Google: We’re Not a Publisher but …
October 10, 2008
Chris Snyder’s “AOL Sends Journals Users to Google’s Blogger” for Wired here reports that AOL will transfer its bloggers’ content to Google. Maybe Google is an aggregator, not a publisher. Whatever the term, original content is original content. Making that content available is a publishing function. Google insists that it is not a publisher. Maybe a better logician than I can explain this apparent contradiction. Mr. Snyder does not seize upon this angle. He must know more about Google’s definition of publishing than I do. He works for a real publication, and I work with geese and dogs.
Stephen Arnold, October 10, 2008
More on the Microsoft Commitment to Cloud Computing
October 8, 2008
The Cloud Computing News Desk at this hard-to-remember url ran Maureen O’Gara’s ” Ok, Boys, Cloud Computing Is in the Plan – Steve Ballmer” on October 4, 2008. (Note; when you click the link dismiss the pop up ad and turn off the video for the Windows Server 2008 ad. Pretty annoying, but it pays the bill I assume.) This is a good round up of the recent flurry of news about Microsoft’s commitment to Google-style computing. I tucked this article in my Microsoft architecture file. Three points struck me as particularly important:
- Vista continues to require PR support. The idea is to remove “lingering doubts” about that operating system. I find this interesting because Microsoft just gave Windows XP six more months to live and Apple Mac’s continue to creep up in market share, approaching 10 percent if I recall the last data I saw.
- Microsoft will out innovate Google. I will post on October 8, 2008, a May 2007, interview with a Googler who explains Google’s approach to innovation. The contrast between Microsoft’s mandate to innovate and the semi-chaotic approach at Google is stark. Check this Web for the posting called “Google Character and Its Innovation Method”.
- The inclusion of the full text of a July 23, 2008, memorandum penned by Mr. Ballmer that addresses the strategic initiatives underway at Microsoft. Very useful document with many nuggets; for example, “we’ll make progress against Google in search first by upping the ante in R&D through organic innovation and strategic acquisitions. Second, we will out-innovate Google in key areas…”
A happy quack to Ms. O’Gara for her article and to the Sys-Con team for publishing it. Now about those annoying pop ups.
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
TechRadar: Knife Stabs Deep into Microsoft
October 7, 2008
If you want a world without Microsoft, you will revel in TechRadar’s “analysis” of Microsoft here. The in-depth review “Has Microsoft Lost It?” covers Vista, the Yahoo play, cloud challenges to Office, Live.com, Zune, and more. After reading the well-written, detailed write up, I was not sure what to think. Microsoft has $65 billion in revenue, cash, and 100 million SharePoint licenses, and some other assets such as 93 percent of the desktops running Windows. I get frustrated with Microsoft because the “we’re really smart” attitude of some of the Microsoft employees throws grit into decision making. The result is weird stuff like Microsoft software that doesn’t work on SharePoint or SQL Server back ups that don’t restore. Please read the article and make up your own mind. For me, I just want to know what’s the fit between MOSS and Fast Search ESP. I am a simple goose.
Stephen Arnold, October 7, 2008
Ask.com: Housecleaning, New Paint, Same Damp Basement
October 6, 2008
My newsreader is stuffed like a six-year old’s teddy bear with views, opinions, and analyses of the “new” Ask.com. I remember when humans worked like beavers to hand craft “answers” for the AskJeeves.com “natural language search engine.” That is in the mid 1990s. About a year ago, a semi-wizard from a third-tier consulting firm regaled me at dinner with insights into the innovations that AskJeeves.com (updated as Ask.com) was unleashing to hoards of Web searchers. Then I learned that some of the Rutgers’ wizards had returned to academe. I suffered through a technical paper that explained how Ask.com could scale. As skeptical as I am of Amazon’s approach, the Ask.com presentation was even less convincing.
Today’s stories are capped with the snow on the journalistic Mount Everest. Miguel Helft’s “Ask.com Revamps Search Engine” is the summit from which this Ask.com bobsled launches. You can find his write up here. Please, read this story. See if you agree that one of the most interesting comments in the piece is this statement:
The new Ask.com also includes an index of various question-and-answer sites from around the Web, including Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers, that proves effective at returning results for some queries posed as questions.
I interpret this as a metasearch play. Now metasearch technology has made great strides since the early days of Dogpile.com. Among the services I use are Ixquick.com, the remarkably helpful Devilfinder.com, and the relative newcomer, Clusty.com. I also keep a copy of Copernic on one of my machines because it’s built in collection narrowing function is helpful for some of my queries.
I tested Ask.com with this query, “What’s the capital of Tasmania?” The system’s first result was “Hobart.” The second result was correct as well and pointed me to Wikipedia, the go-to site for general information. Powerset leveraged a demo featuring Wikipedia content into $100 Microsoft dollars not long ago. My second query was a different kettle of fish or “answers”. The query was, “What is the architecture of the Google File System?” The first result pointed to a useful article from the HighScalability.com site here. My other test queries returned useful results, and I concluded that the “new” version of Ask.com was pretty good.
The Search Engine Land write up focused on the notion of “structured search”. With the shift to XML and the crossover from flat ASCII to XML having taken place sometime last year (according to a Google document I located using the Google.com search engine), this is a good point to make. In fact, the Search Engine Land story here made this point:
…we expected this to come. After seeing it, I personally still do not consider Ask.com to be a core search engine and thus do not consider them to be in the race with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. In fact, I find it interesting that Ask.com is bring back the Jeeves approach, which failed back then – but they hope will work now.
I did not see this coming because I don’t pay much attention to the machinations of Barry Diller’s Web and online empire. I don’t think of Ask.com as a resource suitable for my research needs. I probably won’t change my information retrieval habits to much either. Now look at the usage data for the top search engines. I have used the comScore data from this source.
Here’s a Google Trends’ report on the incidence of queries for the top four search engines: Ask.com, Google.com, Live.com, and Yahoo.com. You can update this query here.
Yahoo.com is leading the pack in queries on Google. My hunch is that Yahoo’s financial and business challenges make it popular. What do these data tell us? A Web site can get traffic by becoming a major business story. A Web site with a five percent share of Web query traffic with an improved search engine has a lot of work to do to get traffic.
Ask.com, therefore, has to have a better search engine, and it has to set the media on fire with its search engine. I will check out my newsreader 24 hours from now to see if the Ask.com “news” has staying power. My hunch is that this upgrade won’t have enough horsepower to pull up the Ask.com market share. More is needed. I want to be candid. I am not sure what Ask.com can do to build buzz. Crazy advertisements, staff churn, and a different interface catch my attention, but these are not sufficient to change my research behavior. Google will probably get a bump because people will navigate to Google and type the query “ask” in order to get a direct link to the Ask.com service. Agree? Disagree? I really want to hear from the Traces and Whitneys working at consulting firms to set me straight on my perception that Ask.com is stuck in the damp basement of consumer online Web traffic.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
Powerset’s Approach to Search
October 6, 2008
Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for about $100 million in June 2008. I haven’t paid too much attention to what Microsoft has done or is doing with the Powerset semantic, natural language, latent semantic indexing, et al system it acquired. A reader sent me a link to Jon Udell’s well Web log interview that focuses on Powerset. If you want to know more about how Microsoft will leverage the aging Xerox Parc technology, you will want to click here to get an introduction to the Perspectives interview conducted on September 30, 2008, with Scott Prevost. You will need to install Silverlight, or you can read the interview transcript here.
I can’t summarize the lengthy interview. For several three points were of particular interest:
- The $100 million bought Powerset, but Microsoft had to then license the Xerox Parc technology. You can get some “inxight” into the functions of the technology by exploring the SAP/ Business Objects’ information here.
- The Powerset technology can be used with both structured and unstructured information.
- Microsoft will be doing more work to deliver “instant answers”.
A happy quack to the reader who sent me this link, and two quacks for Mr. Udell for getting some useful information from Scott Prevost. I am curious about the roles of Barney Pell (Powerset founder) and Ron Kaplan (Powerset CTO and former Xerox Parc wizard) in the new organization. If anyone can shed light on this, you too will warrant a happy quack.
Stephen Arnold, October
Mercado Israel: More Trouble
October 6, 2008
Israel’s The Marker IT Computer World here ran a story that Mrku (Mercado) sent 88 workers home. I haven’t been able to verify this story, but I wanted to post the link to it in Hebrew here. Investors, it seems, would not pony up more cash. Stay tuned.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
Hitwise: Microsoft’s Pay for Traffic Working
October 6, 2008
Hitwise, an Experian company, reported on October 3, 2008, that “MSN Cashback [is] successfully attracting visitors. You can read this remarkable article and see the graph “proving” the success here. Hitwise wrote:
In looking specifically at MSN Cashback, we see an interesting trend where the share of visits to the Cashback section of MSN Live is increasing. Eleven weeks ago, MSN Cashback represented 3.75% of the traffic to Live.com and grew to 6.29% last week. This rise in Cashback’s traffic underscores the interest in the program, which is likely to be getting a boost from shoppers looking to save money and stretch their budgets given the current economic climate.
The only challenge in “pay for users” is that users form a habit to get paid, not to search in my opinion. The for fee commercial services have used a variant of this with college students. Commercial online seems free. When the lads and lasses break into the real world, it’s free online services first and foremost. Maybe Microsoft has cracked the code? I doubt it, though.
The key question is, “Why does a vendor have to pay a person to use a service?” Answer: the other vendor–in this case the GOOG–has about 70 percent market share of US search with its share clicking up 0.01 or 0.02 each month. Users choose the GOOG and some of them go for the pay deal as well. The big number is the 70 percent share obtained without paying, answering email, or being particular helpful.
Hitwise is excited, but I am not. Are you?
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
Xalo.vn Search Engine Launched
October 6, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to the successor to Vinaseek. The new Web search engine is Xalo.vn, which indexes content in Vietnamese. The service according to the news item sent to me by my loyal reader is here. The article appeared in April 2008, but the English version is now available. The news story said:
Xalo.vn is designed to search in seven areas: Web, photos, news, music, blogs, forums, and small ads.
The company received funding from a variety of sources totaling about US$2.0 million. Other Vietnam centric search engines include PanVietnam and Vinaseek. Let me know if this link directs you correctly.
Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2008
Hosted Microsoft Exchange
October 5, 2008
Email is the lubricant for many orgnizations’ business dealings. A reader sent me a link to David Hamilton’s “USA.Net Leads Email Market: Report” article on TheWHIR.com. You can access the news story here. I don’t think too much about email unless I’m working as an expert witness. Then email becomes a big deal. Mr. Hamilton reported that USA.Net is the “top player” in the Microsoft Exchange email hosting market. The USA.Net outfit was new to me. After some checking, I learned that the company offers a customized, scalable, and almost 100 percent crash proof hosted Exchange service. Mr. Hamilton reported tht USA.Net processes 38 million email messages a day and manages 80 terabytes of data from its 50 data centers. You can get more information about USA.Net here. The firm is a unit of Perimeter eSecurity. My question was, “How does a customer search email on this service?” I ran a query on the USA.Net Web site and the results list provided me with no concrete answer. Let me know if I have missed something. Finding Exchange email is as important as sending and receiving Exchange email in my opinion. I know I’m missing the obvious. Readers, any thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, October 5, 2008
Exalead’s High Performance Platform: CloudView
October 5, 2008
It’s no secret. When I profiled Exalead in one of the first three editions of Enterprise Search Report that I wrote, I likened the company’s plumbing to Google’s. The DNA of AltaVista.com influenced Google and Exalead. For most 20 somethings, AltaVista.com was one of a long line of pre-Google flops. That, like prognostications about Web 3.0, is not exactly on target.
The AltaVista.com search system was a demonstration of several interesting technologies developed by Digital Equipment Corporation’s engineers over many years. First, there was the multi core processor that ran hotter than the blood of a snorting bull in Pamplona. Second, there was the nifty manipulation of memory. In fact, that memory manipulation allowed Oracle performance in the system I played with to zip right along in the mid 1990s as I recall. And, the DEC engineers were able to index the Internet with its latency and flawed HTML so that a query was processed and a results list displayed quickly on my dial up modem in 1996. I even have a copy of AltaVista desk top search, one of the first of these scaled down search systems intended to make files in hierarchical systems findable. On my bookshelf is a copy of Eric and Deborah Ray’s AltaVista Search Revolution. Louis Monier wrote the forward. He used to work at Google, and, what few people know, is that Mr. Monier lured the founder of Exalead to work on the AltaVista.com project. Like I said, the DNA of AltaVista influenced Google and Exalead. In 1997, some AltaVista engineers were not happy campers after DEC was acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett Packard acquired Compaq. In the fury of the HP’s efforts to become really big, tiny AltaVista.com was an orphan, and an unwanted annoyance clamoring for hardware, money, engineering, and a business model.
François Bourdoncle–unlike Louis Monier, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Simon Tong, among others–did not join Google. In year 2000, he set up Exalead to build a next-generation information access and content processing system. What I find interesting is that just the trajectory of Google in Web search was affected by the AltaVista.com “gravity,” Exalead’s trajectory in content processing was also touched by the AltaVista.com experiment.
A result list from Exalead’s Web search system. Try it here.
When M. Bourdoncle founded Exalead, he wanted to resolve some of AltaVista’s known weaknesses. For example, the heat issues associated with the DEC Alpha chips was one problem. Another was rapid scaling, using commodity hardware, not hand crafted components which take months to obtain.
Exalead now has, according to the company’s Web site, more than 170 licensees. Earlier this week (October 1, 2008), Exalead CloudView, a new version of the company’s platform and new software features.
Paula Hane, Information Today, provided this run down of the new Exalead features:
Unlimited scalability and high performance
Business-level tuning and management of the search experience
Streamlined administration UI
Full traceability within the product
WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows
Advanced configuration management system (with built-in version control)
Improvements in the relevancy model
Provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for third-party implementations
You can read her “Exalead Offers a Cloud(y) View of Information Access here. The article provides substantive, useful information. For example, Ms. Hane reports:
One large [Exalead] customer in the U.K. can’t say enough good things about the choice of Exalead—its search solution was up and running in just 3 months. “After performing an extensive three-month technical evaluation of the major enterprise search software vendors we found that Exalead had the best technology, vision and ability to fulfill our demanding requirements,” says Peter Brooks-Johnson, product director of Rightmove, a fast-growing U.K. real estate Web site. “Not only does Exalead require minimal hardware to work effectively, but Exalead has a strong, accessible support team and a culture that takes pride in its customer implementations.”
(Note: A happy quack to Ms. Hane, whom I am quoting shamelessly in this Web log post.)
Phil Muncaster’s “Exalead Claims Enterprise Search Boost” here does a good job of explaining what’s coming from this Paris-based information access company. For me the most significant point in the write up was this passage:
The new line features a streamlined user interface, improved relevancy and the ability to extend business intelligence applications to textual search…
In my investigation of search company technology, I learned that Exalead’s ability to scale is comparable to Google’s. As Mr. Muncaster noted, the forthcoming version of the Exalead software–called CloudView–will put Exalead squarely in the business intelligence sector of the content processing market.
You can get more information about Exalead here. A fact sheet is also available here. Exalead’s Web index is available at www.exalead.com.
I have to wrangle a trip to Paris and learn more about Exalead. I hear the food is okay in Paris. The French have a strong tradition in math as well. I remember such trois étoiles innovators as Descartes, Mersenne, Poincaré, and Possson, and others. In my opinion, Microsoft should have acquired Exalead, not Fast Search & Transfer. Exalead is a next generation system; it scales; and it is easily “snapped in” to enterprise environments, including those dependent on SharePoint. I think Exalead is a company I want to watch more closely.
Stephen Arnold, October 5, 2008
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