Top 1,000 Sites: Interesting and Odd
May 29, 2010
You can get Google’s version of the Top 1,000 Web sites via the Double Click Ad Planner. There are some anomalies. I could not spot Google.com nor YouTube.com. Microsoft’s sites were not rolled up but presented as individual sites; for example, Live.com at #3, MSN.com at #5, Microsoft.com at #6, and Bing.com at #14. Same handling of Adobe. The approach makes sense. A notable red herring link was Com.com which points to Cnet.com. A surprise that Ca.gov was on the list at 565 and the UK’s Direct.gov.uk was # 803. I did not spot any of the much-loved US government Web sites. The National Institutes of Health was #176. The IRS was #288 ahead of Hulu.com at #292. NASA was #604. The Department of Education was #762. The USGS turned up at # 978. The other US government entities were presumably outside the Top 1,000. Google’s star crossed social networking service Orkut was #45 with 45 million visitors. Facebook, according to the Google report, has 540 million visitors. To get an idea of the variance between the Google data and Nielsendata, compare some high profile companies. I looked at Nielsen’s April traffic data for Apple. Nielsen reported 61,158 million uniques. Google reported 72 million. Similar differences pepper traffic league tables. Which is less incorrect? I average which is close enough for horse shoes in my opinion.
The “truth” appears in log files. The problem is that comprehensive log file analysis is a challenge in many organizations. Net net: Some Web site operators may not know the hard count.
Stephen E Arnold
Fly.com, Flight Search
May 28, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Fly.com. I ran several queries and found the service speedy, delivering results on a par with those I routinely use for my travels. I noticed that discount airlines such as Southwest did not appear in the results for my test queries. I use Southwest to travel from Louisville to Chicago Midway and to Baltimore’s BWI airport. I added Fly.com to my bookmark manager, but I still have to knit together Southwest trips with other carriers’ service to get the lowest fares.
Stephen E Arnold, May 28, 2010
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Ancestry Data
May 27, 2010
My family has a long history of failures. In fact, on a recent trip to the UK, I found scratched into a centuries-old century stone wall near Tetbury, “No Arnolds Allowed.” If you have some relatives who sojourned in the UK, you may want to take a look at “Nonconformist Records Archived Online.” Begin your skeleton hunt by navigating to London Historical Records, 1500s-1900s.
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2010
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Guardian Goes Open
May 26, 2010
Darned interesting write up this: “What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s New Open Platform”. Some of the GigaOM analysis roils the water in the goose pond. This particular article makes several good points. The key for us in Harrod’s Creek was this comment:
The vehicle for this change is its “Open Platform,” which launched last week and involves an open application programming interface (API) that developers can use to integrate Guardian content into services and applications. The newspaper company has been running a beta version of the platform for a little over a year now, but took the experimental label off the project on Thursday and announced that it’s “open for business.” By that The Guardian means it’s looking for partners that want to use its content in return for licensing fees or to enter into a revenue-sharing agreement of some kind related to advertising.
The write up wants the Guardian to do more. My hunch is that the Guardian will do more. Prudence is not a virtue in Silicon Valley. It is in Manchester. What can one learn from British reserve? Quite a lot I think.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2010
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SurfRay Surges
May 24, 2010
SurfRay pinged us on May 21, 2010. We took the opportunity to gather some information about this search and content processing company. We want to break our coverage of SurfRay into two parts. In this first part, we bring you up to date on the company’s product. In the second part, which will run in Beyond Search on May 31, 2010, we take a look at some of the details of the SurfRay products. Here’s the update, which as far as we know is an exclusive look at this company.
SurfRay (www.surfray.com) has released feature-packed Ontolica 2010 containing the new Ontolica Search Intelligence module, and with support for Ontolica Preview. This recent release provides extensive reporting and analytics on search performance and SharePoint content processing. You can get more information about Ontolica here. A free trial is available from this link.
The 2010 release of Ontolica Preview, which provides native support for about 500 document formats, ranging from Office formats to vector image formats and high-fidelity HTML preview, the product also supports in-document highlighting, allows users to browse to best-bet pages inside documents, and is optimized for performance over the internet, with no client installs needed.
Having completed development on Ontolica Express, a search extension to Microsoft Search Server and Search Server Express, they have transformed Microsoft’s free search engine into a much more rich and robust solution. With important features such as wildcard and Boolean search as well as drill down and faceted search, they can provide effective solutions to the customer.
The feature matrix shows how Ontolica adds important functionality to the SharePoint 2010 environment. Notice that the Fast Search solution lacks important out-of-the-box features such as portal usage reports and hot linked thumbnail previews.
Packaged enterprise search solutions most often equate to long and expensive customization and implementation projects for customers. SurfRay is out to change that. With a new managing director and several new releases of the company’s Ontolica and MondoSearch products they have positioned themselves for the impending release of SharePoint 2010. Soren Pallesen, the new CEO, believes SurfRay has a significant opportunity for the firm to grow.
Other search vendors add features that are hard to understand and don’t offer real value for customers. SurfRay is committed to delivering value to customers with easy to use, out of the box, and based on industry-standard technologies.
SurfRay, a Microsoft Certified Partner, can deliver tightly packaged enterprise search solutions that are rich in functionality but easy to test and install – Ontolica installs literally in 5 minutes. And in so doing, SurfRay is responding to customers move toward more packaged search products and away from expensive consulting projects.
Founded in 2000, SurfRay is a global leader in search infrastructure software for enterprises that delivers highly packaged enterprise search solutions that are easy to try, buy and install. SurfRay has more than a 1000 customers in over 30 countries and is dual headquartered in Santa Clara, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark. Their customer base includes some of the most known brands and largest companies in the world, including AT&T Wireless, Bank of Thailand, Best Buy, BMW, Ernst & Young, Ferrari, H & R Block, Intel Solution Services, John Deere, Nintendo, and the list goes on.
SurfRay is a trendsetter in packaged enterprise search solutions that takes the complexity out of deploying business search solutions. They achieve this by releasing new products and versions continuously and by focusing on geographic expansion. They have established dedicated physical presence in local markets to further build their local customer support and international reseller network, such as SurfRay UK and Ireland, SurfRay Benelux and Nordic. All this seems to be working as SurfRay recently announced over 20 percent quarter-to-quarter revenue growth.
Pallesen believes, “Today most customers are very well educated on search technology and they don’t want to be convinced that they need some fancy new techno-feature. The next new thing that truly will transform the search market and deliver substantial value to customers will be enterprise class search solutions that install and are configured as easily as Microsoft Office.”
SurfRay has a deep heritage in innovation and advanced search technology. They continue to leverage this and put valuable enhancement into packaged search solutions that makes search functional as well as easy to install and use.
Stephen E Arnold and Melody Smith, May 24, 2010
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Wowd Gets Two Patents – Sign of Future Success?
May 22, 2010
New kid on the block gets two patents on its method for ranking search results based on usage data and its variation on peer-to-peer networking. Wowd is a search system that makes it easier to discover what’s popular on the Web. the company says, “A new way to search… when what’s happening now matters.”
Though Wowd is not yet at the scale that necessitates this patented technology, they are hedging their bets and being prepared for when that day comes. Gigaom.com reported in their article, ‘Wowd Doubles Down With Social Search and P2P Patents” that Wowd doesn’t plan to do much with the patents at the moment but it will demonstrate to investors that they are serious.
The first patent is for a method of ranking web pages based on the way people use them. In other words, it gives a search engine the ability to weigh anonymized information about where users click to go next from a web page. The technology was developed for real-time use and especially social search. The second patient is for their variation on peer-to-peer networking and is not search specific. The real time search sector has a number of vendors fighting for traffic. Wowd is a useful service.
Melody K. Smith, May 22, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
Google, StreetView, and Allegations in the US
May 20, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to TechEye.net’s “Google Sued over Snaffled Street View Data.” I am not an attorney, not a journalist, not qualified to do much more than point to this write up. According to the article,
Google has received a writ from Vicki Van Valin and Neil Mertz as part of a class action that their privacy was violated by Street View vehicles picking up data from open wireless internet connections used at home. They also want a court to prevent Google from destroying the data that’s been collected.
The article includes quite a few references to legal things. I did recognize the phrase “class action.”
Assume that the article is accurate and that the legal references in it are germane to the allegations. Here are the questions I want to capture before the slip from my goose brain:
- Are the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission likely to take an interest in this matter?
- What happens if the legal eagles move the matter into court and some of the alleged “information” is deleted or otherwise unavailable?
- How will the “we’re sorry” and “we goofed” method work in the face of international and US actions related to the alleged Google StreetView data collection scope?
I don’t know, but I remember one person said in a lunch conversation, “Never ask for permission. Do it. It is easier to ask for forgiveness.”
Will this work as a method of deflecting the allegations?
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2010
Freebie.
Finding Books
May 17, 2010
You can’t live on good ideas alone and Booshaka may find out the hard way. A recent Killer Startup review, “Booshaka – A Search Engine for Facebook,” details how this social search engine provides excellent tools for users. Booshaka functions like web-based search engines, but only shows Facebook postings. Users can type in a topic to search, click the most popular search topics or choose one of the “fun” topic listings. The results look just like Facebook wall postings, but from all different people. The problem is, there is now “Wow” factor. Nothing about this program made us sit up straight and say, I wish I’d thought of that. While Booshaka provides something helpful and unique, it reminds us that if you aren’t spinning heads, you’re spinning your wheels. Maybe the mud tires will get a grip? We hope so.
Patrick Roland, May 17, 2010
Freebie.
YourOpenBook: Hurry
May 16, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a Facebook centric “finding” service. If you have some Facebook skeletons in your closet, you may want to gobble a Rennie before navigating to YourOpenBook. I ran some interesting queries but the goose will not reproduce those results. Fascinating body of content and a basic search engine. Powerful and thought provoking. Know your child’s Facebook name? Azure chip consultant under 30? Coworker? Enjoy before the service suffers an unexpected outage. Note: queries are now returning different results with each refresh.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2010
Freebie.
Big Data, Publishing, and an Opportunity?
May 16, 2010
People are looking for a way to connect to the massive quantities of data online, but these publishers may be missing the point. Semantic Web’s recent article, “Big Data Publishing: Common Threads in STM, Legal & Educational Publishing,” discusses the possible onslaught of publishing online data, even recommending it as an entrepreneurial option. Big data publishing is the idea that a publisher will compile the Web—from blog posts, tweets, news articles and other ephemera—into print form. The goal is that people will want to study the web as a whole and understand how all things are connected. The question is, why should the internet be published? There are tools like social search that help us make connections between many topics, individuals and opinions already. Do we really need researchers and academics to help us make these connections?
Patrick Roland
May 16, 2010
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