London’s Google Developer Day Summary
September 19, 2008
A happy quack to Tim Anderson for his excellent summary of the key points from Google’s London Developer Day. You can read his summary here. His “Google Developer Day Promotes Web as a Platform” hits the highlights and adds some color. Mr. Anderson adds useful comments like this as well:
There were signs Google is engaged in a platform war, between what it calls the ‘open web’ and proprietary web-development software, such as Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight.
I wish more ZDNet Web log posts were like this one.
Stephen Arnold, September 19, 2008
Autonomy: Quicker than Microsoft Fast Search Yet Again
September 19, 2008
Autonomy continues to out think Microsoft Fast Search. The nimbleness of Autonomy cannot be overlooked by the Redmond giant. Microsoft has revenues of $65 billion or so. Autonomy weighs in with $400 million or $500 million in revenues. Microsoft spent $1.2 billion for an enterprise search vendor which stunned the content processing world with a Web part to integrate SharePoint (a hugely complex content management system) with Fast ESP (an equally complex content processing system). Now Autonomy rolls out its “its information processing technology [that] extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to meet customer requirements for scalability, connectivity and conceptual search.” You can read the details of this new Autonomy product here.
Now if I were involved with Microsoft Fast Search, I would be tempted to say, “Those Autonomy folks have hit on a very good idea.” I might even be tempted to suggest that we buy Autonomy just to get the company’s marketing team. When you have billions in the bank and are fighting to out Google Google, why not buy Autonomy? It makes more sense than trying to weld together Powerset and Ciao.com technology in my opinion.
I don’t know who is running the Microsoft enterprise search operation. There’s been too many executive changes and too few substantive announcements to hold this addled goose’s short attention span. What’s clear is that Autonomy is able to pinpoint cracks in the Microsoft Fast Search armor and exploit them. Anyone who has any hands on experience with SharePoint knows that it’s easy to get a finger crushed in SharePoint’s moving parts. So Autonomy asserts:
Autonomy further extends global MOSS scalability through its distributed, brokered architecture and “geo-efficient” design which allows data to be automatically replicated in the most sensible location based on bandwidth, lag time, availability and demand. This enables high performance and gives users aggregated access to all enterprise information in a unified view in globally dispersed environments while reducing bandwidth overhead. Because IDOL creates a stub, or shortcut, to the data and supports tiered storage rather than requiring that data be stored in SQL Server, organizations using IDOL with SharePoint can further benefit from dramatically reduced SQL Server licenses and associated scalability limitations.
Microsoft may want to pay close attention to how Autonomy deftly points out the finger mashing gears and levers in SharePoint. Next Microsoft may want to put safety covers on the more dangerous bits. If SharePoint and Fast Search continue to dog paddle along, Autonomy and maybe other vendors will find the 100 million SharePoint users easy pickings.
A happy quack to Autonomy for this deft marketing move. A goose gift for the Redmond behemoth who seems unable to organize its parade and get it marching toward the objective of delivering a solution to the scaling problems in SharePoint. Agree? Disagree? Help keep me informed via the Comments function on this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, September 19, 2008
Google and Government Content
September 19, 2008
In the furor over Google’s growing share of the search market and the GOOG’s decision to move forward with its Yahoo ad deal, I can’t fault anyone for overlooking this Federal Computer Week article. “The Search Mandate” by FCW’s John S. Monroe is a brief but important comment about Google. You can read the September 15, 2008, item here. Google, according to Mr. Monroe, does a better job of indexing US government information than the US government. For those unaware of the Government Information Locator Service or GILS, this 1994 initiative was supposed to market it easy to find US government information. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) is killing the program. The reason is that Google and other commercial search engines do a better job than the US government. For most people, the idea that a service like Google’s government search here or the Microsoft-Vivisimo service here or even the little known Yahoo service available by limiting the query to the Dot Gov domain here are better than the Federal government’s home grown GILS is obvious.
For me, this announcement triggered several thoughts. I want to outline these so I don’t have them slip away, and you may want to comment on my opinion about this GILS dead end.
- The scope of the Google government index, based on my test queries, seems broader than the indexes of either Yahoo or Microsoft-Vivisimo. Even queries run on the Department of Energy Web site, indexed by a third party engine, perform less well for me than the same queries run on Google’s government index. Try it yourself. Among my test queries were “ECCS”, “nuclear fuel pool”, and “SWU”. Let me know what you find out.
- The bread and butter of high end professional information services is indexing content from various courts, government agencies, and related sources such as routine documentation about specific programs. Companies generating revenue by indexing public information and adding metadata include LexisNexis (a British Dutch outfit) and Thomson Reuters (Canadian and American). These outfits could witness an increasing erosion of their revenue as knowledge about the usefulness of ad supported or free search services’ ability to offer the same data without the big price tag.
- Useful tools such as those available from Yahoo, for example, make it easy for savvy developers to integrate government information with other services. These mash ups may create more useful ways to look at Economic Research Service data, the reports available from the Department of Commerce, and procurement needs of local, country, state, and Federal entities. Such services would have broader ripple effects than making it easier and cheaper for an attorney to locate a court document.
I have not figured out how important or unimportant the GILS decision is. My hunch is that unless Microsoft and Yahoo can do a better job of indexing US government information, Google may well dominate this information sector as it now dominates Web search. With advertisers and newspapers pawing the ground about the Google Yahoo deal, perhaps some folks smarter than I might want to consider the implications of Google being the primary way to locate government data. A server glitch in such circumstances might make it tough for government workers or citizens to find what they are seeking. The Library of Congress, the individual executive agencies, and various quasi-government organizations seem unable to make their content available and searchable in a comprehensive and timely way. There may be enough Federal employees to print out documents and go through them by hand. A fine kettle of fish is that scenario.
Stephen Arnold, September 20, 2008
Google: Another Cool Patent
September 19, 2008
Anna Patterson left Google to found Cuil, the much-maligned search engine. You can refresh your memory about Cuil here. I learned on September 16, 2008, that the USPTO granted 7,426,507 to Google. Invented by Dr. Patterson, “Automatic Taxonomy Generation in Search Results Using Phrases” discloses:
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases. Related phrases and phrase extensions are also identified. Phrases in a query are identified and used to retrieve and rank documents. Phrases are also used to cluster documents in the search results, create document descriptions, and eliminate duplicate documents from the search results, and from the index.
Now that Dr. Patterson has left Google, it appears to me that she has conveyed some of her technical insights to Google. Nothing unusual in that in the Googleplex. Would Cuil.com have benefited from this invention? If you have any thoughts on this matter, please, post them.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
Google: Voice to Text
September 19, 2008
For me, the question was, “What took so long?” The person who invented some of Google’s voice to text technology is Sergey Brin. If you love reading Mr. Brin’s prose, check out US7027987 here. Once again, I am late to the Web log orgy of posts about Google’s announcement that it would process spoken text, index it, and make the text an adjunct to Google’s video search services. You can read the Google “official” Web log post here. The most important point for me in the short article was this statement:
As with all things in Labs, we will continue to experiment with new features.
The eternal beta is the bane of Google’s competitors. I expect Microsoft and Yahoo to jump into the fray as well. In the rush to emulate Google, the BBN Technologies pioneering work in this field will be overlooked. “What’s a BBN anyway” will be the rejoinders from 20 somethings intent on reinventing the wheel, fire, and suspenders. One bottleneck for voice to text has been the lack of sufficient reservoir of computing horsepower to crunch the data. Another issue is having a sufficient knowledgebase to make sense of the variants in pronunciation. Google, I surmise, believes that it has both of these issues in hand. I will keep you posted on the other horses in the voice to text search horse race.
Stephen Arnold, September 17, 2008
Speed Up SharePoint Search: Cray CX1
September 19, 2008
Want to speed up SharePoint search? The answer may be the Cray CX1. The mini super computer may be what the Microsoft Certified Engineer ordered. Prices start at $25,000 but can rise by a factor of three, depending on the options you need. The Register has a useful description here. The MarketWatch write up is here. Cray–share price about $5–provides more information on its Web site here. No word on how much heat this puppy spits out, however.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
The Google Zeitgeist Bomb Shell
September 18, 2008
News accounts of the Messrs Brin, Page, and Schmidt at the Google Zeitgeist announcement are playing second fiddle to the cratering of the US financial sector. I’m tempted to link to the Associated Press stories, but I won’t. Who wants to be sued when newspapers are in a death spiral, and their house pet are trying to keep their noses out of a sea of red ink.
I’m watching the news flicker across my laptop screen, and most of the stories are about Google hooking up with GE for “green energy.” I ignored this story because Google’s floating data centers remind me of nuclear plant cooling technology. GE knows about these efficient cooling systems, and it struck me that Google’s floating data center patent was a retake on what the utility industry has been doing for decades. There’s a fascination with Google Android and the snubbing of the Apple iPhone for the nifty street imaging. There is a rehashing of Google and Yahoo working to explain that their tie up won’t make much difference in Web advertising. I liked Steve Shankland’s story “Google’s Schmidt: Full Steam Ahead Yahoo Ad Deal”, although the headline is not smooth. You should read his take here.
My take on all this is that the major message from the Zeitgeist hoe down is simple:
We are doing what we want.
I think that focusing on the frippery does me little good. Google is moving forward at increasing speed to leverage its competitive advantages. Whether regulators, competitors, or ad associations are unhappy with the GOOG warrants one of those math club dismissals. Zeitgeist’s meaning for me is, “We are the commercial equivalent of the control exercised by Qin Shi Huan’s ecosystem. Don’t remember who this fellow was? Click here. Think Google dynasty. Agree? Disagree? Share your metaphors.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
Two Social Search Twitches: IBM and Vivisimo Announce Moves
September 18, 2008
What caught my attention was two unrelated announces about social search. I define the opaque yet trendy term as plain old search and email with some sort of ad hoc user interaction permitted. In the right situation, “social search” can be a useful short cut around the need to index at Google scale. Without a slick implementation, “social search” can raise some interesting security issues. But in today’s pressure packed financial world, I think making sales takes precedence over worrying too much about what toothless regulators want organizations to do to conform to ineffectual rules and regulations.
First, IBM announced that it will open an IBM Center for Social Software as part of its Tomorrow at Work program. You can read about YAIL (yet another IBM lab) here. The motivation for the CSS (no, not cascading style sheet, it’s an acronym for the Center for Social Software) is to overcome enterprise resistance to social networking, social search, and other social functions. IBM has enlisted Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters as its first partners in CSS. I am curious about the type of news and financial functions that will be “invented” at the CSS. I find a great many social software functions readily available, including well known (Facebook and MySpace) and less well known or publicized services cataloged quite well on Wikipedia here. I am certain CSS and its partners will push beyond these lesser social innovations in record time.
Second, Vivisimo told Earthtimes here that social search (a branch of social software) can be “a powerful technology deployed by visionary firms to nurture and grow their social capital.” The idea is that getting employees to interact can improve productivity, knowledge sharing, and performance. You can find direct links to a 1998 journal article on the topic and a Vivisimo white paper.
My thought is that email and mobile phones provide most, if not all, of the benefits attributed to social software. Both IBM and Vivisimo want to encourage organizations to use Web 2.0 (whatever that means) technology to gain even greater benefits. The payoff for IBM will be increased sale of its consulting services and products. For Vivisimo, the benefit will be more licenses for its Velocity search system and its function that allows a user to add metadata to a retrieved document.
I look forward to innovations from IBM and more social search functionality from Vivisimo. For me, I will stick to email, my mobile, and some SMS texting to oil the feathers of the Beyond Search addled goose. Social software raises too many issues about security, privacy, and compliance for me to push my beak too deeply into these murky waters.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
Microsoft Powerset Arrives
September 18, 2008
The Powerset Web log contains a summary of the progress made with Powerset’s technology here. You can see the system in action by navigating to Live.com search here and entering the phrase “Chrysler Building”. The system displays an “answer” in the form of an extract from Wikipedia. For me the most interesting part of the Microsoft Powerset article was this statement:
But, many topical queries do not show Answers today such as musicians, albums, films, etc. For this experiment, we selected some of these categories and will return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers we show in Powerset, using data from Freebase. Eventually, we hope to give Answers for even more topics.
The Answers feature, therefore, may not be available to you. If you launch queries not supported by the system, you won’t see any of the Powerset technology.
The demonstration looks interesting, and as the Web log post states, the Powerset team pulled off this impressive display in only 30 days. This contrasts sharply with the Microsoft Fast Search Web part, a project completed in only 45 days. To me, it looks as if Powerset’s presentation of its Wikipedia search demo was easier to port to Live Search than it was for Fast Search to make its pre-existing Web part available for SharePoint.
I am looking forward to more substantive innovations from both Powerset and Fast Search in the near future. Although interesting, both the Powerset and the Fast Search projects left me wanting more. In fact, I thought of the old Wendy’s advertising theme “Where’s the beef?” for both of these initial development efforts.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
AT&T: Ma Bell’s Giving the Internet Another Go
September 18, 2008
I need a scorecard to keep track of the “new” Ma Bell’s Internet initiatives. Disclosure: I worked on AT&T projects when I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. I was a vendor to Bell Laboratories and several units of the pre-break up AT&T. I worked on a programming job at Bell Communications Research, and I was involved in the USWest Yellow Pages Project. I even have a couple of pals who are former Bell Labs’s wizards. Therefore, when I say, I’m confused it’s almost like hearing this from a real Bell head.
The story “AT&T to Link iPhone to U-Verse Video, Internet”. You can read it here. The hook for the story is AT&T’s effort to extend its reach into the Google-verse. Oh, sorry, I meant “Internet world.” I don’t want to go through the history of AT&T’s different efforts in different incarnations in the Internet. Some of them are truly amazing. The split between the “real” AT&T and the separate “hosting” outfit in year 2000 and 2001 were inspired. Then there was the buy out of IBM’s Internet service that became AT&T’s dial up Internet service. Then there was a deal with Yahoo for DSL which was pretty darned amusing. I could go on but won’t.
Now the “new” AT&T is creating a U-Verse to get a piece of the video action. Never mind that AT&T has changed directions more times that my mother when she was fiddling with which figurine went on which shelf. The notion that AT&T is going to glue together its new mobile search service (I think the partner is Yahoo now), the independent Steve Jobs (the dominant force in digital audio and video for money), and an AT&T designed high speed Internet services.
Right.
The traditional telcos can win in the US because the companies can bill people. Elsewhere, life is not so good. Furthermore, Google is a crafty beast, and it has already reached a truce of sorts with Verizon. (Chortle, ha, ha). Here’s what will happen:
- The new service will appear and AT&T mobile customers will get a deal–for a short time. Then the fees hit.
- The partners–Apple and Yahoo–may grumble. AT&T will try to put these outfits in a thumb screw and legal eagles will flap.
- Digital video will remain volatile, a money sink, and contentious.
- AT&T will reload and try again.
If you see another outcome, educate me. Just wear your Young Pioneers’ ball cap and t shirt. If you don’t know what these are, don’t bother writing me. You are uninformed about the way Ma Bell operates.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
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