Verity as a Magnet: Great Sales Lead Idea
December 5, 2014
I scanned a machine generated summary of search news. I spotted this story:
I navigate to the link and saw:
I clicked the Verity link, which I assumed would be a 404. I was sent to this page:
Yep, good old www.hp.com.
Marketing 2014.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2014
Start Your Search Engines…Go!
December 5, 2014
What does predictive analytics have to do with formula 1 racing? Everything, says Computer World UK in “McLaren’s F1 Predictive Analytics Snapped Up By KPMG.” Formula 1 is to Europe as NASCAR is to the United States. It is one of Europe’s most popular sports and a lot of high-end technology is used to make the sport more exciting. McLaren is a top team and KPMG, a tax and advisory firm purchased its predictive analytics. KPMG will then use the analytics software to improve audits and advisory services.
“Simon Collins, KPMG’s UK chairman said: ‘McLaren has honed sophisticated predictive analytics and technologies that can be applied to many business issues. We believe this specialist knowledge has the power to radically transform audit, improving quality and providing greater insight to management teams, audit committees and investors.’”
McLaren is also renowned for its software being used to make split level decisions. The software’s potential is untested and its capability to help more industries is about to take off from the start line.
Whitney Grace, December 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP Autonomy: Tax Methods and a Sidewalk Guarantee
December 3, 2014
I watched Dr. Mike Lynch on CNBC explain, quite patiently, that Hewlett Packard struggles with accounting procedures. He pointed out that HP created a document that explains how a rebasing exercise created the magical billions written off the $11 billion purchase price of Autonomy.
The story gets some legs in “Document Raises Questions on HP’s $8.8bn Write Down of Autonomy.” Note that this a Financial Times’s document and you may have to pay to view it, assuming it is still online when you read this blog post. The link I am providing plunked me in the middle of a wonky “slide show” with the article stuck on the lower edge of the PowerPoint.
The write up reports that Mike Lynch was fired and a team of HP professionals started work on a rebasing exercise. My thought is that if one is going to spend $11 billion, one might want to do one’s homework BEFORE turning over the cash and buying the company.
Dr. Lynch is quoted by the FT as saying:
“The document was completed a month after HP made those allegations and any future valuation of the company would have had to include them. HP’s own court filings repeatedly assert the rebasing analysis includes the effects of the allegations,” he said.
In terms of time, HP purchased Autonomy in October 2011. Autonomy had discussed selling with other companies. Autonomy tapped the expertise of Frank Quattrone and his colleagues at Qatalyst Partners. Oracle posted some information about the Quattrone pitch deck in September 2011. You may be able to snag a copy at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/please-buy-autonomy-503330.html.
Autonomy is unique among vendors of enterprise search systems. It was the first company to generate revenues from enterprise search in excess of $600 million. At one time there were more than 60 vendors competing directly with Autonomy. Some like Convera and Siderean Software ran into financial difficulty. Others like Fulcrum Technologies, iPhrase, Exalead, ISYS Search Software, and Vivisimo among others were able to find buyers before the market contracted more. Most vendors of enterprise search either scrambled to reposition themselves or develop technologies that positioned the companies to provide something other than search which was by 2008 accelerating on a path to becoming a low value utility.
HP, as I recall, performed due diligence. After doing the MBA and CPA thing, the company paid $11 billion for a company that after 15 years of invention, innovation, great marketing, and savvy acquisitions was at full sail. At the time of the deal, proprietary search was under assault from open source options that were simply “good enough.” HP bought at a time when valuations of search companies was not just softening, valuations were downright mushy.
HP, I assume, is smarter and more informed than I. HP bought Autonomy, and HP quickly demonstrated its buyer’s remorse. The groaning and moaning about Autonomy not being worth $11 billion is becoming a bit tiresome.
I envy Dr. Lynch for his ability to maintain his poise and temper. I am not sure I would have advised HP to purchase Autonomy. I know what happened to AltaVista, which HP converted into jet fuel for Google. I know that the company has been plagued by management upheavals and products that seem to have wandered from the HP way. Ink is profitable, but it is not a refined scientific instrument. Now HP’s senior manager is garnering some attention due to Pando.com’s write up “Documents Show How eBay’s Meg Whitman and Pierre Omidyar Conspired to Steal Craigslist’s Secrets.” If true, I wonder how reliable HP is today when it comes to presenting facts in a fair and accurate manner.
Exalead commanded a sale price of about $200 million. Oracle paid about $1 billion for Endeca. Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for Fast Search & Transfer. Vivisimo went for a modest $20 million. Now along comes HP dragging the history of its mishandling of AltaVista.com and ponies up $11 billion. I found that number pretty darned amazing, and I have done work with some pretty crazy investment bankers over the years. HP paid the equivalent of the purchase price of nine Fast Search & Transfers, a company that landed in hot water for its financial methods. HP paid the equivalent of buying more than 50 Vivisimos. Consider $20 million or $1.2 billion versus $11 billion. Yowza. What the heck were the consultants advising HP using as a valuation scorecard?
My view is that HP wants its money back. I remember when I bought a 1955 Oldsmobile from a used car dealer on the bad side of Peoria, Illinois. I asked, “Does the car come with a warranty?”
The dealer looked at me and said, “See that sidewalk? When you drive the car off the lot and hit the sidewalk, you get a sidewalk guarantee.”
I had no idea what a sidewalk guarantee was. I asked, “What’s a sidewalk guarantee?”
The dealer replied, “When you cross that sidewalk, you are responsible for any problems with the car.”
HP is now struggling to understand “sidewalk guarantee.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2014
Searchblox Uses ElasticSearch to Power Multilingual Search
December 3, 2014
The article titled Multilingual Search—Easy to Setup and Manage For Your Website on Searchblox discusses the difficulty of multilingual search. If you think search in English only is complicated enough, consider global corporations that must make search possible in any number of languages, all with their own sets of synonyms and double meanings. Cross-language search is particularly difficult, given that the existence of terms that have different meanings in different languages (occasionally with hilarious results.) The article explains,
“SearchBlox provides a simple solution that takes care of setting up search for non-english languages and supports 25+ languages out-of-the-box. Each collection is tied to a specific language which enables you to tune the stop words, synonyms and meta data handling without complicated configuration. SearchBlox lets you search across multiple languages at the same time and display them together taking out the complexities of handling encoding. SearchBlox lets you index multilingual documents like word, pdf, excel and ppt files…”
SearchBlox uses Elasticsearch as an engine. The article lists all of the languages supported by Searchblox, from Arabic and Bengali to Kannada, Slovak, Romanian and Telugu all the way down to Thai and Turkish. Encoding and displaying search results has always been a challenge in multiple languages, but Searchblox guarantees full search capabilities in the whole list of languages.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Recommind Placed on the Deloitte 2014 Technology Fast List Sixth Year in a Row
December 2, 2014
The article titled Recommind Ranked Among Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s 2014 Technology Fast 500(TM) on Consumer Electronics Net announced that Recommind, software application provider, has garnered a spot on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. This is the sixth consecutive year that Recommind has earned a place on the list of the fastest growing tech companies in North America. The article states,
“The companies ranked on the 2014 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 continue to set the bar for their industry higher each year,” said Eric Openshaw, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology, media and telecommunications leader. “There are so many exciting products and smart thought leaders driving this list. We congratulate the Fast 500 companies and look forward to seeing them continue their momentum into 2015.” Recommind attributes success to its innovations in enterprise data management solutions…”
At this rate, Recommind seems to be poised to be the next Fast Search or Autonomy IDOL. Customers include AstraZeneca, The US Department of Energy, Cisco, and Marathon Oil, among others. In order to be considered for the Deloitte listing, companies must own “proprietary intellectual property” the sale of which contributes the majority of the company’s revenue. Recommind is a leader in unstructured data management solutions as well as Discovery technology.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Useful Tip for Elasticsearch Admins
December 1, 2014
Short honk: Elasticsearch continues to outpace the other open source search vendors. I know that some of the companies with venture funding folks breathing down their necks say otherwise. Keep in mind that there is a difference between performing and saying one is able to perform. Elasticsearch delivers functionality that we find valuable. Also, from the information flowing through my Overflight system, Elasticsearch works. Really!
A useful security configuration article offers helpful tips. Navigate to “Elasticsearch: Dealing with Complex Permissions.” The short article provides some code snippets that you will find instructive.
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2014
Finding Books: Not Much Has Changed
December 1, 2014
Three or four years ago I described what I called “the book findability” problem. The audience was a group of confident executives trying to squeeze money from an old school commercial database model. Here’s how the commercial databases worked in 1979.
- Take content from published sources
- Create a bibliographic record, write or edit the abstract included with the source document
- Index it with no more than three to six index terms
- Digitize the result
- Charge a commercial information utility to make it available
- Get a share of the revenues.
That worked well until the first Web browser showed up and individuals and institutions began making information available online. There are a number of companies that still use variations of this old school business model. Examples include newspapers that charge a Web browser user for access to content to outfits like LexisNexis, Ebsco, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, and other outfits.
As libraries and individuals resist online fees, many of the old school outfits are going to have to come up with new business models. But adaptation will not be easy. Amazon is in the content business. Why buy a Cliff’s Notes-type summary when there are Amazon reviews? Why pay for news when a bit of sleuthing will turn up useful content from outfits like the United Nations or off the radar outfits like World News at www.wn.com? Tech information is going through a bit of an author revolt. While not on the level of protests in Hong Kong, a lot of information that used to be available in research libraries or from old school database providers is available online. At some point, peer reviewed journals and their charge the author business models will have to reinvent themselves. Even recruitment services like LinkedIn offer useful business information via Slideshare.com.
One black hole concerns finding out what books are available online. A former intelligence officer with darned good research skills was not able to locate a copy of my The New Landscape of Search. You can find it here for free.
I read “Location, Location: GPS in the Medieval Library.” The use of coordinates to locate a book on a shelf or hanging from a wall anchored by a chain is not new to those who have fooled around with medieval manuscripts. Remember that I used to index medieval sermons in Latin as early as 1963.
What the write up triggered was the complete and utter failure of indexing services to make an attempt to locate, index, and provide a pointer to books regardless of form. The baloney about indexing “all” information is shown to be a toothless dragon. The failure of the Google method and the flaws of the Amazon, Library of Congress, and commercial database providers is evident.
Now back to the group of somewhat plump, red face confident wizards of commercial database expertise. The group found my suggestion laughable. No big deal. I try to avoid the Titanic type operations. I collected my check and hit the road.
There are domains of content that warrant better indexing. Books, unfortunately, is one set of content that makes me long for the approach that put knowledge in one place with a system that at least worked and could be supplemented by walking around and looking.
No such luck today.
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2014
Poor Search Equals Poor E-Sales
November 27, 2014
Logically this statement makes sense and if you have been paying attention to facts you already knew it:
“A recent study by the Baymard Institute, an independent web research institute with a focus on e-commerce usability and optimization, found that many of the top 50 U.S. e-commerce sites are lacking essential e-commerce search capabilities which is hindering current online sales.”
Please feel free to insert your favorite exasperation for pointing out the obvious. This is something that even an experienced online retail shopper could tell you. Digital Journal covers the story in “Baymard Institute Study Finds Major Problems With Search On Leading E-Commerce Sites.”
Baymard found that most users don’t like browsing through categories. The search function on these big e-retailers also found they don’t have a spell check feature, did not support thematic or product searches, and required specific jargon.
EasyAsk responded to the Baymard’s with a white paper detailing how e-commerce Web site can improve their search feature to improve sales. One way is supporting natural language search. The white paper is available for free download.
Whitney Grace, November 27, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Disappearing Content: You Cannot Search for It if It Is Not There
November 25, 2014
The issue of shaped and filtered content is becoming more and more of a mainstream topic. I read “Uber Removed Blog Post from Data Science Team That Examined Link between Prostitution and Rides.” The world’s oldest profession meets the world’s newest ride service. I noted this passage in the write up:
“The company examined its rider data, sorting it for anyone who took an Uber between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night. Then it looked at how many of those same people took another ride about four to six hours later – from at or near the previous nights’ drop-off point. Yes, Uber can and does track one-night stands. Consider it the Uber equivalent of the walk of shame.”
How will this corporate approach to content play out? My hunch is that content has been getting removed for a long time. I recall looking for information about the Spyglass browser decades ago and finding a 404 error.
At least today there are copies of the Web, caches on public systems, and people who store content on their drives. Nevertheless, most people cannot search for content that is not “there.” Has anyone looked for CMS information about the original MIC, RAC, and ZPIC contractors? My hunch is that more attention should be paid to content that goes missing, not because of its prurient nature, but because the disappearance of content provides very useful information about the behavior of people, systems, and organizations.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2014
Elasticsearch Ups the Pressure on LucidWorks (Really?)
November 23, 2014
I am not too keen on videos. I prefer reading hard copies. I did find the video referenced in “Elasticsearch Uses Power of Community for Open Source Analytics” useful. My team and I are putting the finishing touches on a report that points out how enterprise search vendors have been leapfrogged by vendors rarely considered by mid tier consultants and the self appointed experts in search. The video drives home a simple point: Combining open source technologies delivers information access functions that are more useful to users than laundry lists, odd ball point and click suggested content, and confusing mash ups of information presented without context.
Why the reference to Lucid? One of the firm’s presidents had been involved with Jaspersoft, an open source analytics outfit. Despite this “inside track”, Elasticsearch has powered past Lucid, leaving that open source vendor struggling to reach parity with Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch itself faces challenges, but that’s the name of the game when keyword search is the keystone of a service. For now, Elasticsearch leaves competitors rushing to close the gap. By the way, this subject was the focal point of one of Dave Schubmehl’s IDC reports that surfed on my name. The juicy part about the “gap” was edited from my original write up. Nevertheless, the facts remain valid. Kudos to Elasticsearch.
Stephen E Arnold, November 23, 2014
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
