Nstein: Searching for a Better Search
November 8, 2008
Nstein Technologies [http://www.nstein.com/en/] digital publishing specialist Diane Burley presented a webinar titled “Searching … For a better Search!” on November 6, 2008. The point was to teach media companies to evaluate how search works on their web sites, address the pros and cons of search strategies like link lists or search boxes, and show how sites might be losing readers. Ms. Burley reviewed case studies to illustrate the differences between active and passive search; how to use semantic analysis to improve search; useable ideas for improving stickiness; and real-world examples of media companies using internal and external search. Has returned to its content processing roots?
Jessica Bratcher, November 7, 2008
Ballmer’s View of Android
November 8, 2008
Steve Ballmer, according to ZDNet Australia here, has little to fear from Android, Google’s open source mobile phone operating system. Suzanne Tindal’s article summarizes remarks Mr. Ballmer made at an annual investment conference sponsored by Telestra. Ms. Tindal presents the highlights of Mr. Ballmer’s talk in a series of quotations. You will need to read her article to get the flavor of Mr. Ballmer’s view and attitude toward Google and its mobile adventures. However, one comment, attributed to Mr. Ballmer, caught my attention. Ms. Tindal reported Mr. Ballmer as saying:
“They [Google] can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, bla dee bla dee bla, but you know they start out way behind in a certain sense.
I think it was the “bla dee bla dee bla” that seemed memorable. Google has been circumspect in the information I have gathered when it comments about Microsoft. I think the GOOG enjoys making a modest move and then waiting to see if Microsoft reacts, sometimes with considerable gusto, to a tiny Google input. I cannot recall a Googler characterizing Microsoft’s technology as “way behind” or using “bla dee bla dee blah” in a presentation I have watched either in person or on YouTube.com.
Microsoft has made Google’s enterprise initiatives higher profile than they would have been in my opinion. Google does a so so job with sales and marketing. The Google brand is widely recognized, but few know that Google is in the email archiving business and offers bare bones email search for some enterprise customers. Almost no one in Harrods Creek knows that Google’s pricing for its GB 7007 is set up to make an upgrade a no brainer and a first time purchase pretty expensive. Yet Microsoft’s putting Office in the “cloud” has been explained as a way to keep competitors from snagging this business. The comparison is not that Zoho is challenging the Office suite of software. The comparison is between Microsoft and Google.
Now the mobile operating system. I listen occasionally to Paul Thurrott’s podcast which is available on iTunes and on Mr. Laporte’s Web site here. Not more than a week or two ago, I thought I heard Mr. Thurrott suggest that Microsoft should start over with its Windows mobile software. When a respected journalist makes such a radical suggestion, I had my personal hypothesis confirmed. I have fiddled with mobile devices running Windows mobile. I found that I had to click icons to do pretty basic phone things; for example, make a call. I also discovered that on both and HP and Treo device, the responsiveness was not well matched to my expectations. I gave up, dismissing the system as desktop Windows slapped on a phone. That’s not what a phone type device requires.
I think it is too early to know if Android is a hit or miss. Some of the applications for the G1 device available from T Mobile are interesting. I like the Apple iPhone, but it’s on screen keyboard is almost impossible for me to use. I don’t plan on visiting Hot Hot Hot Nails and getting plastic artificial fingernails glued on so I can hit the tiny keys. The applications don’t resonate with me either. I am accustomed to the BlackBerry device.
I think mobile device operating systems and mobile interfaces are in their infancy. It’s a phone, and I want to tell it what I want. No one has pulled off that feature to my satisfaction at this time. Therefore, I think Microsoft, Google, and Nokia have a long road to travel.
Mr. Ballmer’s comments are theater for investors. For me, the casual dismissal of Google is not warranted. Furthermore, I think Microsoft has quite a challenge with its own mobile operating system. Those 10 year olds are growing up and their needs will drive the market. My thought is that a more balanced statement might be, “Google’s first effort is good, but the company has a long road to travel. We all do. It’s a horse race that is ultimately decided by what today’s 10 year olds buy in three or four years.” The “bla dee bla dee blah” statement is a throw away dismissal, not a reflection of the reality Apple, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, and Nokia have to live with.
Stephen Arnold, November 8, 2008
Knowledge Tree: Just There Search
November 7, 2008
On November 6, 2008, a person told me that the addled goose should take a gander (no pun intended) at Knowledge Tree’s document managmenet software. My information about Knowledge Tree here was that it was another open source software player. I poked around and discovered a feature list here. The company has an extensive line up of partners who install, customize, and support the product in most major population centers. You can find the list of partners here.
On November 4, 2008, the company issued a news release here explaining that the company had signed on as an Intel partner. This particular Intel program ‘validates software security, interoperability, and Intel multi-core processor compatibility. This benefits software vendors by reducing support and development costs, whilst providing end users with increasing confidence in the security and quality of software optimized for Intel platforms.’
The San Francisco based company asserts:
KnowledgeTree is document management made simple: secure, share, track and manage the documents and records your organization depends on with ease.By leveraging an active and innovative open source community, Knowledge Tree provides an easy to use and production-ready enterprise document management solution for use by corporations, government institutions, medium to small business and many other organizations. KnowledgeTree’s open source architecture allows organizations to easily customise and integrate their document management system with their existing infrastructure, providing a more flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications.
I fiddled with the system, ran some basic queries, located information. The behavior of the system suggested that the underlying search plumbing was Lucene, not a negative by any means.
The reason I mention this system is that open source continues to be a hot topic in a country without vowels in its name. The logic is that extensibility and freedom from vendor lock in is important for some organizations.
The other hook that snagged my attention with the smooth integration of search into the main program function. Search is ‘just there’. As a result, users are getting what is an embedded search function that can provide acceptable access to content processed by the system. For many organizations, this approach is acceptable.
If you want to look at how software vendors will address the problem of search, take a look at Knowledge Tree. I will keep my eye opened for other vendors of systems with ‘just there’ search.
Stephen Arnold, November 7, 2008
Ask: Yet Another Play for a First Impression
November 6, 2008
Author’s Note: This post will not render correctly in Internet Explorer 7.0. I am looking for a fix.Â
My newsreader pointed me to “Ask.com Speeds Up Its Searches” on the IOL Technology Web site. The author was Rachel Metz. The article’s main point is that Barry Diller’s Ask.com has been tweaked to make it display results more quickly. The most interesting statement in the article was:
Ask.com, owned by InterActiveCorp, encountered the repeat-visitor problem after launching a version of its search engine, Ask 3D, in June last year. With Ask 3D, the site moved away from showing search results as a long list and sorted them into three vertical panels, one of which included photos and other multimedia content related to users’ queries. Ask 3D was well-received, chief executive officer Jim Safka said, but it was too slow at downloading search results. “A lot of people tried the site, but wouldn’t come back.”
A year, maybe 18 months ago, I had dinner with two people from a third tier consulting firm. One of the consultant’s comments lodged in my mind. The keen thinker said, “I think Ask.com is doing a very good job. I use the service because I find it more useful than Google.”
Quite useful for 11 year olds. Not so useful to me.
After this comment, I make Ask.com a regular stop on my swing through Web search engines. I come back to ask, so I am a repeat visitor. The problem is that I don’t use Ask.com, and it has zero to do with the interface. Speedier performance, related results, and skins don’t mean much to me. I learned in September 2008 that some middle school students find Ask.com a useful resource.
I don’t even know a middle school kid, so I can’t begin to think about an online search from that point of view. I made a couple of inquiries and learned that a middle school assignment is a personal narrative or a biography of an important person such as George Washington. I ran the query “George Washington” on Ask.com, Live.com, and Yahoo.com. I skipped Google because everyone I know uses Google for most searches. I wanted to see what the also-rans were doing to win me over.
Google Log Data
November 5, 2008
Robin Bal’s ‘Why Does Google Log Details of Search Queries’ is an interesting post. You can find the November 4, 2008, write up here. Robin Bal’s approach is to summarize Google’s statements about log data. If you are unfamiliar with these, I recommend reading this article. For me, the most important point in the post was this comment:
One of Consumer Watchdog’s complaints surrounds Chrome’s navigation bar, which can be used to enter a Web site address or a search query. The Google Suggest feature built into the browser relays searches back to Google as you type, in hopes of anticipating your desires. Brian Rakowski, product manager for Chrome, said queries sent to Google through autosuggest feature do include data like a user’s IP address. But Google logs just 2 percent of the data brought in through Google Suggest to improve the feature, Rakowski said, and anonymizes the data within 24 hours.You’re flying blind without that information, so we have to collect a little bit,’ he said.
Robin Bal does not reference any of the Google patent documents. A number of these provide more detail on the data model used to house usage data and the methods employed to convert individual clicks into useful values for other system processes. Nevertheless, the round up is helpful and depicts Google in a generally positive manner.
Stephen Arnold, November 5, 2008
OrcaTec’s Truevert: Green and Semantic Search
November 4, 2008
Truevert, created by OrcaTecjust released a beta version of its vertical semantic search engine that returns “green”-topic results. The program pulls its search from the body of Yahoo! spidered pages, and it interprets results based on context within the documents rather than keyword counts and popularity of hits. The goal is to focus on environment-conscious related answers. The engine will also “learn” words, no tagging or taxonomy required.
Truevert is also touted to work in any language. We ran some test quereies. “Batteries” returned attbat.com, a site with eco-friendly batteries, as the top result. In German (“Batterien”), the first result was GRS, a company that deals with recycling batteries. But in Spanish (“bateria”), the top listing was a Wikipedia entry for a type of Brazilian musical group.
They want feedback; Send it to feedback@truevert.com.
Jessica Bratcher, November 4, 2008
Google Pressures Yellow Page Sector
November 4, 2008
When I was in France, the hotel Internet connection failed. There was no paper book of business listings. The print directories–hereinafter called yellow pages–are no longer available at my hotel. In Harrods Creek, I get a number of weird yellow page publications. I receive a listing of businesses in the east end of Louisville, but I don’t look at it. I think I have a listing of minority owned businesses as well. I also recall seeing a silver yellow pages. The idea for that directory was that I could find businesses that wanted to work with people my age.
My newsreader delivered to me a story which if true spells trouble for anyone in the yellow pages business not working with Google. I may be misreading this news story in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) here, so you can double check me. “Sensis Concedes Defeat to Google” by Asher Moses is a story that told me Google nosed into the yellow page business, disrupted it, and ended up with a deal that Sensis (an Australian directory publisher owned by the big telco Telstra) had to take or run out of oxygen.
Mr. Moses wrote:
Telstra’s Sensis has given up on competing with Google in online search and mapping, announcing today it would provide its Yellow business listings to Google Maps and abandon its own search engine for one powered by Google. From the first quarter of next year, all of Yellow’s business listings – the most comprehensive directory in Australia – will be stored in Google Maps.
Will Google have the same success in North America? In my new Google and Publishing monograph for Infonortics, I explain how Google is building its own directory of businesses and providing free coupons to help the merchants get traffic. Years ago I worked on the USWest Yellow Pages’ project. One fact I recall was that a surprising number of yellow page advertisers don’t like the yellow pages.
In my experience, when there is a potent free service that is better than the existing service, the better service will disrupt existing business processes and then supplant them. So, if Google squeezed Sensis’ owner to get its way, Google will probably find the same pattern repeating itself in other markets. In short, the GOOG will become the yellow page champion. It’s just a matter of time. Regulators have a tough time understanding what Google does or why any single action is a problem. Bananas are a monoculture I think. That’s no problem, but there is just one type of banana. I have a list of other business sectors at risk for a Sensis type play by the GOOG. No one seems to care. The Google is just so darn fun.
Stephen Arnold, November 4, 2008
Google and the Washington Post’s Use of the Word Monopoly
November 4, 2008
Does anyone care about the library market? There are some specialist firms, mostly stuck in the sub-$1.0 billion a year basement. These firms have been aggregated by Thomson and Reed Elsevier to create $7.0 to $9.0 billion revenues streams, but these outfits have been challenged to grow rapidly and find new markets. There is the leveraged Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, a company hoping that Google acquires it, giving the owner a big payday. And there is the dwindling number of highly specialized firms trying to survive in a world where library budgets are no longer automatically increased.
The Washington Post story by James Gibson “Google New Monopoly” leap frogs over the shallow analyses of Google “doing good”. Mr. Gibson goes to the heart of Google’s deal with publishers for book scanning. He wrote here:
By settling the case, Google has made it much more difficult for others to compete with its Book Search service. Of course, Google was already in a dominant position because few companies have the resources to scan all those millions of books. But even fewer have the additional funds needed to pay fees to all those copyright owners. The licenses are essentially a barrier to entry, and it’s possible that only Google will be able to surmount that barrier. Sure, Google now has to share its profits with publishers. But when a company has no competitors, there are plenty of profits to share.
I find this interesting and potentially troublesome for Google for three reasons:
- The Washington Post editors knowingly characterized the book scanning, optical character recognition, and the other bits and pieces of this Google operation as a monopoly. The way I read the word “new”, the Post editors accept as common knowledge Google’s possession of at least one other monopoly, maybe more.
- The companies in the library world are likely to face the grim prospect of Google picking off information domains one by one. Google already has a patent service, which is bad news for some vendors. Maybe Derwent and Questel will be okay, but the pressure will mount for smaller fish. Google for its part is probably unaware of the library ecosystem that it will disrupt, but the disruption has begun for Ebsco and HW Wilson unless these firms can innovate and pump revenues quickly.
- Traditional library vendors have largely failed to keep pace with technology and consistently priced their products so that most people wanting information cannot access these data directly. In Harrods Creek, I have to drive to the public library in downtown Louisville to access some information resources. Google is going to make more and more of this high value information available to me and others directly. Whether ad supported or on a subscription basis, I will buy from Google.
The bottomline, therefore, is that if one wants to make a case that Google is on the path to more than two monopolies, the Washington Post makes that story clear in my opinion. Frankly none of the traditional information vendors can slow or impede Google. Google won’t have to buy all of the companies, but it may buy one or two to get some expertise and certain content domains. For the rest of this small, but important industry, the writing is on the wall. Change or be pushed into the lumber room.
Stephen Arnold, November 4, 2008
Azure: Wit and Optimism
November 3, 2008
I enjoy the Register. The addled goose wishes he were British so his edge has that Pythonesque slant. The article “What Ray Ozzie Didn’t Tell You about Microsoft Azure” is enjoyable and informative. It contains a wonderfully terse description of Amazon’s and Google’s cloud services. The Google description is quite tasty with the spice of shifting the job of figuring out how to use it from Google to the user. Nice point. You must read the full article here. Despite the wit, the write up makes several significant points:
- The cloud is a ragout, not a cohesive system or strategy
- A developer has to deal with a large number of components
- Microsoft might pull this off because Ray Ozzie has worked in this for a long time.
My view is more conservative. I want to see Microsoft deliver before I get too excited or put odds on Microsoft’s chances for success. Google’s been working on its cloud services for a decade, and those are not without their faults. I couldn’t access my Gmail for a time, then my “ig” page was dead too. Whether you agree with me or the Register is secondary to the useful information in its write up.
Stephen Arnold, November 3, 2008
Azure as Manhattan Project
November 3, 2008
I usually find myself in agreement with Dan Farber’s analyses. I generally agree with his “Microsoft’s Manhattan Project” write up here. Please, read his article, because I can be more skeptical about Microsoft’s ability to follow through with some of its technical assertions. It is easy for a Microsoft executive to say that software will perform a function. It is quite a different thing to deliver software that actually delivers. Mr. Farber is inclined to see Microsoft’s statements and demos about Microsoft Azure as commitment. He wrote:
Microsoft’s cloud computing efforts have gotten off to a slow start compared with competitors, and it’s on the scale of a Manhattan Project for Windows. Azure is in pre-beta and who knows how it will turn out or whether consumers and companies will adopt it with enough volume to keep Microsoft’s business model and market share intact. But there is no turning back and Microsoft has finally legitimized Office in the cloud.
My take is similar but there is an important difference between what Microsoft is setting out to do and what Google and Salesforce.com, among others, have done. Specifically, Google and Salesforce.com have developed new applications to run in a cloud environment. Google has many innovations, including MapReduce and Salesforce.com has its multi tenant architecture.
Microsoft’s effort will, in part, involve moving existing applications to the cloud. I think this is going to be an interesting exercise. Some of these targeted for the cloud applications like SharePoint have their share of problems. Other applications do not integrate well in on premises locations so those hiccups have to be calmed.
The big difference between Azure and what Google and other Microsoft competitors are doing may be more difficult than starting from ground zero. Unfortunately, time is not on Microsoft’s side. Microsoft also has the friction imposed by the bureaucracy of a $60.0 billion company. Agility and complexity may combine to pose some big challenges for the Azure Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was complex but focused on one thing. Microsoft’s Azure by definition has to focus on protecting legacy applications, annuity revenue, and existing functions in a new environment. That’s a big and possibly impossible job to get right on a timeline of a year and a half.
Stephen Arnold, November 3, 2008
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