The Feivi Arnstein Interview: Founder of SearchLion
August 2, 2011
On August 1, 2011, I had an opportunity to talk with Feivi Arnstein, founder of SearchLion. SearchLion provides a browser-based interface that looks like a Google-influenced Web search system. The home page for SearchLion presents an interesting description: The new way to search. Welcome to the 21st century Web search.” The system makes it easy to narrow a query on specific types of content; for example, Web content, images, news, blogs, and Twitter messages.
SearchLion reflects a different approach from the keyword method that is quite different from the brute force approach used by the early Web search systems. In fact, the tagline for the service is “The New Way to Search.” To make certain a user understands the new direction the company is taking, the splash page offers the greeting, “Welcome to 21st century Web search.”
I ran queries on the system, which offers relevance ranked search results from Google and Yahoo. I found the output useful. When I clicked on the Open button next to an entry in the results list, the system displayed in the browser a preview of the Web page. IN addition, other hits are listed in the right hand column of the display which are related to the result I “opened”.
Source: www.searchlion.com
When I spoke with Mr. Arnstein, I was curious about the inspiration for the interface, which puts the focus on content, not ads. The idea for the content centric interface was, according to Mr. Arnstein, a result of his work in the financial services sector. Screens for traders, for example, are filled with information important to the task at hand. He said:
My first professional background was as a Technical Futures trader. I spent several years making a living day trading equity futures from my own private office. When you trade equities, you use software which makes use of every inch of screen space. So, for example, you can have a screen which is evenly split into four equity charts. The concept is simple: the more data you can access on the screen, the more productive you will be. I was accustomed to the efficiency of trading software. I realized that when searching and browsing the web, there were big parts of the screen going to waste. So I sought to find ways to use the available screen space to give the user more data.
He noted:
We think this fosters switching back and forth which is time consuming and can be confusing to many users. If you can have results and the source both on the same screen, our research suggests that users can find what they looking for much more quickly. In addition to opening the live sites, you can also save your searches together with the live sites. When you then load a search from your saved list, the live sites open automatically. We’ve used the same concepts without our MultiView features. Instead of the live Web site, MultiView uses the blank areas of the page to show you a different type of search result; for example, images, news, videos, etc.
The technical challenges were “interesting”, according to Mr. Arnstein. He added:
When showing more information, your browser will be using more resources. It took a lot of work and innovation to make sure the user gets his additional information, whether the live sites or the various types of results and still be extremely fast.
You can read the full interview with Mr. Arnstein on the ArnoldIT.com subsite, Search Wizards Speak. The Search Lion site is at http://www.searchlion.com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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Infinite on a Web Page. Yep, Infinite Annoyance
July 18, 2011
Have you noticed that “innovations” in search get in the way of finding relevant information quickly.
Quick example. I am at my desk at 0900 on July 16, a Saturday in Nowhere, Kentucky. Our houseguests were on the way to the Louisville Zoo to see the polar bear. (I thought these poor creatures had been eliminated in the global warming that some folks in Harrod’s Creek don’t think is real. Guess I was wrong.)
Now I get a call. Bzzz.
My wife wants to know the phone number of the tire story on Goose Creek Road (no joke, it’s really Goose Creek) and Westport Road. I think the tire store is a BF Goodrich affiliate. I key in to Bing, then Google the following “BF Goodrich Goose Creek Road Louisville Kentucky”. Guess what! No tire store. I could not locate the tire store which I saw last night on the way home from the gym.
How did I find the tire store? I looked in an old copy of the Yellow Pages.
So much for the personalization, the fancy mash up functions, and the other baloney generated in pursuit of clicks and ad revenue.
Now I learn that I may not see tidy result pages with a reasonable number of hits. I like these fixed length pages because I have some weird ability to remember where I was in a fixed space like a Web page or a giant spreadsheet. When the fixed page is infinite, I have no clue where I was “located.”
Google Experimenting with Infinite Scrolling on Search Result Pages! reminded me of the infinite pictures display on Bing. The latency of that “feature” was enough to relegate Bing.com to the last seat on the goose’s softball team. Bing often never gets in the game. Google imitated the function which I had seen demonstrated a long time ago by an outfit in Israel, whose name I lost when I looked for it a moment ago in Google. Sigh.
My view is that if someone thinks “infinite”, the thought is addled. If you have to do these silly user experience features, rethink where the search box is. Who wants to scroll up an infinite – x vector to reframe a query. Oh, I forgot. Google will predict what I want so who needs to reframe a query.
Wow. Wow. Wow. The real world exhibits latency. I guess in Google Land, latency is trivial, maybe irrelevant. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
Freebie just like ad supported search engines. But at what “cost”?
Holodeck: For Your Spies Only
July 14, 2011
Wired announces. “Spy Geeks Want Holodeck Tech for Intel Analysts.” Yes, finally! Wait, intelligence analysis?
The U.S. intelligence community’s research group DARPA is working on the Synthetic Holographic Observation (SHO) program, which will allow intelligence analysts use holographic displays to collaborate. Oh. I guess that’s cool too.
Though we’re still a long way from the Holodeck as envisioned in Star Trek, writer Adam Rawnsley is emphasizes that this is a step in that direction. More importantly for the current point in history, it could become an indispensible tool for our intelligence officers. The article asserts:
The program is aimed at generating 3-D displays that let analysts get a better feel for the mountains of imagery that the intelligence community collects. In particular, SHO needs to render conventional imagery and LIDAR (light detection and ranging) into holographic light fields. . . .SHO needs to be able to let multiple analysts work together on the same image at the same time. To do that, it has to be interactive. DARPA asking prospective builders to make a hologram that analysts can navigate and manipulate in ways that regular maps don’t allow.
Sounds like a great idea. I look forward to learning more. We think a phase change is search and information access is underway.
Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Search Lion: Innovative Search Results Presentation
July 3, 2011
Short honk: You will want to explore SearchLion.com, a newcomer to the Web search sector. The interface is clean. Enter a query in the search box and click a content type. The search results display. When you click the “open” button, the Web site displays in the white space on the right hand panel of the interface. Click the title and you open the link in a full browser window. The idea is that I did not navigate away from the results list to see a Web site.
In a blog post, the company highlighted two interesting features in its blog post “The Bing Imperative”:
The ability to open search results right on the search page. The ability to view different types of search results at the same time.
At this time, SearchLion is presenting search results from Google or Yahoo within its service. SearchLion suggests it will offer its own index in the near future. Worth a look at how the company is approaching “user experience.”
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2011
Holiday freebie
Adobe, Customer Support, and Malarkey
July 1, 2011
Malarkey is, according to the Free Dictionary, “empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk; “that’s a lot of wind”; “don’t give me any of that jazz”. I learned the word from one of my grandparents who squeezed pennies until they screamed. Close watchers were they. Those folks knew rubbish. So do I.
I read an absolutely amazing write up “The New Art and Science of Great Customer Experience.” I am breathless. No, I am stunned. The author is, according to the post by Eric Savitz (not the author) is written by Rob Tarkoff, a senior manager at Adobe. Now, when I hear Adobe, I don’t think, “customer service.” I think about a Web site that is tough to navigate, my numerous official Adobe user names, and the incredibly awful support for the product I use to write my mindless, vapid monographs—Framemaker.
Come on, Adobe. Tell me how to set a custom color in Framemaker 9 and avoid generating every possible RGB value when I place a JPEG. Please, please, oh, Athena, please. Image source: Morguefile.
I do not think of Adobe and customer service, customer support, or customer anything. I think of annoying updates, ponderous PDF code, and an interface to Framemaker’s custom color controls that make me and my programmers weep in frustration.
Here’s the passage that got me thinking about customer support and search:
Some companies are taking the lead to provide true customer experience innovation. Smart brands are figuring out ways to extend the conversation beyond the purchase experience, creating new customer touch points by encouraging shoppers to share ideas and stories post sales on social sites such as My Starbucks Idea and Nike+. These brands are embracing new channels and new enterprise systems are being built to support them by discarding the constraints of past practices, architectures, and business models that inhibit true CEM.
Yikes, CEM or customer experience management. Wow. Oh, wow.
Today I think that word is just another bunch of baloney. Yep, ground mystery meat in a plastic tube is a good metaphor for “customer service” and its twin “customer experience”. I get the print version of Consumer Reports. One of the write ups in the July 2011 issue is “What’s Wrong with Customer Service?” I suppose this article is online, but for our purpose the article is a report based on what Consumer Reports’ readers perceived. The survey, like any whizzy 21st century mathercise can be distorted like a fun house mirror. Even though I am skeptical of surveys, the Consumer Reports’ data struck me as interesting for three reasons:
The Portal Is Back: What Do You Love? Answer: 1998
June 28, 2011
I labor in the goose pond in the hollow in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. Time stands still in Harrod’s Creek. No joke. One can see walkers, bicyclists, and even horse riders in these parts. What did I see yesterday? A blast from the past: The “new” What Do You Love” service from the Google. If you have not heard about the site from the savvy folks in Silicon Valley—”Google Quietly Rolls Out WDYL.com: A Range of Google Product Results on One Page”—you definitely want to catch up with the Google. My goodness, there are so many informed sources available from prolific experts on other information centric Web sites, WDYL is going viral.
You can check out the service yourself, by navigating to http://www.wdyl.com. You will see a Yandex-style basic search box, sort of a reminder of the way things were at Google and now are at Yandex.
Now run a query for Riemann Hypothesis, which is similar to the type of query that most people run when testing services in my experience. What does WDYL.com display? A mash up of frames that is a portal dressed up in a meat dress. These “containers” present “relevant” results for the user’s query. Here’s what I saw:
A couple of points:
- There were two empty containers. Yikes. I thought that Google would expand the semantic cloud in order to show close matches. Guess not in the case of “Riemann hypothesis.” So two null sets.
- I did not find the offer to “translate” Riemann Hypothesis into 57 languages particularly helpful. Most people who care about the hypothesis recognize the string as it is presented in most of the math books I have examined, including the ones in Hong Kong in March. Yep, English worked, so another null set.
- The photo album is interesting but not germane to my test query. The reason is that this “love” service is more of a demo than a useful and intelligent enhancement for my queries. I did like the mini version of an equation which when I clicked it did nothing. No link I suppose for those who like equations.
- The maps container was a zero as well.
Here’s what I wanted to see in a Google container but did not:
Note that the Yandex display provides a link to the Wikipedia write up which is okay with me. The main hit for me was this one:
For me Yandex delivers on point search results quickly without the “controlled chaos” thing with the null sets, offers to show maps, and other ephemera. No wonder content free content is having such a Six Flags day at the Googleplex.
My initial take is, therefore, pretty much what I noted in the title to this post. Yep, it is 1998. As you may recall, Google rose to fame and fortune because search vendors were chasing the notion of a one stop shop or portal. Google perceives itself as sufficiently big to warrant its own portal.
I think the demo is interesting, but what strikes me is that as Google struggles to make coherent the outputs of controlled chaos, Yandex is chugging along poised to grow as Google loops back to the presentation idea that distracted Excite, Inktomi, Lycos, Yahoo and other search vendors in 1998.
Google exploited that distraction. Will Yandex do the same? Will Google react as did Yahoo in 1998? Exciting times in the world of content free content and empty containers.
Stephen E Arnold, June 28, 2011
From the leader in next-generation analysis of search and content processing, Beyond Search.
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