Video Sites and Search
January 27, 2009
ZDNet posts interesting statistical data, a bit like the old Predicasts’ File 16 data on Dialog minus the type charges. On January 23, 2009, Alex Moskalyuk summarized the comScore video site traffic data. You can view his original post here. I took a look at the data and did some quick fiddling around. I was interested in how much additional traffic one of the video sites listed would have to generate to pull even with YouTube.com in the month reported in the table. Here’s my rework:
| Property | Viewers, 000 | Share | Traffic Needed |
| Total Internet | 146,064 | 100.00% | — |
| Google Sites | 97,928 | 67.045% | — |
| Fox Interactive Media | 58,115 | 39.787% | 39,813 |
| Yahoo! Sites | 39,956 | 27.355% | 57,972 |
| Microsoft Sites | 34,979 | 23.948% | 62,949 |
| Viacom Digital | 27,109 | 18.560% | 70,819 |
| Hulu | 22,456 | 15.374% | 75,472 |
| AOL LLC | 22,442 | 15.364% | 75,486 |
| Turner Network | 20,735 | 14.196% | 77,193 |
| Disney Online | 13,028 | 8.919% | 84,900 |
| Time Warner – Excl. AOL | 12,564 | 8.602% | 85,364 |
| Source: comScore | |||
What’s interesting is that Hulu.com, to pick one video site that gets a lot of hype as a YouTube.com competitor needs to attract 75,486,000 more visitors to match YouTube.com’s traffic. What surprised me what the strong showing of Fox Interactive Media. Fox needs only 39,813,000 more visitors to reach parity with YouTube.com. I don’t watch video but it seems that Google’s 67 percent market share in video may not be as solid as its 70 percent share in Web search. The gap in video is narrower at least for Fox.
Stephen Arnold, January 27, 2009
Lucene SOLR Challenger in Enterprise Search
January 27, 2009
I received an email about Marc Krellenstein’s leaving a big dead tree publishing outfit and joining Lucid Imagination. Mr. Krellenstein came on my radar when he worked on the search system used by Northern Light. I lost track of him until he appeared at a conference under the aegis of a dead tree publishing company. His presentation, as I recall, was a highly useful, deeply informed discussion of the Lucene open source search system. With the information that he was joining the stealth outfit Lucid Imagination here, I figured that his enterprise and Lucene background would play a major role. ZDNet’s Paula Rooney’s “Lucid Aims to Be Top Open Source Enterprise Search Player” confirmed my suspicions. You can read her story here. She reveals that the licensing fee for the open source system will be positioned as a subscription. Unlike some of the brand name solutions, the annual subscription “will range from $12,000 to $18,000 per year.” If you check out the pricing of Google Search Appliance solution, Lucid Imagination becomes a bargain. Compared to some of the brand name vendors, the subscription fee is one-fifth the starting price of commercial systems. You can get open source search systems from other companies. I have written about Tesuji and Lemur Flax. Both warrant a look if you are interested in open source search systems with support and consulting to smooth life’s little wrinkles in information access. As the economy worsens, lower cost search solutions may warrant a closer look.
Stephen Arnold, January 27, 2009
ChaCha: Social Search Dances for Big Money
January 27, 2009
About 2.5 hours north of the hollow where the Beyond Search goslings write Web log posts is Indianapolis, Indiana. A suburb of Indianapolis is Carmel, Indiana, population 40,000. Carmel has a search engine, and that search engine has “secured $11 million of a $30 million Series C round.” One of the investors is Bezos Expeditions which brushes up against Amazon. Good news for ChaCha.
ChaCha.com is a question-and-answer system. The company reports that it has three million people on record as having tried the system. In terms of traffic, here’s Google Trends for Yahoo.com, Ask.com, and ChaCha.com.
Here’s the interface:
To get the results, the user then creates an account shown below:
The company sends the activation code to a mobile phone. For me, the system reported unknown mobile device.
After working around that problem, the system did not have an answer to my question, “What is a Google Search Appliance?”
I have this company in my monitoring list. Right now, I don’t feel comfortable offering too many “from the hollow” comments. With more money, ChaCha.com should be able to raise its profile and demonstrate its business model to me.
Stephen Arnold, January 27, 2009
Knol: One More Thing
January 26, 2009
The GOOG’s Matt Cutts, writing on his personal Web log, offers up a parental “Four Things You Need to Know about Knol.” Gentle reader, the story is here. I assume the use of “you” by Mr. Cutts meant me. I looked at his points from my goose-like perspective.
I liked the idea that Google doesn’t favor its own products and services. The assertion may be accurate in terms of Knol but if you search for “enterprise search” you get some results that place Google as the seventh hit in the results list this morning. There’s an ad for a Google Webinar. This supports the assertion that Google is not favoring Google services.
Second, he points out that Knol is “doing fine”. This is a bit like Amazon talking about “objects” in its cloud services. The problem is what’s an object and what’s “fine” mean. Knol has about 100,000 articles. I assume that 100,000 is fine. If so, then why is there a Knol for Dummies campaign underway here?
Third, the Knol team is moving. I agree. Subtle changes creep into Knol; for example, the notion of “authoritative” has obviously been tweaked by the Knol team. Mr. Cutts enjoins me to “write a quick article or put some information on the Web.” My question is, “What’s authoritative mean?’
In short, the “four things” are interesting. The one thing that my research Knol is / was supposed to do was provide inputs to the Google knowledge bases. “Some information” does not match up with the disclosures in Google’s public documents–for example, US20070038600–about its knowledge bases.
Knol certainly warrants observation. More on Knol appears in my forthcoming Google study, The Digital Gutenberg.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
More on Google and Control
January 26, 2009
Search Engine Journal’s “Unable to Change Googlebot Crawl Rate via Google Webmaster Tools” provides some insight into Google’s ability to implement variable controls. The article addresses the situation in which a Webmaster wants Google’s indexing robot to “crawl faster”. For some Webmasters, the Google administrative controls don’t work. Ann Smarty provides some information about this situation. She ignores one reason of which I thought: Google wants to control what happens with regards to indexing a specific site. The GOOG’s ability to implement fine grained controls makes clear what Google’s resources for control of its sprawling infrastructure is revealed in this write up in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
SharePoint How to Code That Shows How Not to code
January 26, 2009
I double checked the links to how to information in Microsoft’s official blog post about SharePoint business intelligence on January 25, 2009, at 7 pm Eastern. Still broken. You may have better luck than I do, but this type of carelessness is what makes me increasingly nervous about SharePoint. The article was “Microsoft Business Intelligence Strategy Update and SharePoint” here. The post asserts that the interesting interactions among SharePoint, PerformancePoint, Excel, and SQL Server are ready for prime time, industrial strength business intelligence. There’s a lot of buzzwords in the write up. My attention went to the links in this paragraph:
More information is available on http://www.microsoft.com/bi regarding this announcement; here are some links to specific product capabilities and how-to’s, to help you get started. Now, there is no excuse to start rolling out a complete BI solution, one that you know will be utilized because it uses the technologies you know today, and works with the systems you are already familiar with.
The key link for the Beyond Search goslings was the one that explained to get these often incompatible and mutually unintelligible parts to work. Guess what? The link’s dead. The author Pej Javaheri made one of those all too common Microsoft arabesques: explanations that are not backed in example code. Perhaps the layoffs and financial challenges overrode the need for getting the details in order. If you can locate these how to’s, put the information in the comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
Google and Video Playing Technology
January 26, 2009
I don’t pay much attention to online video. The trophy generation and the short attention span types do. Google tried its hand at its own video player and then shifted to Flash. If you care about video, you may want to check out Google’s invention disclosed in US20090024923. The abstract for this said:
Embedded Video Player Abstract A system, method and various user interfaces provide an embedded web-based video player for navigating video playlists and playing video content. A Web site publisher can create and store a video player with customized parameters (e.g., player type, appearance, advertising options, etc.) and can associate the player with a playlist of selected videos. The stored video player is associated with a player ID in a player database and can be embedded in a Web site using an embed code referencing the player ID. A user interface for the embedded player provides controls for controlling video playback and for controlling the selection of a video from the playlist.
Why is Google noodling a player? Two reasons. Why help out Adobe? Get more control over the experience in the browser or composite application. Google wants control to have some response to this type of situation. The video push is a real deal. Google has a cluster of video inventions, which signals to me an initiative.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
Information Technology Experts
January 26, 2009
With the proliferation of clueless management, information technology carpet baggers have had a willing if uninformed clientele. I know. You want to tell me that your clients are well informed and understand your expertise. You may even have a core competency. But when you get to be my age, you learn you don’t much at all. What you do know is changing quickly. With each passing day, my knowledge loses currency and I become dumber. Not surprisingly I have, like the turtles that once lived in Beargrass Creek, become cautious, slow moving, and conservative.
What happens when clueless clients encounter carpet baggers? I will get to that in a moment. I want to make sure you know what a carpet bagger is. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, a carpet bagger is “a Northerner in the South after the American Civil War usually seeking private gain under the reconstruction governments.” When I use the term, I put a spin on the connotation; namely, “a nonresident or new resident who seeks private gain from an area often by meddling in its business or politics.” I also spell the word with a space between carpet and bagger to remind myself that these were cheap briefcases in the 19th century.
Image source: http://i175.photobucket.com/albums/w127/CAITIpix/carpetbagger.jpg
Consultants who are carpet baggers may not recognize that their firm and its employees are practicing this type of work. Today 20 year olds don’t want to hear from an intellectual turtle in Kentucky that their analysis of a situation might be uninformed. Better to terminate the deal. I fired a client in Manchester, England. My radar lit up, and I jumped off that reed boat.
I read the Bloomberg story here with the chilling headline “Price Waterhouse Auditors Arrested in Satyam Inquiry.” The story does a very good job of explaining how two Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ professionals were arrested for “conspiracy and co- participation”. We have an allegedly crooked information technology consulting firm and allegedly crooked financial consultants. What’s that mean for customers of these two outfits? Here are my thoughts:
- Complex technology requires that an organization’s senior management understand the business problem, the technology that will be used to resolve the problem, and the risks involved. A failure to assume this responsibility makes it easy for trophy-generation consultants and nice guys like Mr. Madoff to practice their allegedly dark arts.
- As complexity of software and systems increases, the likelihood of improper behavior seems to me to go up. Look at the dust ups over content management and enterprise search systems that don’t manage content and can’t locate information. A specific example is the US government’s decision in one matter to terminate two companies’ contracts. I am not sure what subsequent legal hula hooping took place.
- Some vendors’ willingness to allow marketing to be science fiction and technology a work in progress seems to be spreading. Clueless clients or lazy procurement teams just want to be told that a system will do the job. Whether that system can or will do the job is of little concern. Turnover and other uncertainties often mean that there will be no consequences for flops.
I have been around too long to think that any change will take place to inject the clueless managers with knowledge. Hopefully the present financial crisis will allow the those with knowledge and a desire to behave in a responsible manner to make some gains. In the meantime, it’s probably a good idea to recalibrate your use of Satyam’s services and PricewaterhouseCooper’s advice.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
The Zune Effect
January 26, 2009
Activenetwork has a short news item “Frankly Speaking: For Microsoft, the Pain Is Just Beginning” here. The short item’s headline stated what few want to believe. The snippet included this sentence, “…It’s big because it means Microsoft has begun to hit bottom… Microsoft has never learned the lessons of the original IBM. My thought was that this statement is not 100 percent accurate. Microsoft’s combination of multiple initiatives, technical tangles, and market missteps deserves a name. I suggest “the Zune effect.” Apple trundles happily along. The Zune effect. Google chugs forward. The Zune effect. A working definition, “A mix of bad timing, technology issues, and misreads of the market set the stage for a rough journey.” Thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
Exalead: Moving the Front Line
January 26, 2009
A happy quack to the reader in California who sent me an update on Exalead. In the last 10 days, I have received a steady flow of news. The company continues to make headway in the US market.
The company has announced CloudView OEM Edition 5.0. This is a version of the product that can be embedded in third- party applications. The product has been designed for independent software vendors and software as a service providers. The OEM edition includes performance improvements with tweaks to make embedding easier and quicker. The product, as I understand it, can be used to add search and sophisticated content processing functions to email, CMS, call center, and other information centric applications.
Paul Doscher, CEO of Exalead said:
As the use of traditional Web and Web 2.0 technologies including wikis, instant messaging, social networking, and collaboration has proliferated within the enterprise, users have come to expect the same simplicity, speed, and scale from their enterprise software providers. The challenge for ISVs is to provide that same experience in their search capabilities without sacrificing the security and precision required for enterprise use. Exalead CloudView OEM Edition helps them deliver on that challenge.
(Note: you can read an exclusive January 2008 Beyond Search interview with Mr. Doscher here.)
Features of the new product include:
- Ability to deal with petabytes of data
- Aggregation, collation, and normalization of data from disparate structured and unstructured sources; for example, HTML, Microsoft Office documents and other files scattered across corporate servers, data located at SaaS providers, active and archived e-mail, relational data, proprietary application data, etc.
- Support for fuzzy and precise relevancy
- Small CPU and disk footprints
- Scalability to handle spikes
- High peak user concurrency
- Support for existing interfaces, security models, and data source
- Multi language support.
In my April 2008 Gilbane Group report Beyond Search I highlighted Exalead’s architectural advantage. Based on my research, Exalead and Google tackle scaling and performance in somewhat similar ways. (Note: the founder of Exalead was a senior AltaVista.com engineer. You can read an interview with François Bourdoncle here.)
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
