The Search and Retrieval News Feed
March 24, 2013
Dear, dear Twitter was not able to reclaim my newsfeed. The lads and lasses did try. I think that in grade school that would earn a high mark. In the real world, well, no comment. But everyone was really, really nice. We have many, many assurances that action was underway. We really, really think this makes clear the risks of using a free service. Super experience. I assume a couple thousand people know more about pop stars than they ever thought possible.
If you want to sign up for the feed of headlines for ArnoldIT’s Beyond Search Blog, the new handle is BeyondSearchNow. The RSS link has been updated. Wow, I love Twitter. Wow, I never knew how fascinating a pop star’s secret life could be.
Anyway, the dull, old Beyond Search news stream is at BeyondSearchNow. Here you go: http://twitter.com/beyondsearchnow
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2013
Search Technology at Funnelback Morphs Into Compliance Auditor
March 24, 2013
According to the new post on Funnelback’s Web page, the search engine technology and services system is morphing into a compliance auditor. The article, “Funnelback WCAG Compliance Auditor Version 2 Is Out Now,” shares that the newest release of the auditor technology includes the ability to configure checking runs, on-demand checking of HTML, and comprehensive reporting abilities.
The article comments on the additional features:
“Matthew Sheppard, Manager of Research and Development at Funnelback said, ‘Customers have been making amazing progress on their website accessibility with version 1.5, but we wanted version 2 of the tool to make the process easier than ever. WCAG Compliance Auditor version 2 is flexible, highly configurable and accommodates the last minute changes that web content editors often face whilst maintaining their website’s content accessibility at the same time.’”
I think the new capabilities are intriguing, but there is no information available on the Web page on which countries the auditor works for. However, the global company has a demo available at http://www.funnelback.com/our-products/demo. Definitely worth a look.
One question: “How can a single consulting firm know so much about so many search and retrieval systems?” Hyperbole, exceptional intelligence, or marketing?
Andrea Hayden, March 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Are There Lessons for Enterprise Search in the Pew Publishing Study 2013?
March 19, 2013
If you have not looked at the Pew report, you will want to check out the basic information in “The State of the News Media 2013.” The principal surprise in the report is that the situation seems to be less positive than I assumed.
Here’s the snippet which I tucked in my notebook:
Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978. In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%. Time magazine, the only major print news weekly left standing, cut roughly 5% of its staff in early 2013 as a part of broader company layoffs. And in African-American news media, the Chicago Defender has winnowed its editorial staff to just four while The Afro cut back the number of pages in its papers from 28-32 in 2008 to 16-20 in 2012. A growing list of media outlets, such as Forbes magazine, use technology by a company called Narrative Science to produce content by way of algorithm, no human reporting necessary. And some of the newer nonprofit entrants into the industry, such as the Chicago News Cooperative, have, after launching with much fanfare, shut their doors.
Professional publishing companies like Ebsco, Elsevier, ProQuest, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer are going to affected too. If the content streams on which these companies “go away,” the firms will have to demonstrate that they too can act in an agile manner. Since the database centric crowd has crowed about its technical acumen for years, I think the agility trick might be a tough one to pull off.
But what about specialist software vendors of search, content processing, and indexing? Are there lessons in the Pew report which provide some hints about the search of these information centric businesses?
My view is that there are three signals in the Pew data which seem to be germane to search and related service vendors.
First, the drop off which the Pew report documents has been quicker than I and probably some of the senior publishing executives expected. These folks were cruising along with belt tightening and minor adjustments. Now the collision between revenue and expenses are coming together quickly. How will these companies react as the time for figuring out a course correction slips away? My view is that there will be some wild and crazy decisions coming down the runway and soon. Search and content processing sector vendors are facing a similar situation. A run though my Overflight service reveals quite a few vendors who have gone quiet or simply turned out the lights.
Second, the lack of information is not unique to publishing. Organizations have quite a lot of data. The problem is that making use of the data in a way that enhances revenue seems to be difficult. There are quite a few companies pitching fancy analytics, but the vendors are facing long buying cycles and price pressure. Sure there are billions of bits but there is neither the money, expertise, or time to cope with the winnowing and selecting work. In short, there are some big hopes but little evidence that the marketing hyperbole translates into revenue and profits.
Third, traditional publishing is on the outside looking in when it comes to new business models. Google and a handful of other companies seem to be in a commanding position for online advertising. Enterprise search and content processing vendors have not been able to find a business model beyond license fees and consulting. Just like the traditional publishing sector, the statement “We can’t do that” seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy. In search, I think there will be some business model innovation and it will take place at the expense of the vendors who are sticking to the “tried and true” approach to revenue generation.
My take is that the decline of traditional publishing may be a glimpse of the future for search and content processing vendors.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2013
Big Data Search Made Better with LucidWorks
March 19, 2013
LucidWorks has caught the attention of Mark Smith at Ventana Research. He takes a deeper looks at the LucidWorks search and Big Data offerings in his open letter, “Big Data Search is Getting Better with LucidWorks.”
Smith sums up the LucidWorks’ offerings:
“LucidWorks has two product offerings in the search market. LucidWorks Search provides the ability to rapidly set up search and index content using Apache Solr. The company not only provides full commercial-grade support and services and a security framework, but has also improved on Solr’s usability for developers and business users. Solr, built on top of Lucene, is an enterprise platform that provides full-text search, dynamic clustering, geospatial search and other enterprise-class capabilities . . . LucidWorks is definitely a vendor to examine if you are looking to bring enterprise-class search to your organization and big data deployments.”
It is no surprise that LucidWorks is catching the eye of a global research organization. Enterprise search, and Big Data specifically, is on the lips of all developers these days. It is good to know that research is available to steer buyers in the right direction. LucidWorks seems to be well-supported, and a great value.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook Not Planning On Launching External Search
March 19, 2013
Despite numerous rumors and requests pleading for the contrary, it appears Facebook will not be pursuing external search. The intentions are laid out in the article on Search Engine Land titled “Facebook: No Plans For An External Search Engine.”
The article reveals comments from Grady Burnett, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions for Facebook, who stated that the social media giant has no plans or intentions to launch an external search engine, such as that run by Google or Bing.
The article includes an excerpt from the live blog coverage of the SMX West keynote address from Burnett:
“DS: Do you ever see Facebook wanting a dedicated search product outside of Facebook? Mentions the past rumors that Facebook might buy Bing from MSFT.
GB: I don’t see that happening. We called it ‘Graph Search’ because we’re focused on letting people search the Facebook graph. So my answer would be no.”
The James Bond Film “Never Say Never” comes to mind when we hear these kinds of statements. We think that given some time, this is not the last we will hear from Facebook on this topic. As the company explores the possibilities of graph search, the improved search capabilities discovered in the process could just be the nudge that is needed to jump into external search.
Andrea Hayden, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
SLI Steps up to Fill Google Commerce Gap
March 19, 2013
Google Commerce has opened a wide gap in the online market since it pulled up its stakes and left town. While this has some worried, we think it’s going to make for an interesting frontier. In fact, it is already getting that way as we discovered from a recent Virtual Strategy story, “SLI Systems Offers and Easy Migration Path for Retailers Using Google Commerce Search to SLI’s Full Service Learning Center.”
According to the story:
“SLI Systems (www.sli-systems.com) today announced that it is offering special terms for its full-service site search solution for retail and eCommerce sites currently using Google Commerce Search, which Google recently announced will be discontinued. To help companies continue to offer uninterrupted site search capabilities, SLI is giving them a fast, simple way to implement its industry-leading Learning Search solution, a highly robust and customizable site search that is shown to increase conversions and improve the online experience on retail sites like Jelly Belly, ULTA, Vermont Teddy Bear, and hundreds more.”
Let the games begin. In the aftermath of Google Commerce’s disappearance, we have read a few stories like this. The marketplace is wide open for companies like SLI and EasyTask who have begun making attempts to shepherd in wayward users of Google’s. We think the winner will be the company with the best customer service. Who that will be is anyone’s guess right now.
Patrick Roland , March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Navigation Misses the Point of Search and Retrieval
March 18, 2013
How does one become a sheeple? One answer is, “Accept search outputs without critical thinking.”
I don’t want to get into a squabble with the thinkers at Nielsen Norman Group. I suggest you read “Converting Search into Navigation” and then reflect on the fact that this was the basic premise of Endeca and then almost every other search vendor on the planet since the late 1990s. The idea is that users prefer to click than type queries or, better yet, have the system just tell the user what he or she wants without having to do so much as make a click.
Humans want information and most humans don’t want to expend much, if any, effort getting “answers.” In the late 1970s, I worked on a Booz, Allen & Hamilton study which revealed that managers in that pre-Internet Dark Age got information by asking the first person encountered in the hall, a person whom an executive could get on the phone, or by flipping through the old school trade magazines which once flowed into in boxes.
A happy quack to http://red-pill.org/are-you-one-of-the-sheeple-take-the-quiz/
What’s different today? According to the write up, as I understand it, not too much. The article asserts:
Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. A few years ago, I characterized users’ research skills as “incompetent,” and they’ve only gotten worse over time. “Pathetic” and “useless” are words that come to mind after this year’s user testing.
There you go. When top quality minds like those Booz, Allen & Hamilton tried to hire took the path of least resistance almost 50 years ago, is it a big surprise that people are clueless when it comes to finding information?
The point of the article is that people who make interfaces have to design for mediocre searchers. Mediocre? How about terrible, clueless, inept, or naive? The article says:
… you should redirect users from a normal SERP to a category page only when their query is unambiguous and exactly matches the category. A search for “3D TV” could go to the subcategory page for these products, but a search for “3D” should generate a regular SERP. (Costco does this correctly, including both 3D televisions and other products relevant to the query.) Until people begin to grasp the complexities of search and develop skills accordingly, businesses that take such extra steps to help users find what they need will improve customer success — and the bottom line.
My view is just a little bit different and not parental like the preceding paragraph.
New Updates to Solr and Lucene
March 18, 2013
Apache Solr and Lucene are notable for good maintenance and frequent updates. These updates are one of the many reasons why Solr and Lucene are considered top choices in open source software. Another upgrade has just been announced in the default codec update 4.2. Read all the details in the article, “Apache Solr and Lucene 4.2 Update Default Codec Again.”
The article sums up some of the improvements:
“The Solr search platform now has a REST API which allows developers to read the schema; support for writing the schema is coming. DocValues are now integrated with Solr and as they allow faster loading and can use different compression algorithms, the integration offers a wide range of feature possibilities and performance benefits. Collections now support aliasing allowing for reindexing and swapping while in production, and the Collections API has now been improved to make it easier to ‘see how things turned out.’ It is also now possible to interact with a collection in a node even if it doesn’t have a replica on that node.”
The full details of the changes can be read in the Lucene 4.2 and Solr 4.2 release notes. When foundational software is improved, the value-added software attached to it gets an automatic upgrade as well. This is the case with LucidWorks and their suite of search offerings built upon the open source strength of Lucene and Solr. Interestingly, LucidWorks has been criticized for not having a RESTful API, but with the newest upgrade to Solr, the claim is no longer valid. LucidWorks will no doubt remain on top.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Google Commerce Creates Opportunities for Others
March 18, 2013
Google Commerce seems to have gone the way of so many other seemingly good ideas from the search giant: it was sent out to the pasture. However, this leaves an interesting wake as we discovered in a recent Virtual Strategy story, “EasyAsk Announces Google Commerce Replacement Program.”
The article shares:
“The search industry is undergoing an enormous change as the largest companies in the world evolve from simple Keyword Search to a more advanced, semantic Natural Language search model. IBM Watson, Apple Siri, and even Google Internet search are now deploying smarter search algorithms that don’t rely on Keyword Search. Since 2001, EasyAsk has lead the industry in providing the fastest, most accurate search results for online shoppers using Natural Language search that understands the context of the search query.”
Despite some initial fears, this is an exciting time for search. With Google’s flawed Commerce program out of the way, we suspect there will be a rise in others who will pick up the slack. Interestingly, EasyAsk has the early lead in this race and one we suspect they will hold on to. Ever since the company rolled out it’s Quiri (a Siri-like verbal component), we’ve had a feeling this was a hot company on the rise. Now, with Google Commerce gone, we know it’s a fact.
Patrick Roland, March 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Mark Bennett on Open Source Search
March 15, 2013
Mark Bennett is a recent edition to the LucidWorks team, after New Idea Engineering joined LucidWorks. Steven Arnold recently interviewed Bennett for his noteworthy series, Search Wizard Speak. “An Interview with Mark Bennett,” can be found on the ArnoldIT Web site.
After discussing many of the latest trends in search, Arnold and Bennett turn to the question of proprietary search solutions, and how they are responding to the surge in open source.
Bennett weighs in:
“Some organizations will use open source because its efficiencies are recognized by management. Other organizations will embrace open source because a vendor offers 24×7 support like LucidWorks and has world class engineers available to customize the system. The feature-set is different as well, enterprise buyers care about analytics and data quality, and would prefer a graphical UI. Other organizations will stick with what has been traditionally licensed year after year indifferent to the fact that what’s in an IBM solution may be open source or totally proprietary like Oracle Endeca or Oracle InQuira.”
Bennett is a great addition to the LucidWorks team, which has expanded again recently with the addition of Stephen Tsuchiyama as SVP. LucidWorks is increasing their staff to meet the growing demands of open source software for the enterprise. But LucidWorks is not just responding to a trend, they have been a leader in search and customer service for years, so they are also benefiting from their stellar reputation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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