Why Google Can Land Its Jets at Moffett Field and Oracle Can’t
June 4, 2008
The San Jose Mercury News ran a story with the fetching title, “Google to Build Employee Housing at Huge New Complex at NASA’s Ames Research Center.” You can read the story here. Do this now. Traditional media often make the data bunny go on an egg hunt to find a news story moved to a hidden place on the Web site. Moffett Field is the expanse of flat land adjacent Highway 101 north of San Jose. Let’s just say that it’s prime real estate and skip trying to assign it a value.
The most intriguing passage for me in Brandon Bailey article was:
The company says it will build up to 1.2 million square feet of offices, research and development space, company housing, recreation – and possibly even retail shops for Google employees – on 42 acres of the former Moffett Field property, which it will lease initially for $3.66 million a year. The project is part of Google’s plan for long-term growth, according to company representatives, who said details of the development are still being decided. Construction would start in 2013 and proceed over the next decade.
Several thoughts popped into my mind as I mulled over the implications of this story:
- Messrs Brin and Page will not suffer the indignity that Larry Ellison must tolerate when he tries to land his jet after the San Jose airport closes. $3.66 buys a pretty good parking place I surmise.
- The hopes of Microsoft, Verizon, and other companies who have hoped that Google would self destruct in the next year suffered a set back. This deal says that Google is planning for the long haul. The Googlers won’t kick their plan in gear until 2013 which, if the company’s growth rate continues at its present pace, will occur when the GOOG is in the $50 to $60 billion revenue range.
- Well, that solves the recruitment problem. Japanese companies built dormitories. If you know what the Google song, exercise program, and warm up suit will be, let me know.
Outfits like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Verizon are probably scratching their heads and asking, “What’s with these guys? Did Google switch from advertising to real estate?”
My reminder is that the GOOG is 18 months to 36 months ahead of these companies and, by extension, their executives. I anticipate a joint venture among IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Verizon to buy Los Alamos National Laboratories where there is a great deal of open land available for development.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Does This Mean Users Can Downgrade from Fast ESP to MOSS or ESS?
June 4, 2008
I snagged this post from Apple Insider. One part of my mind says, “It’s a spoof.” Anther part says, “Maybe it’s true and will apply to other Microsoft software?”
Apple Insider writes:
Speaking at an event Tuesday in the nation’s capital, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said his company’s licensing policy allows for customers to install the previous generation of Windows should Vista not impress.
“Customers get both,” he said. “I don’t know how you can do better than getting both.”
You should read the full post here.
The devilish voice said to me, “Will a disenchanted Fast Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) be able to downgrade to SharePoint’s built in Express / MOSS / ESS technology?”
Agree or disagree, a happy quack to the folks at Apple Insider.
Stephen Arnold, May 4, 2008
A Wizard Tells It Straight: The Web Is Not an Operating System
June 4, 2008
Straight up Tim Bray’s post here is one of the best things I have read today, maybe in the last few months. Dr. Bay may not be as well known at Paris Hilton, but he’s been a contributor and innovator for many years. One example: He teamed with Dr. Ramanathan Guha to whack out the document that defined some of the semantic Web’s more interesting bits.
The most important point for me in his excellent essay was:
Lots of modern business is all about pumping information. The classic example would be finance; banks are giant information pumps with cash machines at the edges. Organizations (business, governments, clubs, political parties, religions) who figure out how to surf the new information flow will succeed and prosper; those who push back will be swept away. And it won’t have anything to do with whether anything’s like an OS or not.
Highly recommended, and he hits the theme “the Internet is about people” dead on as well. If you don’t recall any other innovations from Dr. Bray, think SGML. He contributed to that as well. For a fuller bio, click here.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Wikia Search: Social Search Is Blooming
June 4, 2008
I haven’t done much thinking about social search. Years ago when I saw a demonstration of Eurekster, now Euereksterswicki. I thought sites suggested by users was interesting. As the Internet expanded, a small collection of recommended sites would be useful. We built Point (Top 5% of the Internet) in 1993, eventually selling the property to CMGI’s Lycos unit. Social search was a variation on Point without the human editorial staff we relied upon 15 years ago.
Wikia: User-Modifiable Results
The big news in the last 24 hours is the sprucing up of the Wikia Search system. The venture is a result of Jim Wales’ creative nature. If you have not tried the system, navigate here and fire several queries at the system. It’s much more comprehensive than the system I tested several months ago. I still like the happy cloud logo.
I ran the query “enterprise search” on the system. The result was a pointer to Northern Light. The second result was a pointer to the enterprise search entry in Wikipedia. So far so good. What sets Wikia apart is that I can use an in-browser editing function to change a hit’s title. I can also move results up and down the page. I can see how that would be useful, but I save interesting hits to a folder. I then return to these saved files and conduct more in-depth investigations. So, the system generates results that are useful to me, contains a dollop of community functionality, and sports a larger index. You can read more about the system on Webware.com, which has a useful description of the service here.
Vivisimo’s Social Search
In New York at the Enterprise Search Summit, someone asked me, “Have you seen Vivisimo’s new social search system?” My answer was, “No, I don’t know much about it.” When I returned to my office, I have a link to Vivisimo’s explanation of social search. Vivisimo announced this function in October 2007, and I think that the catchphrase hooked some people at the New York show, and You can read the announcement here.
The point that resonated with me is:
Enabling users to vote on, rate, tag, save and share content within the search interface is just the first step in creating a collaborative information-enriching environment. Velocity 6.0 allows users to add their own knowledge about information found via search directly into the search result itself in the form of free-text annotation.
In this context, social search means that I can add key words or tags to an item processed by Vivisimo. The term is added to the index. If I provide that term to a colleague, the index term can be used to retrieve the document. An interactive tagging feature is useful, but it was not the type of functionality that I use. Others may find the feature exactly what is needed to make behind-the-firewall search less frustrating.
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Social search taps into the wisdom of crowds. Some crowds are calm, even thoughtful. Others can be a management opportunity.
Baynote
Today I received an email from a colleague asking, “Did you see the social search study published by Baynote, Inc. Once again, the answer was, “No, I don’t think so.” I clicked on a link and went through a registration process (easily spoofed) to download PDF of the six-page report.
Baynote is a company specializing in “on demand recommendations and social search for Web sites.” You can explore the company’s Web site here. I didn’t read the verbiage on the Web page. I clicked in the search box and entered my favorite test query, beyond search. No joy The three hits were to information about Baynote. (The phrase beyond search sent to Clusty.com delivers a nice link to this Web log, however.)
I clicked back to the PDF report and scanned it. The main idea I garnered from the white paper is:
Baynote combines a site’s existing search engine results with community wisdom to produce a set of optimized results that is proven to yield greater conversions, longer engagement, and improved satisfaction. Thus, Social Search can be thought of as a community layer on top of the site’s existing search engine. The original search results may be re-ordered in the process, and the augmented results may include additional results that weren’t originally produced by the search engine, but proven to be valuable to your Web site visitors. Because Baynote is delivered as SAAS (software as a service), it can be live on a Web site in as little as 30 days with little or no development, installation or configuration.
If you have an existing search system, you can use Baynote as an add-on. With minimal hassle, you can rank results using the Baynote algorithms, monitor user behavior to shape search results, generate See Also references, and merge results from different collections.
I’m going to update my mental inventory about search, adding social search to list of search types that I lug around in my head.
Observations
I do have reservations about social anything. I’m 85 percent convinced that the Vivisimo and Baynote approaches have merit. But I want to end this short item with these observations:
- Social anything can be spoofed. When I visited Los Alamos National Labs, people with access to the facility fiddled with hard drives and other digital assets. If this stuff can happen at a security-conscious facility, imagine what a summer intern can do with social search in your organization.
- Users often have very good ideas about content. Other users have very bad ideas about content. When there are lots of clicks, then the likelihood of finding something useful edges up. The usefulness of Delicious and StumbleUpon are evidence of this. However, when there are comparatively few clicks, I’m inclined to exercise some extra caution. Tina in the mail room is a great person, but I’m not sure I trust her judgment on the emergency core cooling system schematics.
- The lightweight approach to tagging is not going to yield the type of information that a system like Tacit Software’s provides. If you want social, then take a look at Tacit’s Active Net system here.
- My hunch is that nearly invisible monitoring systems will yield more, higher quality insights about information. In some of my work, I’ve had access to outputs of surveillance systems. The data are often quite useful and generally bias-free. Human systems have humanity’s fingerprints on the data, which can obscure some important items.
Social search can be quite useful. Its precepts work quite well in high traffic environments. In more click sparse environments, a different type of tool is required to ferret out the important people and information.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Changes in Store for Microsoft Live.com Search
June 4, 2008
Jessica Mintz filed an information-charged story on June 3, 2008. Titled “Microsoft Exec Says Live Search Needs Image Fix.” Please, read her article here. These AP pieces have wacky urls and can be tough to find a day or two after the stories appear.
There were several points in her write up of Kevin Johnson’s talk at a conference operated by Third Door Media. Mr. Johnson is the president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, and he is one of Microsoft’s top dogs in the search-and-retrieval sector.
The points that struck me as particularly important were:
- There is brand confusion. A fix or a change may be in the cards
- Microsoft is working to convince stakeholders that it has a plan in the aftermath of the bolloxed Yahoo deal
- Microsoft is focusing on “commercial intent queries”, which I think means buying something.
What’s tough for me to convey in this short commentary is the tone of Mr. Johnson’s remarks. For some reason, I heard this highly-paid wizard expressing himself with a tinge of frustration.
Google’s been chugging along for a decade, and the company shows few signs of losing steam. When old Google wizards become Xooglers, young wizards take a close look at Google as the equivalent of a cow being stamped “Grade A Prime”. Legal documents hurled at Google have done little to slow the GOOG.
With Microsoft’s Web search market share sliding, maybe I am reading emotion into Mr. Mintz’s summary of Mr. Johnson’s remarks. Check out the story and let me know if you agree or disagree. Try to locate this story using http://search.live.com. When I checked, the story wasn’t in the Live.com index. The GOOG had indexed it. I think Google makes an effort to index Microsoft-related stories. What do you think?
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Nstein: One of the Fastest Growing Companies in Canada
June 4, 2008
I last took a close look at Nstein in early 2006. A long-time acquaintance had been involved with the company. The firm drifted of my radar. Earlier this year, I pinged the company to get an update. Communications were interesting. I wrote about Nstein’s user group meeting here. Today Nstein blipped my radar as one of the 100 fastest-growing companies in Canada.
I try to keep one eye peeled on Canadian engineers. The University of Waterloo spawned OpenText and Research in Motion. The University of Toronto and several other schools have generated top-notch engineers for decades. But I admit that overlooked Nstein as one of the top financial performers in Canada.
According to the information I received from the company today (June 3, 2008):
[Nstein] has made the PROFIT 100 list of Canada’s fastest-growing companies in 2007. With 1,244% growth in revenues over the past five years, Nstein made a remarkable entry into the list – ranking 51st in Canada and 6th in Québec.
he new positioning of the company suggests that the firm is shifting away from its roots in text processing. The Web site is different from the one I recall from 2006. Gone is the quickly Nstein logo. That bit of whimsey has been replaced with a more serious design. With a new president, new positioning, some acquired technology, Nstein is growing.
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The “old” logo on the left reminds me of Einstein’s haircut. The new logo on the right reminds me of the hard edged graphics favored by business-oriented firms.The tagline tells exactly what the company does. I no longer associate the firm with a core competency in text mining, which may be an incorrect notion.
I had pigeon-holed the company as a player in the text processing market. Not so. Today’s Nstein is “a leader in digital publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines, and online content providers.” This description reminded me to Fast Search & Transfer’s newspaper and publishing business. As you may know, Fast Search offered a content processing solution built on the company’s Enterprise Search Platform.
Nstein’s approach is to offer a multilingual solution that edges into Web content management, digital asset management, text mining, and image management. If you want to know more about Nstein’s products and services, navigate to the Nstein Web site here.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
How Much Info Is There? The Answer Is Coming
June 3, 2008
A happy quack to the colleague who sent me the link to this story: “Groundbreaking UC San Diego Research Study to Measure ‘How Much Information?’ Is in the World”. You can read this story here.
What hopped off the screen was this statement:
We have designed this research as a partnership between industry and academics to take the next steps in understanding how to think about, measure, and understand the implications of dramatic growth in digital information,” said Professor Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, co-leader of the new program. “As the costs per byte of creating, storing, and moving data fall, the amounts rise exponentially. We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.”
Wizards from many high-profile organizations will work to answer this question. In the meantime, I’ll keeping upgrading my storage devices and parking data on cloud storage services. My data grows 2X each year. I wonder how much data my neighbor’s 14-year-old video music collector stores. I’m certain he’ll provide hard data. Maybe it will be easier to ask his parents. Neither uses a computer. Also, I bet the folks in Brazil, China, India, and Thailand, among other data centric countries will be particularly forthcoming.
I’m looking forward to the results of this study.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Composite Shows Appliance for Business Intelligence
June 3, 2008
Business intelligence the old-fashioned way required specialized math and programming skills and a big honking computer to crunch data. Composite Software Inc. has released its business intelligence appliance. Called Composite Discovery, the system integrates on a ready-to-run server business intelligence and analytics software. The system also integrates a search function so you can locate specific information via a search box.
The system allows a user to create what the company calls “reusable recipes” to make it easy to share queries or models with colleagues. Running a standing query becomes a single click task.
Like other appliances, multiple devices can be connected to handle larger volumes of data. Unlike the Exegy appliance, this device is designed to allow an organization to deploy a complete business intelligence system without having to integrate outputs from one system with another content processing component.
Composite Appliance framework.
License fees begin at $150,000. A monthly plan is available, but you should contact the company to get a custom price quote.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2008
Coveo: Beyond a Billion Documents
June 3, 2008
Most licensees of enterprise search systems don’t know how many documents the system must index. Coveo can handle more than 1,000,000,000 documents.
Even fewer search system licensees know that many enterprise search systems have hard limits on how many documents a system can index before choking, sometimes expiring without warning. For example, Microsoft SharePoint has a hard limit significantly below the Coveo billion document target. Microsoft acquired Fast Search & Transfer, in part, to have a work around for this scaling problem.
Coveo’s G2B Information Access solutions deliver security, relevant results, and very strong ease of use. You can “snap in” Coveo to SharePoint, Documentum, and IBM FileNet environments without custom coding. For more information, navigate to the Coveo Web site. A free trial is available.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2008
Google Custom Search Tweaked
June 3, 2008
After goosing the Google Mini, Google has made some changes to its Custom Search Engine Business Edition program. The biggest change is dumping this wacky name and replacing it with GSS for Google Site Search. Regardless of the name, Google offers cloud-based Web site indexing.
The service allows a Web site administrator to use Google’s Web indexing system to index a Web site. The GSS gets date biasing which uses a tiny bit of Google’s time functionality. The idea is that you can now put newer information at the top of a results list. This is not true time stamping, but it’s better than the chronologically-challenged results lists that Google has imposed on its users for a decade. GSS hooks into Google Analytics.
GSS is not free. You can put up with ads on your site index. Alternatively, you can pay the GOOG $100 for a year of service for indexing up to 5,000 pages. Go over that amount, and you have to pay more if you want more pages indexed.
Techmeme has a useful series of links on this subject here. You can read more at ComputerWorld here. The InternetNews.com story is here. The Ecommerce Times story is here.
The impact of this change is modest, but it has four implications. First, Google can add features to GSS at low incremental cost. For example, Google has technology that allows a participating site to send XML “instructions” to Google. A Web administrator might use this type of “push” to program the behavior of the GSS engine, which is separate from the public Web index. Code widgets can allow other operations as well. Second, the appeal of a low-cost, no-hassle approach to indexing a Web site is significant. This is not a new idea, but it is the first time that a company with Google’s brand power has make this type of service available on such a broad scale. Scale is the differentiators. Third, today’s user of a Google cloud-based service like Web site indexing becomes tomorrow’s prospect for more robust data management and information services. Fourth, vendors of search and retrieval software have one additional pressure point being touched by the GOOG somewhat less gently than before.
Think of this as a digital variation of a long-term, upsell opportunity.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2008
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