Elasticsearch Pins Big Hopes on New Marketing VP
January 12, 2013
The complex Elasticsearch, with their recent investment infusion, seems to be tapping into proven marketing strategies. In “Elasticsearch Expands Executive Team to Drive Adoption of Big Data Search,” BusinessWire reveals that the company is welcoming tech-marketing expert Elyse Phillips, who has spent fifteen years in the field. The write-up summarizes the new vice president of marketing’s experience:
“Elyse has spent her career rapidly evolving innovative technologies and services into market game changers. Prior to Elasticsearch, Elyse was director of marketing at Appcelerator, the leading mobile development platform provider, where she launched Titanium, the number one open source mobile development platform in the world, and helped build a community of 350,000 mobile developers worldwide. Prior to Appcelerator, Phillips was the head of marketing and investor relations for First Virtual Corporation, a pioneer in Internet video, where she took them from start-up through IPO.”
Elasticsearch CEO Steven Shuurman believes that Phillips’ history of creating savvy marketing positions and strong visibility will help drive his company to big-data success. Will marketing be enough to overcome the complexity of their system?
Elasticsearch recently benefited from $10 million in Series A funding. Though their headquarters are in Amsterdam, Phillips will reportedly be working in the SanFrancisco Bay offices. The company was formed in 2012 specifically to develop and support the open-source elasticsearch solution, which several of its founders helped establish through Apache.
Cynthia Murrell, January 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A9 Search May Be on the Verge of Improvement
January 11, 2013
Sometimes tidbits of information come from unexpected places. A job posting at LinkedIn for a “Principal Software Engineer- Contextual Relevance” suggests that Amazon may be trying to fix up A9 Product Search. It is good to make use of existing assets, but I do hope any new hire understands what they are getting into. A9 has been panned as a disappointment so far.
The job description reads, in part:
“This is an exciting opportunity to develop the next generation of technologies for understanding unstructured textual content. Leveraging Amazon’s unique assets, we are building industry-leading systems to comprehend textual data and solve challenging contextual relevance problems like key concepts extraction, text classification, and sentiment analysis. Our systems need to operate at internet scale and serve billions of requests every day in a fault tolerant manner and under stringent latency requirements. You will thus need to aim high and invent revolutionary technologies that have a large and direct impact on one of the largest businesses on the web.”
Well, at least they are not downplaying the challenge. Naturally, the credentials required are pretty hefty, but if you think you or someone you know has what it takes, check it out.
The posting also emphasizes that A9.com combines the advantages of a small-business culture with the resources of their parent company. A9 is, not surprisingly, headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, and was formed in 2003 as an Amazon subsidiary. Though perhaps not (yet) all that Amazon hoped for, the search platform is in place and functioning on their site and many other e-commerce sites.
Cynthia Murrell, January 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Nexans Licenses PolySpot Search Engine
January 10, 2013
We learned that the Nexans Group, a global player in the infrastructure, industry, building, and local area network data markets, uses the PolySpot search engine to cross-reference its internal sources of information and all of its information portals.
According to information provided to Beyond Search:
The goal of the roll out was to streamline collaborative processes while ensuring the integrity of security regulations. The strong point of the solution lies in the simplification of access to information regardless of the source. Using the PolySpot engine, users, customers, partners, and employees of Nexans can now easily access the product catalog and at a level of information consistent with their right of access.
Nexans tested various competing solutions on the market. PolySpot told Beyond Search:
PolySpot stood out because of the performance and strength of its Microsoft SharePoint connector. The PolySpot connector for Microsoft SharePoint is characterized by a very large tolerance of isolated errors (corrupt data, crashes, micro network outages, etc).
PolySpot supports the indexing of an entire SharePoint farm and provides fine-grained filtering. The PolySpot approach limits the the maximum load on the application and network.
As a result, Nexans Group users have access to faceted navigation within the relevant Group directory. Information access is pivotal to Nexans Group’s business which offers an extensive range of cables and cabling systems to raise industrial productivity, improve business performance, enhance security, enrich the quality of life, and assure long-term network reliability.
For more information about PolySpot’s technology and services, visit www.polyspot.com.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2013
SharePoint 2013 Offers Improvements in Search
January 10, 2013
An overall architecture for SharePoint 2013 Search can be found on the Search Technologies’ Web site.
As new releases tend to do, SharePoint 2013 has made some tweaks that users would do well to explore, we learn in “Search Engine Changes in SharePoint 2013” from iT Pro. SharePoint consultant Veena Sarda details the search-related changes and presents them in a handy chart.
The first thing to note is that FAST Search has now been worked into the SharePoint code base. That means that FAST capabilities like metadata extraction, visual search, and advanced linguistics are now part of the package. Content and analytics processors have been added to the logical architecture, and a specialized Search Administrator now manages these and other search-related components. Also new is a dedicated analysis engine, which performs both search and usage analytics.
Crawling has been improved; it is now possible to crawl http sites anonymously, and the time for the index to merge and present those results has been dramatically shortened. Results rendering has been moved from the server to the client side. Document parsing is now much more refined, relying on a set of new parsing features, rather than on file extensions to do the job.
Other welcome improvements affect the user experience. The UI has been revamped to accommodate the new features, with a re-design based on nested layout templates defined in JavaScript and HTML. This change allows for easier extensibility. Furthermore, end users now have an easier time of it; the write-up notes that the platform now provides:
“Direct access to the most granular information inside of sites and documents, and then enables users to act on the results without having to leave the results page. Every search box in every team site offers full access to enterprise-wide search, people search, and other specialized search experiences in addition to the traditional scoped site search.”
Part of this simplified workflow is the new Hover feature, which presents a visual preview of sites, documents, and conversations at the pause of a mouse.
A few more search-related improvements: Authors are identified as experts based on document content, where before they were identified by My Site profiles. People Search (which used to be independent of document search) has been integrated with the core results and can be targeted by name, location, phone number, and other properties.
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy shifts is the new Query Rules feature. SharePoint 2010 only allows for simple queries—one query, one set of results. Sarda writes:
“Query Rules are a new feature in SharePoint 13 that help act upon the ‘intent’ of a query – Query Rules are composed of three top level elements: Query Conditions (i.e. matching rules), Query Actions (i.e. what do you do when you find a match), Publishing Options (i.e. when should this rule be active). Query Rules allows to have search requests from a user trigger multiple queries and multiple result sets.”
A welcome addition. For more information on SharePoint 2013, see the “brief functional walk-through” posted at Search Technologies. It contains, among other things, an easy-to-understand flow chart. The SharePoint experts there also promise to post future updates at that link.
Search Technologies leverages search engines to provide business advantages to their clients. With over twenty years of experience in the field, the company asserts that it is the largest IT services company dedicated to search engine implementation, consulting, and managed services. For information on the firm’s SharePoint 2013 Search Services, visit www.searchtechnologies.com. Search Technologies is headquartered in Herndon, Virginia.
Cynthia Murrell, January 10, 2013
The Complete Total Bing Bar Makeover
January 8, 2013
Bing has prided itself on providing more eye candy for its users than the minimalist Google screen and logo. Bing has lately been updating its looks. First it was Snapshots, now the social bar has become more socially appealing. Search Engine Watch highlights the changes Bing made in “Bing Social Sidebar Gets a Makeover.” The hover cards and dark grey coloring have disappeared, giving way to the color white and a more uniformed look. There are two new headers that separate social media content from friends and general content on these Web sites.
Bing’s social search is also noted as digging way in the recesses of old posts. Users can see what their friends were saying in the past on Facebook or they could always turn to the Facebook year in review app. The search is also a good feature to use to find trending content on all social networks on specific topics.
Despite the updates, the author does not see the design lasting long:
“However, being perfectly honest, I can’t see this design staying for very long. It’s almost too many blue links now and with the more visual social sidebar winning the competition for attention, the ads are now too easy to miss – you can just skip over that middle block.”
What works now will change tomorrow. So is the fate of the Internet. The lack of ad prevalence on the page will really hurt Bing. As long as they do not redo the page to have a fifteen second ad before you can view your content, though, most people will be all right with the changes.
Whitney Grace, January 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Paid Links May Be the New Content Manipulation Game
January 8, 2013
With the New Year upon us, we can count on new tricks for content manipulation. Search Engine Land brings to our attention of the of the possible new tricks in “Will 2013 Bring a Paid Link Resurgence?” Not many people give credit to link builders, but the conjecture is that bad links for Web sites could potentially be as bad as negative SEO. Google has once more updated its Webmaster Guidelines and paid linkage is a way to manipulate Google’s search results. Google is punishing web sites for unnatural links. Webmasters will have to finally admit that content is the only way to get to the top of Google’s search results or control their marketing process. The later usually involves greenbacks that most do not want to spend. If business starts to suffer, however, guess where investments will need to be made?
Google is working overtime to control its search results:
“Google’s constant attempts to crack down serve only to spawn new and harder-to-catch ways to win. It sounds harsh but I know that no matter what methods they develop of controlling manipulation in one form, people will find ways to manipulate something else, until that gets smacked too, and they start over again.”
Paid links are part of everyday Web search and their impact is felt, we just do not realize it. However, one method of search results manipulation does not prove better than the other. It all depends on what is popular at the time and what can get past Google’s aggregators.
Whitney Grace, January 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data and Search
January 1, 2013
A new year has arrived. Flipping a digit on the calendar prompts many gurus, wizards, failed Web masters, former real journalists, and unemployed English majors to identify trends. How can I resist a chrome plated, Gangnam style bandwagon? Big Data is no trend. It is, according to the smart set:
that Big Data would be “the next big chapter of our business history.
My approach is more modest. And I want to avoid silver-numbered politics and the monitoring business. I want to think about a subject of interest to a small group of techno-watchers: Big Data and search.
My view is that there has been Big Data for a long time. Marketers and venture hawks circle an issue. If enough birds block the sun, others notice. Big Data is now one of the official Big Trends for 2013. Search, as readers of this blog may know, experiences the best of times and the worst of times regardless of the year or the hot trends.
As the volume of unstructured information increases, search plays a part. What’s different for 2013 is that those trying to make better decisions need a helping hand, crutches, training wheels, and tools. Vendors of analytics systems like SAS and IBM SPSS should be in the driver’s seat. But these firms are not. An outfit like Palantir claims to be the leader of the parade. The company has snazzy graphics and $150 million in venture funding. Good enough for me I suppose. The Palantirs suggest that the old dudes at SAS and SPSS still require individuals who understand math and can program for the “end user”. Not surprisingly, there are more end users than there are SAS and SPSS wizards. One way around the shortage is to make Big Data a point-and-click affair. Satisfying? The marketers say, “For sure.”
A new opportunity arises for those who want the benefits of fancy math without the cost, hassle, and delay of dealing with intermediaries who may not have an MBA or aspire to be independently wealth before the age of 30. Toss in the health care data the US Federal government mandates, the avalanche of fuzzy thinking baloney from blogs like this one, and the tireless efforts of PR wizards to promote everything thing from antique abacuses to zebra striped fabrics. One must not overlook e-mail, PowerPoint presentations, and the rivers of video which have to be processed and “understood.” In these streams of real time and semi-fresh data, there must be gems which can generate diamond bright insights. Even sociology major may have a shot at a permanent job.
The biggest of the Big Berthas are firing away at Big Data. Navigate to “Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.” Harvard, MIT, and juicy details explain that the trend is now anchored into the halls of academe. There is even a cautionary quote from an academic who was able to identify just one example of Big Data going somewhat astray. Here’s the quote:
At the M.I.T. conference, a panel was asked to cite examples of big failures in Big Data. No one could really think of any. Soon after, though, Roberto Rigobon could barely contain himself as he took to the stage. Mr. Rigobon, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, said that the financial crisis certainly humbled the data hounds. “Hedge funds failed all over the world,” he said. THE problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics.
Sure Big Data has downsides. MBAs love to lift downsides via their trusty, almost infallible intellectual hydraulics.
My focus is search. The trends I wish to share with my two or three readers require some preliminary observations:
- Search vendors will just say they can handle Big Data. Proof not required. It is cheaper to assert a technology than actually develop a capability.
- Search vendors will point out that sooner or later a user will know enough to enter a query. Fancy math notwithstanding, nothing works quite like a well crafted query. Search may be a commodity, but it will not go away.
- Big Data systems are great at generating hot graphics. In order to answer a question, a Big Data system must be able to display the source document. Even the slickest analytics person has to find a source. Well, maybe not all of the time, but sometimes it is useful prior to a deposition.
- Big Data systems cannot process certain types of data. Search systems cannot process certain types of data. It makes sense to process whatever fits into each system’s intake system and use both systems. The charm of two systems which do not quite align is sweet music to a marketer’s ears. If a company has a search system, that outfit will buy a Big Data system. If a company has a Big Data system, the outfit will be shopping for a search system. Nice symmetry!
- Search systems and Big Data systems can scale. Now this particular assertion is true when one criterion is met; an unending supply of money. The Big Data thing has a huge appetite for resources. Chomp. Chomp. That’s the sound of a budget being consumed in a sprightly way.
Now the trends:
Trend 1. Before the end of 2013, Big Data will find itself explaining why the actual data processed were Small Data. The assertion that existing systems can handle whatever the client wants to process will be exposed as selective content processing systems. Big Data are big and systems have finite capacity. Some clients may not be thrilled to learn that their ore did not include the tonnage that contained the gems. In short, say hello to aggressive sampling and indexes which are not refreshed in anything close to real time.
Trend 2. Big Data and search vendors will be tripping over themselves in an effort to explain which system does what under what circumstances. The assertion that a system can do both structured and unstructured while uncovering the meaning of the data is one I want to believe. Too bad the assertion is mushy in the accuracy department’s basement.
Trend 3.The talent pool for Big Data and search is less plentiful than the pool of art history majors. More bad news. The pool is not filling rapidly. As a result, quite a few data swimmers drown. Example: the financial crisis perhaps? The talent shortage suggests some interesting cost overruns and project failures.
Trend 4. A new Big Thing will nose into the Big Data and search content processing space. Will the new Big Thing work? Nah. The reason is that extracting high value knowledge from raw data is a tough problem. Writing new marketing copy is a great deal easier. I am not sure what the buzzword will be. I am pretty sure vendors will need a new one before the end of 2013. Even PSY called it quits with Gangnam style. No such luck in Big Data and search at this time.
Trend 5. The same glassy eyed confusion which analytics and search presentations engender will lead to greater buyer confusion and slow down procurements. Not even the magic of the “cloud” will be able to close certain deals. In a quest for revenue, the vendors will wrap basic ideas in a cloud of unknowing.
I suppose that is a good thing. Thank goodness I am unemployed, clueless, and living in a rural Kentucky goose pond.
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2012
Another Beyond Search analysis for free
Gannett Wants Better Content Management
December 31, 2012
Gannett is a media and marketing company that represents USA Today, Shop Local, and Deal Chicken. One can imagine that such a prolific company has a lot of data that needs to be organized and made workable. Marketing and media companies are on the forefront of the public eye and if they do not get their client’s name out in the open, then it means less dollars in the bank for them. One way this could happen is if they do not centralize a plan for information governance. The good news is “Gannett Chooses ITM for Centralized Management of Reference Vocabularies,”as reported via the Mondeca news Web site. Mondeca is a company that specializes in knowledge management with a variety of products that structure knowledge in many possible ways. Its ITM system was built to handle knowledge structures from conception to usage and the maintenance process afterward. ITM helps organize knowledge, accessing data across multiple platforms, improved search and navigation, and aligning/merging taxonomies and ontologies.
Gannet selected Mondeca for these very purposes:
“Gannett needed software to centrally manage, synchronize, and distribute its reference vocabularies across a variety of systems, such as text analytics, search engines, and CMS. They also wanted to create vocabularies and enrich them using external sources, with the help of MEI. Gannett selected ITM as the best match for the job. At the end of the project, Gannett intends to achieve stronger semantic integration across its content delivery workflow.”
Gannett is sure to discover that Mondeca’s ITM software will provide them with better control over its data, not to mention new insights into its knowledge base. Data organization and proper search techniques are the master key to any organization’s success.
Whitney Grace, December 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Effective Search Technology Is Business Critical in 2013
December 28, 2012
This has been the year of “big data” and search acquisitions, and we have tracked the changes closely. CMSWire has also noticed the trend, making note in the recent article “Search in 2013 Will Become a Business Critical Application.” The article comments on the emerging trend of search implementation and argues that information and actionable insights from big data are critical to business. The need has never been greater for effective search technology and support.
The article continues:
“The Findwise survey […] indicates that less than 20 percent of organizations have a strategy for search even though many of them will be supporting multiple search applications. I expect this figure to improve markedly by the time the 2013 Findwise survey is presented [in May].
The 2011/2012 search vendor acquisition frenzy took out most of the mid-range vendors. In 2013 we will find out whether smaller commercial vendors can attract the investment they need to bring their technologies to a wider market or whether the space will be taken by open-source applications.”
We believe search will be critical to successful business operations in 2013. Secure search and the use of metatagging will lead to improved business processes and enterprise decisions driven by content. The article mentions Intrafind as a potential option for a blend of open-source and proprietary modules and we believe this software has the necessary offerings to help integrate business-critical search.
Andrea Hayden, December 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Yahoo Reveals Our Curiosities
December 28, 2012
It is time once again for Yahoo’s annual Year in Review report, in which the company shares the most popular searches performed with its engine during the preceding year. Search Engine Land gives us the lowdown in “2012 Yahoo Year in Review: Over 500 Top Searches in 50+ Categories.”
Writer Elisabeth Osmeloski emphasizes the role of Vera Chan, Yahoo’s senior editor and Web trend analyst, who has been compiling these lists since 2005:
“[Ms. Chan] clearly enjoys looking for the ‘why’ behind some of these popular search trends. Every year, Ms. Chan hosts a press conference call to share insights and give some context around these searcher behaviors, as she explains that we now live in a ‘Freakonomics’ world — and people like Nate Silver are bringing new meaning to number crunching — she’s clearly one of the people making sense of ‘big data’ at Yahoo.”
So, how do they do it? The company describes its methodology:
“To develop the Yahoo! Year in Review, Yahoo’s editors analyze Yahoo! Search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and the growth from previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. Individuals and their Search queries always remain anonymous. Top searched refers to searches with the highest volume. Spiking refers to searches with the greatest change from one year to the next.”
It looks like users spent 2012 focused on some pretty highbrow topics. Ha, just kidding! While we did look up important stuff like elections and the Colorado wildfires, there are also top-rankers like “honey boo boo,” “gangnam style,” and “Jackson family fight.” It really is an interesting compilation, and you could spend a lot of time perusing the results.
Yahoo breaks popular searches into categories, and this year there are more classifications than ever. There is, of course, Top Searches Overall (not surprisingly, “election” won first place). Some other interesting categories include Top Obsessions (“iphone5”), Top Searched Memes (“kony 2012”), and Top Job Searches (“work from home jobs”). Check out the article for more curious groupings. Or groupings of the curious, if you will.
Cynthia Murrell, December 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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