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
Search: Habits vs Environments
June 2, 2008
In 1980, when you launched the Dialog Information Service search function, the system dumped you into a database about education. From that starting point, you entered a file number. Experienced searchers memorized file numbers; type b 15 and you would be “in” the ABI / INFORM business information file. Type b 16 and you would be able to search PROMT, a collection of business data. Dialog never saw bulletin board systems or the Internet coming.
People fortunate enough to have the money and technical savvy could become online searchers. The technology was sufficiently clumsy and the entire process so unfamiliar to most people as to make online searching an arcane art. Searching in those early days was handled by an intermediary. When I first learned about online databases at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in 1976, the intermediary was the New York office’s boss. I would call the intermediary, explain what I needed, provide a project number, and pick up the outputs on weird thermal paper later that day. As clumsy and expensive as the process was, it was more efficient than doing research with paper journals, printed books, and the horrific microfilm.
By 1983, Dialog had found a market for its mainframe-based search system–librarians. Librarians had two characteristics that MBAs, lawyers, and folks trained in brochure making lacked. First, librarians chose a discipline that required an ability to think about categories. Librarians also understood the importance of having a standard way to identify authors, titles, and subjects.
Second, librarians had a budget to meet the needs of people described as an “end user”. Some of my Booz, Allen colleagues would rush into our corporate library and demand, “Give me everything on ECCS!”
The approach taken by Systems Development (SDC Orbit), BRS (Bibliographic Retrieval Service), DataStar, and the handful of other online vendors was monetized in clever ways. First, a company would pay money to sign up to get a password. Second, the company would send the librarian to training programs. Most programs were free and taught tips and tricks to tame the naked command line. No graphical user interface.
You had to memorize command strings like this one.SS UD=9999 and CC=76?. The system then spit out the most recent records about marketing. The key point is not the complexity. The point is that you had to form specific habits to make the system work. Make an error and the system would deliver nothing useful. Search and retrieval was part puzzle, part programming, and part memorization. At the time, I believed that these habits would be difficult to break. I think the vendors saw their users as hooked on online in the way a life long smoker is hooked on nicotine.
The vendors were wrong. The “habit” was not a habit. The systems were confining, hellishly expensive, and complicated to such a degree that change was hard for vendor. Change for the people who knew how to search was easy. The automatic behavior that worked so well in 1980 began to erode when PCs became available. When the first browser became available, the old solid gold revenue streams started to slip. The intermediaries who controlled online were disintermediated. The stage was set for the Internet, lowest-common-denominator searching, and graphical interfaces. The Internet offered useful information for free. I have dozens of examples of online budgets slashed or eliminated because neither the vendor nor the information professional could explain the value of online information. A visible, direct cost with no proof of payback crippled the original online industry. Many of the companies continue to hang on today, but these firms are in a race that is debilitating. Weaker companies in the commercial database business will find survival more and more difficult.
The notion of online habits persists. There’s a view that once a user has learned one way to perform an online or digital task, it’s game over for competitors. That’s not true. New customer constituencies come into being, and the people skilled in complex, specialized systems can carve out a niche. But hockey stick growth and fat margins are increasingly unlikely for traditional information companies.
Northern Light: High-Quality Information Fuels SaaS Growth
June 2, 2008
David Seuss, founder of Northern Light, revealed in an interview with ArnoldIT.com that its focus on high-quality information is fueling the company’s growth. The company provides search, point-and-click access, and reports via its platform.
Northern Light SinglePoint is a custom, hosted, turnkey solution for strategic research portal applications. Northern Light is one of the leaders in software-as-a-service (SaaS) information access. The company offers a custom, hosted, turn key solution for strategic research portal applications.
He said:
[Northern Light developed] search technology optimized for searching published documents and research reports, and providing effective solutions for research portals for professional users. … We are a technology services provider in addition to being a technology developer.
The company’s business model is anchored in the SinglePoint portal. He said:
A typical SinglePoint portal has 12 external licensed research subscriptions from content suppliers … and one or more internal primary research repositories… SinglePoint is a hosted turnkey solution in which Northern Light provides content integration, search technology, text analytics (MI Analyst), Enterprise 2.0 collaboration (SinglePoint Connects), user interface, search alerts, document and user authentication, administration system, and hosting.
More information about Northern Light’s services are here. This page also features the names of some of Northern Light’s licensees. You can access the full text of this interview here. The interview is part of the Search Engine Wizards’ speak series. You can read the full-text of interviews with more than a dozen search executives here
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2008
Google Tells Everyone: We Are Human
June 2, 2008
Techmeme has a link to the New York Times’ story “The Human Hands behind the Google Money Machine”. There’s also a link to the useful commentary by Henry Blodget, Silicon Valley Insider. By the time you read this, the comments and analyses of Google’s summer openness will be one of day’s key stories.
Last week there were the interviews and postings about Google I/O conference for developers. The best summary I’ve seen is by CNet. Stephen Shankland’s “We’re All Guinea Pigs in Google’s Search Experiment” and his “Google Spotlights Data Center Inner Workings.” Anand Rajaraman provided a technically-significant scoop about Google’s reluctance to rely exclusively on autonomous software. My post is here. The Datawocky piece is here. (I’ve heard that some Googlers call the Google infrastructure “the borg”.)
The flow of information is useful. As I thought about stream of information, I forced myself to step back and ask, “Why now?” Google has never been particularly forthcoming, and its public-facing representatives “run the game plan”. If you haven’t heard that phrase, it means, “Stick to the script.” At conferences, I’ve watched Googlers thrust into a presentation at the last minute struggle through the script.
Here are my thoughts about this new direction:
- The Google sees an opportunity to position itself a thoughtful leader. The emphasis on people shifts the discussion from monitoring clicks and algorithms to people who think about the implications of technology and market needs.
- The messages focus on what Google is doing. The examples say to me, “Hey, guys, we’re doing these things now.” For a competitor, the positioning of activities as actions based on what’s in place may be chilling. It begs the question, “What’s next?”
- Google is maturing, and its management is confident that messages for users, developers, advertisers, and competitors will increase Google’s presence in the market.
What do you think is behind this new transparency? It’s visible in Eric Schmidt’s remarks about mobile advertising , reported by Seeking Alpha, and his earlier comment in the U.K. Telegraph that Google’s founders have grown up. You can read this story here. and enjoy its now-obligatory picture of Messrs. Brin and Page lounging on some of Google’s signature fluffy furniture.
My take is that Google’s management is not behaving in a spontaneous manner. Just as a series of steps makes an algorithm work, this flood of information has my radar oscilloscope flickering. I think the mathematical logic so prized at Google is at work. I’m watching for signs of a big event in the Googlesphere. Semantic Web? Data management? Major buyout close to completion? Maybe.
Controlled transparency is a signal, not an end in itself.
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2008
IBM: Watching Cloud Patterns
June 1, 2008
Last week, IBM announced a cloud-based, software as a service initiative. IBM has partners in this venture, which appears to focus on the insurance niche. The announcement appeared in a news release, and you can read it here.
IBM has teamed with Millbrook, Inc., whose core business is software integration for the insurance industry. Another party to the deal is Sapiens America Corp. Sapiens (whose corporate family tree is pretty complicated) is another specialist with a core competency in property and casualty.
IBM will use its Cognos 8 Business Intelligence system and the Sapiens Insight software. Both systems will make use of the Millbrook property and casualty model.
The idea is that small- and mid-sized insurance agencies will be have access to industrial-strength business intelligence systems without any on premises software. The three companies said in their release:
Business intelligence and predictive analytics tools are becoming the strategic mainstay of how service enterprises in general, and insurance carriers in particular, conduct their daily business. Companies that have near real-time ability to analyze the entirety of their captured business data and extract key performance indicators and accurate answers to “what-if” scenarios can be more responsive to a rapidly evolving business environment and can competitively maximize profitable operations while moving away from risky propositions.
The announcement struck me as significant step for IBM. IBM has been a player in online and cloud-based services for quite a while. In the late 1990s, IBM Global Network ramped up as an Internet service provider eventually selling that business to AT&T. IBM made some noise several years ago about its grid computing capability. Its AlphaWorks initiative has pushed cloud computing as well. Now IBM is testing the water for niche-focused SaaS or Software as a Service. IBM and its new pal Google are working cooperatively on an educational project to stimulate the flow of programmers with expertise in writing programs for distributed systems.
My thought is that this SaaS warrants observation. On paper and in white board “what if” sessions, IBM could deploy a number its software systems as cloud-based services. The question is, “What’s next in online services for IBM?” Will IBM, like Google, sit on the sidelines and watch Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and other companies push this market forward?
Stephen Arnold, June 1, 2008
Related story from InfoWorld here.
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