Twittering High Praise For Funnelback
March 3, 2013
We have discussed Funnelback, the Australian enterprise and Web search software, before and noted it as a company making great strides in search. It looks like we are not the only ones noticing Funnelback’s quality products, because Ramsay Healthcare recently implemented it. If you visit @funnelback you will find this tweet:
“Check out @ramsayhealth new #search #engine. Type in “knees” in the search box to see #funnelback‘s awesome search. http://bit.ly/prNn0c “
Ramsay Health Care is a well known medical system in the UK and Australia. They added Funnelback to power its Web site search. Simply visiting the Web site and typing in ”knees” rich search results. Not only are you given search suggestions, but you are also offered Web pages and articles. Think of it as a Google search before it went paid link crazy or the less Wikipedia filled DuckDuckGo.
With the advent of EMRs, healthcare professionals are trying to make all types of information readily available for their clients. A Web site that acts a resource tool as well as an organization information source doubles its usefulness. Search becomes all the more important, because in order to be useful one needs to find information. Other Web sites in any field could benefit from a powerful search tool.
Whitney Grace, March 03, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Dissing Facebook Search: The Cold Water Approach
March 1, 2013
I read “Facebook Gives Examples to Jumpstart Usage of Graph Search, Which It May Have Spent Too Long Building.” The main point is that Facebook fiddled and Rome burned. Now, Rome has to be rebuilt on property another empire owns.
Poor Facebook. The company muffed its IPO. Then Facebook cratered with Timeline. Now all those Xooglers have crafted a search which has to be “jumpstarted” like my first automobile, a 1955 Oldsmobile with no passenger side door.
Here’s the part of the analysis I found interesting:
Are any of those things you’d search for regularly, if ever? Maybe you’d take the occasional sweep through nostalgic content, look at recommendations for a vacation, or go hunting for new distractions. However, there’s little chance you’ll spend nearly as much time Graph Searching as browsing the daily refresh of status updates and photos from your close friends. That’s a little worrisome, especially since it follows a trend. In September 2011, Facebook’s big launch was Timeline. Beautiful, sure. But how often do you dive years back into your profile, or those of friends? Facebook poured tons of resources into the ability to call up historic content. For what? When I visit most people’s profiles, I look at their recent photos, last few posts, and About section. All of these were handled just fine by the old version of the profile. Adding cover images may have been sufficient.
Yep, worrisome for a free service in beta too. And who is pronouncing Facebook search a dead Oldsmobile?
My thoughts:
- Facebook cannot emulate Google’s brute force search. Google is eating some hefty costs, and Facebook wants to avoid a 1996 style financial black hole.
- Facebook knows ads and search are hooked. The Xooglers have explained why head to head ad fights with Google is not such a good idea. Therefore, the Facebook folks are looking for an angle. Notice I did not say, “Found.”
- Facebook has a thinner tightrope to walk than Google. Facebook can do many things with its content and metadata. Figuring out what combination will yield the most money and the fewest hassles will take time.
Skip the criticism. Track the deltas. Facebook may fail. So what? The journey is a free education for those not innovating.
Stephen E Arnold, February 28, 2013
Facebook Graph Search Has Enterprise Implications
February 28, 2013
Facebook Graph Search has been making headlines. However, most of these headlines are in response to the fact that this has been too long in coming. Facebook finally has search. Now that the shock is over, experts are turning to analysis of how the search function works and how it may benefit individuals and organizations. Jamie Yap does just that in her ZDNet article, “Graph Search Capabilities Offer Enterprise Benefits.”
After an introduction to the search service and how it works, the author continues:
“Commenting on the new feature, Jake Wengroff, social technologies analyst at Gleanster, an analyst firm, said Facebook is essentially injecting natural language processing functionality to its search algorithm so results can be delivered more intuitively and naturally. The underlying concept of graph search has potential in the enterprise setting. This functionality has a strong opportunity in the enterprise space and will ‘galvanize’ the social software industry to develop similar search capabilities for various purposes, Wengroff added.”
Some are even predicting that Graph Search could fill in the gaps left by customer relationship management solutions. Marketing is another definite application for this type of search solution. For those who are in the market for a more traditional enterprise search application, LucidWorks cannot be beat. Perfect for making sense of Big Data or making sense of internal documents, LucidWorks stands on its trusted name and the Lucene/Solr open source community.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Yandex Outpaces Microsoft in Search Traffic
February 27, 2013
We knew Yandex was one to keep an eye on. Now, Search Engine Watch announces, “Yandex Just Passed Bing to Become 4thLargest Global Search Engine.” According to comScore‘s recent qSearch report analyzing traffic from last November and December, Yandex processed 4.844 billion queries to Microsoft’s 4.477 billion. This despite the fact that the report lumps together traffic from Bing with that of other Microsoft properties like MSN and Windows Live. (Google, of course, is still way, way, way ahead with 114.73 billion search queries.)
Writer Michael Bonfils notes that we cannot be sure what drives this Yandex lead. He observes, though, that the pool of Russian users is still growing and evolving, while the Western markets where Microsoft processes the most traffic seem to be approaching saturation. The article concludes:
“You can speculate all day about what’s happening here. Do Russians just search more? Are Russians searching more because they don’t like the results? Are they gaining market share in countries like Turkey or the Ukraine? Who wins with unique users?
“Regardless of all that, I wasn’t expecting to see Yandex, which doesn’t have nearly the marketing budgets of Microsoft, surpass them in global search queries by the end of 2012. Nothing better than seeing incredibly talented underdogs race past one of the biggies.”
Though we find this development less of a surprise, we join Bonfils in cheering for the underdog. What will the future bring for the formidable Yandex?
Cynthia Murrell, February 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Hakia to Revolutionize Online Shopping Experience
February 25, 2013
Canadian start-up Flow, is teaming up with Hakia to provide semantic search capabilities within a closed platform and take online shopping into a new realm in terms of product specificity and search capability.
Until now e-commerce sites have followed roughly the same pattern; Ebay and Amazon, both powerhouses in the online shopping experience introduced a platform for “every product” and have made a lot of money in the last decade.
The article from Silicon Angle, “Flow Adds Semantic Search from Hakia to Revolutionize E-Commerce,” lays out how Flow and Hakia are creating a different way to search for the products you are looking for, without having to wade through all the extraneous mumbo jumbo. This new partnership hopes to do is to create a social flow and eliminate the sixth degree of separation.
“eCommerce as we know it is pretty entrenched, but social commerce is slowly emerging to challenge the status quo. It’s a concept that’s evolved from what are probably the two biggest phenomena on the web – online shopping and social media. And it’s a natural evolution too, as it only makes sense for marketers to connect with their customers to better understand their needs and position themselves as the ones to provide it.”
Facebook is probably the biggest example of the social marketplace at the moment. Facebook isn’t a shopping powerhouse because it has no search structure. Utilizing semantic search is going to create a kind of exclusive marketplace that hopes to promote less cutthroat competition; since users will be finding exact matches for their searches there’s no competition for most hits in order to remain at the top.
But can the Flow/Hakia partnership really pull through with those kinds of promises? It seems like a pretty tall order to fill. Functionality and no middlemen sound like a dream come true to eCommerce consumers, but the proof is in the pudding.
Leslie Radcliff, February 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Twitter Expands Search Reservoir
February 25, 2013
Twitter, now with more tweets! I suppose that’s a real plus for some. ComputerWorld announces, “Twitter Search to Show Tweets More Than a Week Old.” Writer Jeremy Kirk explains:
“Twitter is modifying its search engine to include tweets more than a week old, a move it said will help users uncover better content.
“Over the next few days, searches will return ‘a fairly small percentage of total tweets ever sent’ but that will increase over time, wrote Paul Burstein, an engineer who works on Twitter’s search infrastructure, on a company blog.
“‘We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks, to determine which tweets to show,’ Burstein wrote. ‘We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query.'”
I suppose a wider search results field is better, whatever the platform. The expansion was announced alongside Twitter‘s updates to its search function in its iOS and Android mobile apps. These apps now return tweets, photos, and people in a single results stream rather than separate tabs. One other change saves users a step by letting them go directly to a linked Web site without opening the corresponding tweet. Ah, the relentless march of progress—now saving us a few seconds at a time.
Cynthia Murrell, February 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Sinequa Highlighted by Yandex
February 22, 2013
I noticed this morning that Sinequa, a vendor which provides a unified information access solution has been moved to the top of the Yandex results list. I was poking around the Yandex system to see how the Google challenger was handling some European analytics, content processing, business intelligence, and search vendors.
On a previous test, Yandex displayed a link to a site offering translations of Latin phrases. (Sinequa, as you may recall from your school days, can be translated as “an essential component or element.” I had one Latin teacher suggest that sinequa indicated “none higher.” Yet another of the specialists who with whom I studied boiled the connotation down to “excellence.”)
CrunchBase describes the company this way:
Sinequa helps companies and organizations to cope with the data explosion and enterprise transformation. Sinequa’s unique value proposition is to provide an out-of-the-box enterprise search solution leveraging all enterprise content, resulting in significant savings for large organizations. Sinequa’s customers are some of the most innovative companies in the world including Siemens, Mercer, EADS, Saint-Gobain, SalesForce.com, Bouygues, SFR, Atos Origin, Loreal, LCF Rothschild, Credit Agricole, the French Ministry of Defense, Groupe Figaro.
You can obtain more information about the company at www.sinequa.com. As an aside, I find the Yandex results increasingly useful. Check the system out at www.yandex.com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 22, 2013
Twitter Redesigns Search Feature
February 22, 2013
Twitter’s blog post, “Search and Discover Improvements: Get More Great Content Faster,” describes updates to the service’s Android and iOS apps and to its mobile-tailored Web address . The primary change, as revealed by product management director Esteban Kozak, is the implementation of separate tabs with their own content streams.
There four of these distinct streams— Discover, Search, Connect, and Links. It is the first two that we find most interesting. The write-up specifies:
“Discover: Now all the content in Discover — Tweets, Activity, Trends and suggestions of accounts to follow — appears in a single stream, on both iPhone and Android. You can also dive into Activity and Trends from new previews at the top of the Discover tab.
“Search: Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet.”
Making search and discovery easier to find and use is a worthy goal, and usually fairly straightforward to implement. The quality of search results, it should be remembered, is another matter entirely. The post mentions that information on new developments can always be found within Twitter’s entries at the App Store and Google Play.
Cynthia Murrell, February 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Oracle Text Workaround for Stop Words List
February 22, 2013
We’ve come across a discussion about Oracle Text at StackOverflow, “Oracle Text Search Doesn’t Work on Some Words.” Essentially, some words cannot initially be indexed, and the fix is to go in and remove those words from the stop words list. Interesting.
The question-and-answer site for programmers received this query:
“I am using Oracle’ Text Search for my project. I created a ctxsys.context index on my column and inserted one entry ‘Would you like some wine???’. I executed the query ‘select guid, text, score(10) from triplet where contains (text, ‘Would’, 10) > 0′; it gave me no results. Querying ‘you’ and ‘some’ also return zero results. Only ‘like’ and ‘wine’ matches the record. Does Oracle consider you, would, some as stop words?? How can I let Oracle match these words? Thank you.”
The top response reveals:
“I found that the query’s output is perfect according to the stop word lists that is in the oracle.
those words can be found in the ctxsys package, and you could query for the stoplist and the stop words using “SELECT * FROM CTX_STOPLISTS; SELECT * FROM ctx_stopwords;” and yes, the oracle consider ‘you’, ‘would’ in your query as stop words.”
The solution—remove the offending stop words with the command, “GRANT EXECUTE ON CTXSYS.CTX_DDL to you” followed by the desired procedure. See the link for an example.
Cynthia Murrell, February 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bad News for Old Style Web Traffic
February 21, 2013
Who knows how universal the information in “Why No One Is Talking about Yahoo’s – or Anyone Else’s – New Homepage.” I find the idea that traditional Web traffic is changing quite interesting. Here’s the snippet I tucked into my traditional 4×6 inch note card box which I kept since my high school debating days:
Like other titans of another tech age, Yahoo is facing an existential threat against which it may be defenseless: People just don’t surf the web the way they used to. It is now the rule, rather than the exception, to share links over Facebook, Twitter and “dark social“ (e.g., email or text messages), which means that most people are arriving on pages buried deep within websites, and may never go near the homepage.
There are some interesting implications for search and retrieval. How does one get found? Good question. Answer: Augmentext.
Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2013
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