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
Njouba: A New Metasearch Engine
September 18, 2008
In a conversation today, I learned about a new Web search engine. The system is Njouba, possibly operated by Ben Ahmed or in Roubaix, France. My research yielded this information. If anyone has more information, please, post it using the comments section to this Web log. With a little poking around, the service may be the work of a sharp programmer responsible for a number of useful services, including an MP3 search engine here.
The About section of the Njouba Web site says,
Njouba is an intelligent Search engine designed for crawling the Web, indexing documents containing information you’re looking for (by specifying keywords) that enables you to find specific information.
I ran several test queries and the results seemed to track with Google’s results. One feature I liked was the tabbed interface which makes narrowing the query to a particular type of content easy. Image search seemed to be inoperable when I tested the system on September 16, 2008, from Paris. The book search returned unusual results for the query “William Shakespeare”.
You can access the system here, and I will add it to my list of metasearch engines.
Google: Artificial Intelligence Activity
September 18, 2008
Google Blogoscoped’s “Google on Artificial Intelligence” provides an interesting compendium of comments about the search king’s smart software. You can read the essay here. The meat of the write up is that the company has had an on going interest in AI or artificial intelligence. Google Blogoscoped references an “internal Google document” published in 2006, which is described here. If you are interested in this subject, you will want to read both of these news items. For me the most interesting point in the blog post was this link to a compendium and quotes. My own research provides a different slant on this topic; namely, the company has had a long interest in finding ways to embed computational intelligence in a wide range of Google operations. The terminology used to describe these innovations does not rely on distinct phrases such as “AI”, “artificial intelligence,” or “machine intelligence.” When Google’s patent documents are searched for common phrases such as these, the result sets are disappointing. Google’s terminology is less direct, using, for example, such terms as “janitors”. Determining the sweep of Google’s use of smart software is a challenging task for some researchers.
Stephen Arnold, September 17, 2008
VivoWare: Yet More Social Enterprise Search
September 17, 2008
Vivisimo told me that it was delivering social enterprise search. I poked around and decided that Vivisimo allowed a user to insert a customer tag (index term) into a document. Now VivoWare asserts that it is a social enterprise search system. You can read the VivoWare explanation here. The VSES (VivoWare Social Enterprise Search) system. The system combines search and social networking. VSES was developed in partnership with Venexus.
VivoWare is an ISP moving into search. The company says:
VivoWare, Inc. was incorporated in Raleigh, North Carolina. VivoWare is a Search Service Provider (SSP) that develops, integrates, and provides social enterprise search solutions. VivoWare’s unique search technology enables businesses and their employees find more relevant information.
VivoWare here explains that it can index and search information in content management systems, file systems and shares, Intranets, RSS feeds, and Web sites. The company’s system also searches image files, standard office documents, and XML. Information about the firm’s technology is here. I have not experimented with the system, but it looks like a federating system with collaboration and “social” functionality provided by Venexus. You can learn more about this company here.
VivoWare and Venexus are deep into the Microsoft mind set. Prices start at $2,500. Oh, when I searched for pricing, the site search engine returned a null set. You can locate pricing on the drop down menu on the site’s home page. I am delighted that one of my two or three readers alerted me to this company, but I have to take a pass on making a definitive statement about the VSES engine at this time.
What is interesting to me is that an Internet services provider is jumping into social search. I spoke with two ISPs in Kentucky and search did not resonate with them.
If you have experience with the VSES system, post a comment using the form at the foot of this article.
Stephen Arnold, September 10, 2008
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