fourth. With the coming of the new year, the rights to the information in the Enterprise Search Reports, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions, came back to me. I will be creating profiles based on my research into more than 50 vendors. At its peak the ESR only contained 30 profiles.
The first profile in the new, free Beyond Search Report series–an analysis of Exalead–is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Web site here. It runs about 11 pages and includes information about Exalead’s search system. I have enough information for a supplement about Exalead’s newest technology, and I will try to get that posted in the next couple of weeks as well.
I will work through my files and publish a profile every week or two. I have not worked out the full publication schedule yet, but I will get that done once I become more familiar with the new format.
There is no charge for these analyses. If you find an error, or if there is something in a profile with which you don’t agree–use the comments section of this Web log to provide your ideas and facts. I try to deliver a zero error document, but I have been writing about companies for a long time. Changes occur frequently, so you may find some variance between what’s in my free report and what the company’s sales rep tells you tomorrow.
The new logo. The Beyond Search goose is a proud mommy. Tess, however, was annoyed. She wanted a canine to identify these free reports.
Keep in mind that some of the information I have about vendors will not appear in the profiles. If you want more information about a vendor, you can write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and ask for a price quote for a more detailed report. I try to track down pricing and patent information, for example, but I don’t put this information in these free profiles. I want to be helpful, but I don’t want to end up as a Wal*Mart greeter. I have to sell some proprietary reports to survive.
Part of my method is to give the vendor an opportunity to comment on my analyses. These profiles are objective, so a vendor may not agree with some of my points. That’s okay. I just don’t want to be sued by 20 somethings who take umbrage at a 65 year old’s view of a search or content processing company. What vendors say and what the software does are two very different things in my opinion.
The combination of the interviews in the Search Wizards Speak series plus this Web log plus the Beyond Search profiles with a nifty new logo makes it easy for a person interested in enterprise search to get smart without spending $1,000 or more for a report that is outdated the minute it becomes available.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Flash Flex Silverlight
January 13, 2009
Search engines often stumble when indexing certain content types. I avoid Flash, Flex, and Silverlight myself, but there are 20 somethings who want to make my browser work like the local movie theatre. Here in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, we are getting new films every week or so. Most are still black and white. But the Flash, Flex, and Silverlight crowd goes for color, sound, and the big screen. Well, I should say that Flash and Flex go for the big screen. Silverlight if the data presented by Rich Internet Application Statistics are correct. You can find the information here. The url is one that might be gone when you read this. The data point out that search vendors will be focusing on indexing Flash and Flex. Looking at the pie charts, the Adobe crowd has 90 percent penetration. Silverlight is chugging along in the 15 percent range. Well, the good news is that Microsoft Fast can probably index Silverlight content.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
.
Melzoo: Googzilla Killer or Googzilla Snack
January 13, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me the link to the Melzoo.com Web search site. I poked around and located on VNUnet an article providing an overview of the service. You can read “MelZoo Takes on Google with Split Screen Search here. The system is a metasearch engine like Ixquick.com and Vivisimo’s Clusty.com. The metasearch technology is not the hook for Melzoo. The company generates an image of the Web site. I first saw this type of preview when I reviewed Girafa.com for my column in Information World Review five, maybe six years ago. Melzoo asserts here:
This preview feature has an enormous impact on the ‘quality of traffic’ delivered to advertisers: the traditional search engines are offering typically only text as a teaser. Chances are that users who enjoy the luxury of a detailed thumbnail preview, will be a lot more selective in visiting the sites they are interested in. This results in a higher effectiveness of use. The chances of “conversion” (i.e. from hit to buy) is currently estimated 5 times higher than with traditional search engines.
I think the vertical metasearch available from Deb Web Technologies is more useful for my work. You can see one of the DWT vertical federated search systems here.
The VNU write up made me sit up and take notice with its inclusion of this assertion in its write up of Melzoo.com:
“MelZoo has improved the experience of browsing the Internet in a totally different way. For years people have used an old technique – text only – to browse the web. MelZoo has revolutionized the way users will browse the web,” said MelZoo chief executive Alex De Backer. “In addition MelZoo is a welcome novelty for the advertisers, as it offers higher quality visitors at a lower cost.”
There are some issues associated with metasearch. These include latency, being blocked, or having to pay the source of the hits for the privilege of using its results. I will keep my eye on Melzoo.com.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
Deep Web Technologies’ Vertical Search for Business Information
January 13, 2009
In the early 1990s, Verity was the dominant enterprise search system. IBM’s confused approach to STAIRS and the complexity of STAIRS derivatives created a market opportunity. Verity took it. Verity’s founders have continued to innovate in search. I was delighted to speak with Abe Lederman (that interview is here) and learn about the innovations his company has made. Deep Web Technologies (DWT) tames the tangled world of US government scientific information. You can explore the Science.gov site here. Now, Mr. Lederman and his team have turned their attention to the needs of the person looking for substantive business information. The company’s new business search system–Biznar–débuted in October 2008.
DWT has identified about 60 business oriented Web sites and federates these sources in near real time. To this core list, the Deep Web (Biznar) takes a user’s query and retrieves results from other Web indexing services. The system then blends the results, producing a results list that is designed to answer business questions. On this select source list are such publications as:
- Business Week
- Money Magazine
- Motley Fool
- US Patent & Trademark Office
- Wall Street Journal.
Sample Query
Let’s look at a test query. I used Biznar to obtain information about “bankruptcy liability”. The system generated a result list with 1,706 entries. I ran the same query on Google.com, which returned a result list containing more than 9,400,000 results. Obviously no human could examine a fraction of these 9,400,000 results. Google advertises that it is good by virtue of indexing a lot of content. Biznar focuses on a meaningful result set of 1,700 items.
But for most people, 1,700 items are too many. Biznar makes it easy to navigate the results. Look at the results page below:
You see a two column display. The larger column presents a traditional results list with several useful enhancements:
- You see a star rating that provides an indication of the importance of the result for this specific query
- The source is displayed for each item; for example, Google Blog Search, Google Scholar, the New York Times, etc.
- The link includes a snippet of the content in the document that matches the query.
New York Times Asserts It Is Indeed Hip Riding the Word Train
January 12, 2009
The New York Times is trapped within a mindset, wrapped in a culture, and under a layer of costs. New York Magazine is doing its part to show how trendy and agile this aging swan really is. You can read “The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady.” The notion of goosing a dowager is an image that makes this addled goose cringe. The folks working on this project will benefit from the experience when they seek another job or chat up a venture capitalist for some dough. For me, the dead tree crowd, including the goosed gray lady, is struggling to find a solution to the journalistic equivalent of Fermat’s last theorem. Trying is good.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
Crazy Stats: Interesting Yet Hardly Web 2.0
January 12, 2009
I think the clever wordsmiths who snagged the Web 2.0 meme are blowing smoke. Losing money is not a business model. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this list of Web 2.0 statistics. I think the word “statistics” as used by TheFutureBuzz.com means “unverifiable factoids”. The article is “49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0, and Internet Stats” is here. Three of the unsubstantiated factoids that caught my attention were:
- Google’s one trillion urls. Impossible to verify. Ranks with Amazon’s assertions about the number of objects managed in its AWS service. More PR fluff than factual bedrock.
- The 70 million videos on Google. Nice assertion, no verification.
- 133 million Web logs indexed by Technorati. Yep, but how many have been orphaned. The total number of Web logs remains a mystery.
If you love these types of factoids, TheFutureBuzz.com article is for you.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
Lousy Economy, Google Gains Share
January 12, 2009
Barron’s reported here that Google gained market share in Web search in the US in December 2008. The source of the data is Hitwise.com. I think these data understate Google’s actual market share, but when the Wall Street Journal’s progeny asserts 72 percent market share, it must be true. The question is, “What will Microsoft and Yahoo do to gain ground?” The answer is, in my opinion, “Not much they can do.” Search is not a priority at either Microsoft or Yahoo. Sure, both outfits say search is job one, but the GOOG is built on search. Search is an add on, a pair of foam dice hanging from a bigger vehicle’s rear view mirror at Microsoft and Yahoo. Time is running out to catchup. Time to leapfrog.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
