Google and Yandex: Who Will Win?
April 29, 2013
Business Week tackled the subject of why Google is not the number one search system in Russia. Good topic, but I wonder if part of the answer rests with why Googlers’ efforts to ride a Russian space ship crashed and burned. Perhaps there is more to the Russian market that clicks from those friendly Muscovites and happy folks in Yakutsk?
The write up “Why Google Isn’t Winning in Russia” asserts:
With all of its success on the Web and the rise of Android to the top of the smartphone world, it’s easy to forget that the company faces huge cultural hurdles – and entrenched competitors – in making its search engine truly a world-beater.
So culture? I thought Google had one or two folks familiar with Russia working in the firm’s offices in the US and Europe.
The point of the write up was to underscore the success of Yandex. Business Week says:
Yandex, which is Russia’s most-used search engine, has an analyst score of 4.6, with a 5 indicating a buy and 1 a sell, while Google scores a 4.3, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yandex’s dominance of the Russian search market – with 62 percent market share compared to Google’s 26 percent – gives it an overwhelming advantage in attracting advertisers and generating profits.
My thought is that Yandex may have some advantages which Google lacks. I could be wrong, but success in some countries may have some connection with politics. Just a thought.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Amazon and Margins
April 26, 2013
Amazon is making some big bets. The company is chasing Apple, Google, PayPal, and probably some other juicy giants. I read “Margin Call 2.” The article includes a nifty chart which focuses attention on Amazon’s margins. Revenue growth is super. Profits are super. So what does a finance type complain about? Margins. The key point is that tucked into the charts about Apple, Google, and Microsoft is the thought that Amazon may have to do some pencil sharpening when its comes to its margins. Cost control may be tough when trying to move into territory occupied by some fierce competitors. Will there be sufficient money for Amazon to address its what seem to be minor and “trivial” search challenges? Search can be an expensive item and cash hungry when pursued aggressively.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Taking on the Google Giant
April 26, 2013
It has been discussed before and will continue to be discussed, because humans are always curious about finding alternate and new ways to accomplish the task. The question is, “Can A Small Search Engine Take On Google?” and it was proposed by On the Media. The link will lead you to a recording about:
“Duck Duck Go is a small search engine based in Pennsylvania that is, according to Google at least, a Google competitor. OTM producer Chris Neary talks with Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg, SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan, and a dedicated Duck Duck Go user about the site. Also, each of the OTM producers try Duck Duck Go, and only Duck Duck Go, for a week.”
Google challenged its unhappy users to use an alternative search engine if they were unhappy with its practices. Duck Duck Go has been acknowledged as a Google rival. Weinberg says his search engine does not collect personal data from its users and it does not have Google Web sites in its results. Others are saying that Duck Duck Go is only acknowledged, because the search engine market is so small. Changing search engines is a major upheaval in a user’s life and the On The Media staff found using Duck Duck Go for a week difficult. Some of the people enjoyed it, because they were interested in privacy and wanted to find an alternative search solution.
Duck Duck Go may not find everything you need in a minute, but its fans are dedicated. It has awhile to go, but count on it hanging on for time to come. The competition is hefty: Google fields 2 billion + queries a day?
Whitney Grace, April 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
LucidWorks Receives High Honor
April 24, 2013
LucidWorks, a company focused on providing open source enterprise search solutions for the enterprise, is used to receiving accolades. To add to their growing collection, LucidWorks has now received a placement on the CRN 2013 Big Data 100 list. Read all the details in the press release, “LucidWorks Named to Inaugural CRN Big Data 100.”
The statement begins:
“LucidWorks, the company transforming the way people access information, announced it was recently honored by being named to UBM Tech Channel’s CRN 2013 Big Data 100 list. The inaugural list recognizes innovative technology vendors that offer products and services to help businesses manage ‘Big Data’ – the rapidly increasing volume, speed and variety of information being generated today. The list covers three categories: business analytics, data management, infrastructure and services.”
LucidWorks Big Data is changing the way that enterprises deal with their Big Data needs. However, LucidWorks Search is also an option for organizations that have a lighter data load. No matter the size of your enterprise or the type of information needs present, LucidWorks makes a fully-supported solution to meet those needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Swinging for the Fences and Search
April 22, 2013
I have been reading—actually time traveling to an economics class in graduate school—David Stockman’s The Great Deformation. I follow the argument. No problem, but I am skeptical of blame from those who were involved in the events. I have been in quite a few crazy meetings, and I avoid discussing the subjects of most of those stories for two reasons: [a] In the midst of events, I had zero clue about the larger, political forces at work in which the meeting was a grain of sand in the larger dust storm and [b] I focus on search and retrieval, a subject definitely not part of the more interesting meetings in which I have participated over the last 40 years.
What impact does the “big bet” approach to investing have on search, content, and analytics vendors?
However, the “deformation” arguments triggered some thinking after I read “Google Investors Say Yes to Big Bets.” I have been looking at some of the reviews of the book. In the Kirkus Review a theme surfaced:
fiscal math hit the shoals,” leaving a legacy of permanent “massive deficit finance” and the legend that “deficits didn’t matter.”
What’s this have to do with search? Well, that is a good question. I took a moment and looked up the venture money which has flowed into a handful of search and content processing companies. Here’s the table in which I captured my result. The link points to the source (maybe a good source, maybe a lousy source).
| Company | Venture Funding | Year Founded |
| Attivio | $48.2 million | 2007 |
| BA Insight | $10.5 million | 2004 |
| Coveo | $34.7 million | 2004 |
| Digital Reasoning* | $5.2 million | 2000 |
| Palantir ** | $301 million | 2004 |
| Vivisimo | $4 million | 2008 |
* The Digital Reasoning number includes In-Q-Tel funding excludes friends, angels, and family funding
** I included Palantir because in one briefing the system was presented as having a robust search function available to analyst users.
If I total these numbers, I get $403.6 million. Tossing out the astounding $301 million for Palantir, the more “searchy” vendors’ funding in this sample total $102.6 million.
Several questions rose in my mind:
First, in today’s economy, how will these firms return to investors their money, interest, and a profit?
Lexmark Allegedly Paid $148 Million for Brainware
April 21, 2013
A happy quack to the researcher who sent me a link to “Lexmark Pays $148 Million for Brainware Data Capture Platform.” The write up published in March 2012 asserts:
Lexmark International, Inc. (NYSE: LXK) today announced the acquisition of Luxembourg-based BDGB Enterprise, including its U.S. subsidiary Brainware, Inc., a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, for a cash purchase price of approximately $148 million.
I tracked Brainware because of its trigram technology which was used in the Brainware search system. What’s interesting is the positioning of Brainware in this write up. Here’s the portion I noticed:
“With the acquisition of Brainware, Lexmark is further strengthening and differentiating our industry-leading managed print services offerings and our end-to-end business process solutions,” said Paul Rooke, Lexmark’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Brainware’s innovative intelligent data capture technology will be attractive to our customers across the globe.” Brainware’s intelligent data capture platform, Brainware Distiller™, accurately extracts critical information from paper and electronic documents, validates the extracted data and passes it to customers’ data management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and/or financial management systems. Brainware Distiller™ enables customers to more efficiently process invoices, fulfill customer orders, balance remittances, index documents, process loan applications, and perform other document-intensive processes. This high growth market is closely adjacent to both Lexmark’s customer solutions and Perceptive Software’s expanding enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) businesses.
Search? Is it just a utility within the larger paper workflow service.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Samuru from Stremor
April 20, 2013
We learned about Samuru, a new Web search systems. You can use the system by navigating to www.samuru.com.
The search system is powered by Liquid Helium, a language heuristics engine for the future of content. The company which developed Samuru is Stremor, whose tag line is “comprehending language.” The company asserts that it offers a “foundation layer that interprets language to evaluate content context, value, authority, sentiment, meaning, and relationships. Instead of text search, the system “enables the future of online media.”
According to the Stremor Web site, Liquid Helium is Stremor’s:
language heuristics engine. The first language analysis engine of its kind. It converts written content into mathematical values and algorithms for predictable analysis, extraction, and manipulation. Liquid Helium factors information about sentence and paragraph structure, word usage, parts of speech, grammar, writing style, punctuation, and inherent bias through a vast collection of proprietary rules, filters, and custom language libraries. As overwhelming as this may sound, Stremor has injected this technology into simple, approachable consumer offerings that demonstrate the ability of Liquid Helium to close the gap between information and knowledge in three verticals: content discovery, creation, and consumption.
The company offers a product sheet which provides more information. The product sheet reveals that Stremor “was created to provide technology solutions that enable content platforms to effectively support the evolution of online media towards an array of connected devices and systems.”
The product sheet says:
An intelligent content-aware foundation is necessary for the needs of multiple screens in varying contexts and use-cases. To this end, we raised capital at an $8M valuation in March 2012.
- The management consists of: Bill Irvine, CEO, “a successful entrepreneur in the fields of digital marketing emerging media, and online community”
- Stephen Melzer, CFO, “a finance professional with deep startup and fundraising experience
- Brandon Wirtz, CTO, “a pioneer in video analysis, search engine exploitation, and content development”
- Greg Rewis, VP of User Experience, who is “a Web standards guru, published author, veteran creator of Web technologies, and former chief evangelist for Adobe.”
We will run queries and monitor the firm.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Video Search: Will It Get Better Post Viacom?
April 19, 2013
I know there’s a push to make sense out of Twitter. I know that millions of people post updates to Facebook. I know about text. Searching for text is pretty lousy, but it is trivial compared to video search. Even the remarkable micro-electronics of Glass are child’s play compared to making sense out of digital video flooding the “inner tubes” of the Internet.
This issue is addressed in part in “Why Video Discovery Startups Fail.” Startup video search and discovery systems do face challenges. The broader question is, “Why doesn’t video search work better on well funded services such as Google YouTube or in governmental systems where “finding” a video needle in a digital hay stack is very important?”
The article says:
Video discovery startups are flawed products and even worse businesses. Why? Because they don’t fit into a consumer’s mental model.
The article identifies some challenges. These range from notions I don’t understand like “context” to concepts I partially grasp; namely, monetization.
My list of reasons video search and discovery fails includes:
- The cost of processing large volumes of data
- The lack of software which minimizes false drops
- The time required for humans to review what automated systems do
- The need for humans to cope with problematic videos due to resolution issues
- The financial costs of collection, pre processing, processing, and managing the video flows.
What happens is that eager folks and high rollers believe the hype. Video search and indexing is a problem. If we can’t do text, video remains a problem for the future. Viacom decision or no Viacom decision video search is a reminder that finding information in digitized video is a tough problem which becomes more problematic as the volume of digitized video increases.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Google Outperforms Bing and Others in Blocking Malware
April 19, 2013
Oh, my. PCMag declares, “Bing Delivers Five Times as Many Malicious Websites as Google.” The charges stem from an 18-month study [PDF] by security firm AV-Test. Google emerged as the safest Internet search option, with Yandex and Bing the worst offenders (in that order), in a field that also included Blekko, Faroo, Teoma, and Baidu.
Though all of these engines take measures to keep malware-infested sites out of their top rankings, the villains make headway using methods perfected by others. Writer Max Eddy explains:
“To move their malware-ridden spawn to the top of Google’s search results, the bad guys are using tried and true search engine optimization tactics—the very same used by corporations and bloggers. According to AV-Test, the attackers use a very simple trick, ‘they first create a multitude of small websites and blogs before selecting the most frequently used search terms from top news stories and using backlinks to optimise these terms for search engines.’
“The study went on to say that users ‘are the least suspicious’ when they see a search result attached to a hot news story. More troublingly, AV-Test reports that sites with Trojans or other malware are returned as ‘top’ results.”
If these results are accurate, we wonder whether a shift to a “walled garden” approach to the Internet might be a solution. The article does note that, whichever search engine you use, your chances of suffering a malware attack through it are slim. Still, it is wise to be careful what you click on, even in top results from trusted search engines. Eddy also recommends a measure many of us wouldn’t leave our routers without—security software. Even the anti-malware measures in the latest browsers, he says, can help.
Cynthia Murrell, April 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comperio 2013 SharePoint Seminar to Charge Extra for No Shows
April 17, 2013
Held in Oslo, Norway, this year’s Enterprise Social and Search with SharePoint seminar promises its usual diverse audience and tech-based discussions. It will take place on May 14, 2013 from 9:00-11:30. Although official events begin at 9:00, show up early for breakfast and networking at 8:30.
The seminar is free, unless, of course you do not show up without providing advanced notice.
According to the seminars registration page, the audience will include the following:
“CIOs, IT Directors, Collaboration Leads, SharePoint Leads, Social Networking Leads, Enterprise Search Leads, Big Data Leads, Business Intelligence Leads, Communication Directors, HR Directors.”
Technology discussed includes SharePoint 2010 and 2013, FAST Search for SharePoint, Comperio FRONT, Hadoop, HD Insight, and Yammer.
Not a bad line up for a free seminar in Oslo. However, those who register but do not attend (and do not provide notice) will be charged a fee of kr. 200, or about $30 US dollars. Considering the expenses Comperio will shell out for each attendee, this no-show charge is an interesting approach to guaranteeing attendance and accounting for wasted expenses.
Samantha Plappert, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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