A Bit of Search History
October 30, 2013
Will Oremus at Slate gives us a history lesson in, “Google’s Big Break.” Though back in 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin did indeed come up with the best approach to search the Internet had yet seen, their enterprise nearly collapsed for lack of one little detail: a way to monetize their service. Investors pressured the startup to embrace the day’s popular money-maker, banner ads. Oremus writes:
“They thought banner ads were ugly and distracting. Worse, banner ads took time to load, and Google’s founders possessed an almost religious devotion to efficiency and speed. In their seminal 1998 academic paper introducing the idea of Google, Page and Brin criticized advertising-funded search engines as ‘inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.'”
All true. Brin and Page found their alternative by peering at rival GoTo.com (later renamed Overture), whose founder had devised paid search to address the same problem. This approach reduced unsightly spam while more tightly targeting audiences for advertisers; it also switched from charging advertisers per page-view to charging per click-through. The solution was an improvement for both users and advertisers. No wonder Google could not resist incorporating the idea into its search engine, beginning in 2000 with the first version of AdWords. At the time, GoTo’s founder Bill Gross suggested a merger to the Googlers-in-chief, but they weren’t interested. Two years later, the refined version of AdWords took off, carrying Google to overwhelming success.
Charitably, Gross says Google did not “steal” his idea because he had not thought to patent it. Overture did file for certain peripheral patents, with which it was able to sue Google after the 2002 iteration of AdWords launched. (GoTo-turned-Overture was owned by Yahoo by then, which picked up a passel of Google stock for its litigative trouble.) Gross remains philosophical about the situation. The article concludes:
“Gross, for his part, seems comfortable, even happy, with how things turned out. . . . ‘I’m wildly proud of coming up with the paid-search model,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t know how big it was at the time.’ Besides, Gross says, if Google didn’t make billions with the pay-per-click auction model, it would have made its billions some other way. ‘I wish I had come up with the Google idea,’ he says. ‘The Google idea was the idea for organizing the world’s information. Mine was just an idea for making money.'”
“Just,” he says. It is refreshing to read about a business person who can take pride in his concept without bitterness at having had that concept profitably pilfered.
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Adding Search Results On Top of Search Results
October 30, 2013
Bing is viewed as the redheaded stepchild that hangs around, but no one wants to engage in a conversation with. Microsoft continues to roll out features to entice users to its search engine and this new one is a good idea in concept, but whether it improves search is still questionable. SearchEngineLand tells us that “Bing Gives IE11 Users A Quick Look At The Top Search Result With New ‘Pre-Rendering’ Feature.” The “pre-rendering” feature does this:
“Bing’s pre-rendering feature was designed to reduce the number of tasks needed to complete a “typical search” by using an IE11 pre-render tag that, ‘Automatically downloads and renders the top result page in the background’ without wasting a user’s bandwidth and battery life. Bing recommends website owners leverage the pre-render tag for their web pages, ‘To boost your own visitors’ experience with your site.”
Bing’s overall goal is to reduce the time users spend searching by saving them typing and clicking time. Improving the user-end experience is Bing’s ultimate goal and creating features like this is an attempt for them to compete with Google. The main reason that Bing can even compete with Google is because of the big name behind it. It also gives the impression that scanning a results list is too much work for users. Since when did reading become so difficult?
Whitney Grace, October 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
In Spite of Fears Over AdWords Search Revenue Continues to Rise
October 28, 2013
The article on Search Engine Watch titled Search Revenues Hit $8.7 Billion in First Half of 2013 shows that in spite concerns over Google’s AdWords adjustments, revenue from search ads continues to rise. The ascension, illustrated with bar and pie charts with data from the last ten years, is clear. The switch to Google’s enhanced campaigns has not caused the reduction that many feared was possible. The article explains,
“Mobile revenue increased by 24 percent from the first half of 2012 ($1.1 billion) compared to the first half of 2013 ($1.3 billion) showing that the mobile ad industry shows no signs of slowing down its growth.”Digital has steadily increased its ability to captivate consumers and then capture the marketing dollars that follow,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “Mobile advertising’s breakneck growth is evidence that marketers are recognizing the tremendous power of smaller screens. Digital video is also on a positive trajectory, delivering avid viewership and strong brand-building opportunities.””
While this is good news for Google and its advertisers, it may leave users in mid-shrug. Isn’t search meant to be about the user’s needs, and not about ad revenue? At this point it is unclear, especially with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s recent report that clearly demonstrates the health and robustness of the online advertising industry.
Chelsea Kerwin, October 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bright Planet Gets Coverage in Rolling Stone
October 25, 2013
Bright Planet once provided a federated search system, competing with outfits like Deep Web Technologies and the pre-IBM Vivisimo. I learned in “Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters” that Bright Planet has expanded into a search application niche. The write up surprised me. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
Another program, made by Bright Planet and called BlueJay, is billed in a brochure to law enforcement as a “Twitter crime scanner.” BlueJay allows cops to covertly monitor accounts and hashtags; three that Bright Planet touts in promotional material are #gunfire, #meth, and #protest. In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can “monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals,” as well as “track department mentions.” Bright Planet did not respond to a request for comment.
As search and content processing vendors seek to generate revenues, product extensions are understandable. My question, “How many other search and content processing firms are shifting from enterprise search to other niches?”
I am okay with these moves, but I have not seen a comprehensive listing of search and content vendors moving in this direction. Perhaps one of the azure chip consulting firms has this report available for a fee. Is there a no cost, publicly available listing of these companies. The Rolling Stone magazine has, it seems, done a better job of reporting on search than some of the poobahs, wizards, and former English teachers now covering the field. I thought Rolling Stone wrote about moving rocks. I am definitely out of touch.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2013
More to Search than Relevancy, Accuracy, Precision and Recall?
October 25, 2013
There is a good chance that we may hear someone cry heresy after reading the Moving Fulcrum post: “The Growing Irrelevance of Google Search.” The author presents his case as a focus group of one who happens to no longer utilize Google as his primary search engine any more. Instead, the author finds information using the following sources: Twitter, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia and Yelp.
The author admits that his searches are focused around himself as opposed to Web sites of information. Whether this has always been the case or not, there are certainly many media available now in order to address the needs of every individual using the Internet.
The post states:
Google excels at searching for the long tail of information. That was true a few years ago, when an individual’s opinion could only be expressed on either a blog post or a forum post, which Google could index/rank like nobody’s business.
But in a world with Twitter, and the silos of information that are now sites like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, Google Search is becoming more and more irrelevant.
While Google is all about relevance, accuracy, precision and recall, we have to ask the question “is that what people want?” For example, the recent New York Times article “It’s Not Just Political Districts. Our News Is Gerrymandered, too” suggests people might not want to search or see much more than their own reflection.
Megan Feil, October 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Personal Search Engine Enters the Scene
October 25, 2013
So you read an article and you know you will want to explore that topic further in the future. What do you do? Bookmark it. Moments later, you find yourself on a great new social analytics search engine. That gets bookmarked too – in addition to many other Web sites and articles that you might want to remember to revisit one day. When that day arrives, it can often be troublesome to locate the specific link you wanted to find amongst all the others you have bookmarked. This is why services like PSE (Personal Search Engine) are incredibly useful. We recently read a helpful write-up on PSE in particular: “PSE Is A Personal Search Engine, Makes Browser Bookmarks Useful Again.”
PSE does not require a download. It is a bookmarklet and it works in any browser except for Internet Explorer. It appears that mobile usage is a potential future update that the developers are exploring.
The article tells us:
“The service is great for articles, but it’s especially good for research or other snippets of information that you know you’ll need later not based on the page title or where you found it, but the actual content of the page you were reading. If you stumble on a site with a great recipe, for example, highlight the recipe and add it to your database. Then later you can search for ‘garlic’ and find it, instead of trying to remember that the recipe was on ‘easycheapweeknightdinners.com.’”
While this service definitely seems like a step in the right direction towards supplementing our invariably fallible memories, it may not be the be-all, end-all of search. What about a personal search engine that truly allows a user to search every folder, email, bookmark across multiple applications, devices and more?
Megan Feil, October 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Search Vendor Management: Frazzled and Scared
October 24, 2013
Generalizations are terrible. Generalization can be useful. I read “Why Being a Thinker Means Pocketing Your Smartphone.” The story appeared on the CNN Web site. I find this amusing, since CNN is associated in my mind with content delivery for those with some sort of dependence on TV filtered information. The key point in the write up struck me as:
“You can’t make headway without thinking about a problem for a long time, in collaboration with smart researchers from different fields, as well as reading a lot,” says epidemiologist Caroline Buckee, one of CNN’s 10 Thinkers for 2013. “But sometimes that hard work reaches fruition or comes together at a random time once you have let thoughts settle down.” We know this — as surely as that 20th-century magnate knew it — and yet we regularly ignore the advice. We surf the Web; we scan news on our phones; we keep our minds digitally occupied in a million ways. When we have a few minutes of down time now, we pull out our mobile devices instead of daydreaming.
The statement is only partially correct. Let me narrow the focus to behavior influenced by uncertainty about what actions to take and the insecurity generated by not having a product or service that people want to pay for.,
Think about your last interaction with a vendor of search, content processing, and analytics. How did the interaction flow? I have noticed since the summer vacations ended and management of search vendors focused on making money that two words characterize many behaviors of the senior management of search and content processing companies. The two words?
Frazzled and Scared
What do I mean?
Here are some recent example:
- Information promised on a specific date has not been provided six weeks later. The fact that the information was needed for a potential investor adds to the spice of the incident.
- A statement “We will meet at the X conference” became three weeks later, “We are traveling outside the United States”
- An assurance that customer support would provide an activation key to a search system generated four additional assurances. But no key arrived.
At a recent conference, I noticed:
- A vendor who beamed when a colleague and I approached the booth. The vendor launched into a series of questions about budget, decision time, and internal staffing capabilities. When I pointed out that I did analyses for my clients, the vendor turned off the charm and moved to another “fish”
- Four vendors in four consecutive presentations said, “We do real time content processing of all information.”
- One company president had beads of perspiration on his forehead as he talked on his mobile phone in a corner of the booth. He looked fearful.
So what?
Based on the information in our Overflight system, a number of search and content processing vendors are no longer updating their blogs with regular posts of a substantive nature. The flow of emails about free webinars and new products is on the rise. I received a half dozen on Wednesday, October 23, 2013. For example:
Might you have a few minutes for a call with Mike Schmitt, Senior Director of Product Management for Astute Networks, to discuss the paper and its findings? It is interesting how even today, smart IT executives are still thinking about storage cost only in terms of the device, vs. the extended consequence it has across performance and productivity, as well as business flexibility and agility.
The “paper” is one of those azure chip, toot toot things. Sigh.
I also am inundated with messages about the “crisis” in search, the lack of traffic to search vendors’ Web sites, and the death of “leads”.
Perhaps the search and content processing companies should step back, take a deep breath, and consider the impact of wild and crazy statements, odd duck behavior at trade shows, and a panhandler’s approach to revenue generation.
Delphes: A Linguistic System That Went Away
October 22, 2013
I have posted a profile of the now offline enterprise search vendor Delphes. You can access the write up at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
Delphes is an illustration of what happens when academic research becomes a commercial search system. From the notion of “soul” to the mind boggling complexity of a Swiss Army knife system, Delphes draws together the threads of the late 1980s and early 1990s best ideas in search. The problem was that selling, supporting, and making the many functions work on time and budget were difficult.
How many other vendors have followed in the trail blazed by Delphes? Quite a few. Some have largely been forgotten like DR Link. Others are still with us, but subsumed into even more complex, over arching systems like Hewlett Packard’s blend of print management and Autonomy.
Reviewing a draft of my analyses of Delphes, several points struck me:
First, Delphes was one of the first search system to combine the almost mystical with the nuts and bolts of finding information in an organization.
Second, Delphes included a number of languages, but it was French language centric. Many search systems are English centric. So the approach of Delphes makes some of the linguistic issues clear.
Third, Delphes’ explanation and diagrams are quite fresh. I have seen similar diagrams in the marketing hoo-hah of many 2013 vendors.
Keep in mind that these profiles will not be updated or maintained. I am providing the information because some students may find the explanations, diagrams, and comments of interest. The information is provided on an “as is” basis. If you want to use this for commercial purposes, please, contact me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Remember. I am almost 70 years old and some of the final versions of these profiles commanded hefty fees. IDC, for example, charges $3,500 for some of the profiles I have created. Are my views worth this lofty price? In my view, that is an irrelevant question since some vendors in Massachusetts just sell the stuff, keep all the money, and leave the addled goose floating in the pond.
A reader reminded me that some big outfits have taken my work and reused it, sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Well, these are for your personal use. As for the big firms, those managers are just so darned skilled any action they take is admirable. Don’t you agree?
Enjoy the tale of Delphes.
Stephen E Arnold, October 22, 2013
Take the Coke and Pepsi Wars and Insert Search
October 20, 2013
Basic economics tells us that brand rivalry prevents a complete monopoly on a free-based market. The quintessential examples are Pepsi and Coke, but let us make the metaphor more modern with a comparison between Bing and Google. EWeek takes a look at Bing’s new claim that its search is more popular than Google in “Is The Bing It On Challenge A Little Off?” The “Bing It On Challenge” supposedly compared Google and Bing search result side-by-side and stripped of their branding. It showed that users preferred Bing 2:1. Yale professor Ian Ayres found these results questionable, because he found the results to be mostly identical.
When Microsoft was asked to share their data sets, they refused to release their results. Ayres got even more peeved when he found out how they collected their information and decided to run his own test:
“Admitting to being “slightly annoyed” in discovering that the claim was based on a study of a mere 1,000 participants, he said that he enlisted Yale law students to run an experiment using a similar sample size and the BingItOn.com Website. We found that, to the contrary of Microsoft’s claim, 53 percent of subjects preferred Google and 41 percent Bing (6 percent of results were ‘ties’),” reported Ayres. Secondary tests, which involved randomly assigned participants and a mix of popular, Bing-suggested and self-suggested search terms, failed to come close to Bing’s 2:1 advantage.”
Then the claim comes in that the results were not shared because they are not tracked and that results in the challenge were slanted in Bing’s favor. Microsoft burned itself on those two. Basic scientific method research would toss this test in the kindling pile immediately. No results or favoritism at all? One fact about marketing is that advertisements cannot make claims without proof. Oh boy! We are back on the Coke and Pepsi blind-fold taste test. Which search results belong to which search engine?
Whitney Grace, October 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Super Search Cooks Dinner and Other Practical Skulls
October 19, 2013
The next time you go to a restaurant and ask to speak with the chef to give him your complements, you just might requesting to speak with IBM’s Watson. According to the MIT Technology Review in, “New Answer From IBM’s Watson: Recipe For Swiss-Thai Fusion Quiche” Watson can now cook. Marked as one of the “light” functions that Watson can perform, inventing recipes is one of the new ways devised to help people on the search and answer discovery.
IBM may have invented the next, best toy robot, but after winning Jeopardy they wanted to put Watson’s AI to more practical uses. While Watson has also been testing its skills in medical applications, the AI has trouble deciphering individual writing styles.
The best way to fix this problem is:
“Watson and other analytic technologies will get better if such records are formatted in clearer ways–with distinct fields for patient symptoms, actions taken, and outcomes, he said. With this in mind, IBM has been trying to customize business software to be Watson-ready (see “Watson’s New Job: IBM Salesman”). A larger point was articulated by Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. The future, he said, lies in building systems that can best leverage the capabilities of humans and computers. A growing body of research is finding that answers gleaned from a combination of humans and computers are more accurate than those generated by either group alone, he said.”
Right now, the best way to make Watson learn is to ask him questions based on a series of search parameters such as the recipes. The results may be strange, such as the papaya-cayenne-orange custard it developed, but oddly delectable.
Whitney Grace, October 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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