A Hefty Guide to Setting up SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Search Center
March 8, 2016
The how-to guide titled Customizing SharePoint 2013 Search Center on Code Project provides a lengthy, detailed explanation (with pictures) of the new features of SharePoint 2013, an integration of the 2010 version and Microsoft FAST search. The article offers insights into certain concepts of the program such as crawled properties and managed properties before introducing step-by-step navigation for customizing the result page and Display template, as well as other areas of Sharepoint. The article includes such tips as this,
“Query rules allow you to modify the users keyword search based on a condition. Let’s say when the user types Developer, we want to retrieve only the books which have BookCategory as Developer and if they type ‘IT Pro’, we only want to retrieve the Administrator related books.”
Nine steps later, you have a neat little result block with the matching items. The article outlines similar processes for Customizing the Search Center, Modifying the Search Center, Adding the Results Page to the Navigation, and Creating the Result Source. This leads us to ask, Shouldn’t this be easier by now? Customizing a program so that it looks and acts the way we expect seems like pretty basic setup, so why does it take 100+ steps to tailor SharePoint 2013?
Chelsea Kerwin, March 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Search Dually Conceals and Retrieves for an Audience
March 8, 2016
There are many ways to trace a digital footprint, but Google is expanding European users’ ability to cover their tracks. An article entitled, In Europe, Google will now remove ‘right to be forgotten’ search results from all its sites, from The Verge tells us the story. Basically, European users who request links to be removed protect those links from being crawled by Google.fr in addition to all their other homepages. The write-up explains,
“So, for instance, if someone in France had previously requested that a link be hidden from search results, Google would just remove it from its European homepages, including google.fr. But a savvy searcher could have just used google.com to dig up all those hidden results. Now, however, the company will scrub its US homepage results, too, but only for European users. The company didn’t provide specifics on how it’ll detect that a user is in Europe, but it’s likely going off IP addresses, so in theory, someone could use a VPN to subvert those results.”
As the article mentions, European privacy regulators are happy about this but would still prefer contested links not appear, even if the searcher is in the U.S. or elsewhere. Between the existence of the Dark Web and the “right to be forgotten” protections, more and more links are hidden making search increasingly difficult.
Megan Feil, March 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Progress and Obstacles for Microsoft Delve When It Comes to On-Premise Search
March 7, 2016
The article titled Microsoft Delve Faces Challenges in Enterprise Search Role on Search Content Management posits that Microsoft Delve could use some serious enhancements to ensure that it functions as well with on-premises data as it does with data from the cloud. Delve is an exciting step forward, an enterprise-wide search engine that relies on machine learning to deliver relevant results. The article even goes so far as to call it a “digital assistant” that can make decisions based on an analysis of previous requests and preferences. But there is a downside, and the article explains it,
“Microsoft Delve isn’t being used to its full potential. Deployed within the cloud-based Office 365 (O365) environment, it can monitor activity and retrieve information from SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook in a single pass — and that’s pretty impressive. But few organizations have migrated their entire enterprise to O365, and a majority never will: Hybrid deployments and blending cloud systems with on-premises platforms are the norm… if an organization has mostly on-premises data, its search results will always be incomplete.”
With a new version of Delve in the works at Microsoft, the message has already been received. According to the article, the hybrid Delve will be the first on-premise product based on SharePoint Online. You can almost hear the content management specialists holding their breaths for an integrated cloud and on-premise architecture for search.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Encryption and Rap Lyrics
March 6, 2016
I read “Gang Used Rap Lyrics to Discuss Guns.” According to the write up:
Members of a gang, accused of smuggling automatic weapons into the UK by boat, used lyrics from a song by rapper the Notorious B.I.G. to discuss their arrival, a court has heard.
The write up added:
The Gimme the Loot lyrics were included in a message from Mr Defraine which read: “I’m ready to got this paper g you with me… my pockets looking kinda tight and I’m stressed yo munky let me get the vest”.
Argot can be a challenge for search and content processing. Were those $5,000 teddy bears on eBay really teddy bears?
Nope. Kinda munky maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, March 6, 2016
Palantir Gets a Rah Rah from Bloomberg
March 5, 2016
I posted the unicorn flier in “Palantir: A Dying Unicorn or a Mad, Mad Sign?” I read “Palantir Staff Shouldn’t Believe the Unicorn Flyers.” I assume that the alleged fliers did exist in the Shire and were not figments of a Tolkienesque imagination. (I wonder of JRR’s classes were anchored in reality.)
The write up states:
For now, Palantir people can rest easy in the Shire, a.k.a. downtown Palo Alto, Calif. The company, which was named after the “seeing stones” from the Lord of the Rings, is not at risk of an evil wizard with preferred shares coming to vaporize workers’ share value.
The write up contains a hefty dose of jargon; for example:
During the fourth quarter of 2015, 42 percent of deals had such provisions, compared with 15 percent in the previous two quarters. Investors were also given the right to block an initial public offering that didn’t meet their valuation threshold in 33 percent of deals in the fourth quarter, compared with 20 percent in the second quarter, the study said. Palantir had neither provision.
Okay.
The only hitch in the git along is that Morgan Stanley has cut the value of its stake in Palantir.
Worth watching even if one is not an employee hoping that the value of this particular unicorn is going to morph into a Pegasus.
Stephen E Arnold, March 5, 2016
Quid Cheerleading: The Future of Search
March 4, 2016
I read “The Future of {Re}search.” (I love the curly braces.) The write up identifies the four big things in information access. Keep in mind that the write up is a rah rah for Quid, which is okay.
Here are the main points:
- Semantic search is the next big thing
- Visualization matters
- Humans are part of the search process
- Bots are the “Future of Search.” (The capitalization is from the source document.)
Quid is an interesting company. I thought that the firm was focused on analytics and nifty visualizations. Their catchphrase is “intelligence amplified,” which strikes me as similar to Palantir’s “augmented intelligence.”
If the write up is on the money, Quid is a search vendor in the same way Palantir Technologies is a search vendor.
The point about bots may catch the attention of the ever-alert Connotate folks. I think bots has been an important part of that firm’s services for many years.
So, “the next big thing”? Well, sort of.
Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2016
The FBI Uses Its Hacking Powers for Good
March 4, 2016
In a victory for basic human decency, Engadget informs us, the “FBI Hacked the Dark Web to Bust 1,500 Pedophiles.” Citing an article at Vice Motherboard, writer Jessica Conditt describes how the feds identified their suspects through a site called (brace yourself) “Playpen,” which was launched in August 2014. We learn:
Motherboard broke down the FBI’s hacking process as follows: The bureau seized the server running Playpen in February 2015, but didn’t shut it down immediately. Instead, the FBI took “unprecedented” measures and ran the site via its own servers from February 20th to March 4th, at the same time deploying a hacking tool known internally as a network investigative technique. The NIT identified at least 1,300 IP addresses belonging to visitors of the site.
“Basically, if you visited the homepage and started to sign up for a membership, or started to log in, the warrant authorized deployment of the NIT,” a public defender for one of the accused told Motherboard. He said he expected at least 1,500 court cases to stem from this one investigation, and called the operation an “extraordinary expansion of government surveillance and its use of illegal search methods on a massive scale,” Motherboard reported.
Check out this article at Wired to learn more about the “network investigative technique” (NIT). This is more evidence that, if motivated, the FBI is perfectly capable of leveraging the Dark Web to its advantage. Good to know.
Cynthia Murrell, March 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Artificial Intelligence Competition Reveals Need for More Learning
March 3, 2016
The capabilities of robots are growing but, on the whole, have not surpassed a middle school education quite yet. The article Why AI can still hardly pass an eighth grade science test from Motherboard shares insights into the current state of artificial intelligence as revealed in a recent artificial intelligence competition. Chaim Linhart, a researcher from an Israel startup, TaKaDu, received the first place prize of $50,000. However, the winner only scored a 59.3 percent on this series of tasks tougher than the conventionally used Turing Test. The article describes how the winners utilized machine learning models,
“Tafjord explained that all three top teams relied on search-style machine learning models: they essentially found ways to search massive test corpora for the answers. Popular text sources included dumps of Wikipedia, open-source textbooks, and online flashcards intended for studying purposes. These models have anywhere between 50 to 1,000 different “features” to help solve the problem—a simple feature could look at something like how often a question and answer appear together in the text corpus, or how close words from the question and answer appear.”
The second and third place winners scored just around one percent behind Linhart’s robot. This may suggest a competitive market when the time comes. Or, perhaps, as the article suggests, nothing very groundbreaking has been developed quite yet. Will search-based machine learning models continue to be expanded and built upon or will another paradigm be necessary for AI to get grade A?
Megan Feil, March 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Delve Is No Jarvis
March 3, 2016
A podcast at SearchContentManagement, “Is Microsoft Delve Iron Man’s Edwin Jarvis? No Way,” examines the ways Delve has yet to live up to its hype. Microsoft extolled the product when it was released as part of the Office 365 suite last year. As any developer can tell you, though, it is far easier to market than deliver polished software. Editor Lauren Horwitz explains:
“While it was designed to be a business intelligence (BI), enterprise search and collaboration tool wrapped into one, it has yet to make good on that vision. Delve was intended to be able to search users’ documents, email messages, meetings and more, then serve up relevant content and messages to them based on their content and activities. At one level, Delve has failed because it hasn’t been as comprehensive a search tool as it was billed. At another level, users have significant concerns about their privacy, given the scope of documents and activities Delve is designed to scour. As BI and SharePoint expert Scott Robinson notes in this podcast, Delve was intended to be much like Edwin Jarvis, butler and human search tool for Iron Man’s Tony Stark. But Delve ain’t no Jarvis, Robinson said.”
So, Delve was intended to learn enough about a user to offer them just what they need when they need it, but the tool did not tap deeply enough into the user’s files to effectively anticipate their needs. On top of that, it’s process is so opaque that most users don’t appreciate what it is doing, Robinson indicated. For more on Delve’s underwhelming debut, check out the ten-minute podcast.
Cynthia Murrell, March 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No Search Just Browse Images on FindA.Photo
March 2, 2016
The search engine FindA.Photo proves itself to be a useful resource for browsing images based on any number of markers. The site offers a general search by terms, or the option of browsing images by color, collection (for example, “wild animals,” or “reflections”) or source. The developer of the site, David Barker, described his goals for the services on Product Hunt,
“I wanted to make a search for all of the CC0 image sites that are available. I know there are already a few search sites out there, but I specifically wanted to create one that was: simple and fast (and I’m working on making it faster), powerful (you can add options to your search for things like predominant colors and image size with just text), and something that could have contributions from anyone (via GitHub pull requests).”
My first click on a swatch of royal blue delivered 651 images of oceans, skies, panoramas of oceans and skies, jellyfish ballooning underwater, seagulls soaring etc. That may be my own fault for choosing such a clichéd color, but you get the idea. I had better (more various) results through the collections search, which includes “action,” “long-exposure,” “technology,” “light rays,” and “landmarks,” the last of which I immediately clicked for a collage of photos of the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Big Ben, and the Great Wall of China.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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