Cazoodle: Semantic Search
April 3, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Euwyn’s “Cazoodle – Semantic Data-aware Search” here. Developed by Chambana wizards, Cazoodle “looks to create semantic data-aware search for various verticals, starting with apartments, events, and shopping (electronics, for the most part).” Euwyn makes clear that Cazoodle is a vertical search engine; that is, the content focuses on a specific topic such as apartments. Cazoodle said:
[It is] a startup company from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), aims to enable “data-aware” search– to access the vast amount of structured information beyond the reach of current search engines. The company is co-founded by Prof. Kevin C. Chang and his research team of graduate and undergraduate students, with the support of the University and technology transfer from the MetaQuerier research at UIUC. Cazoodle is located at EnterpriseWorks, an incubator facility of the University, on the Research Park of UIUC in Champaign, Illinois.
The company seems to be going in the same direction as Classifieds.com, a Web start up that I found quite interesting. Cazoodle delivers a “semantic data-aware search.” I ran a query for an apartment in Urbana, where I worked on my PhD many years ago. The Cazoodle results looked like this:
The service looks interesting, demonstrating that dataspaces can be useful. I detected a few Google influences as well. Click here to try the beta search.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
Amazon Embraces Hadoop
April 2, 2009
The fleet footed Amazon surprised me. I read Larry Dignan’s Amazon Launches Hadoop Data Crunching Service” here. What interested me was Amazon’s use of the Hadoop framework. According to Mr. Dignan’s write up,
The service, called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is designed for businesses, researchers and analysts trying to conduct data intensive number crunching (statement). Hadoop, which is used by companies like Google and Yahoo, is trying to be pushed into the enterprise data center by startups like Cloudera.
I found this interesting for three reasons:
- Amazon has consistently beaten Google to the punch in the cloud computing push for developers and startups. Google has, in my opinion, watched from the sidelines.
- Google influenced the Hadoop system, which is a variant of the Google MapReduce system. You can find a description in my The Google Legacy (2005) here.
- Amazon, despite its early somewhat unusual approach to infrastructure, has gotten its act together. The clearest indication of this is that the company can integrate new technology into its existing data centers and not go down.
In my view, Amazon is making the transition from digital retail operation to a more serious online force.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Twitter to Add to Search Staff
April 2, 2009
ComputerWorld here reported that Twitter will expand its search staff. Juan Carlos Perez and Chris Kanaracus teamed up and wrote:
Twitter jobs page has 15 open positions, a significant number considering that the small company appears to employ just 25 to 35 people. In February, Twitter announced it had raised $35 million in its latest funding round.
Will the expansion of the search group improve Twitter search? I hope so. The company’s present system forces me to use a number of utilities to perform the types of queries I want to resolve. With soaring unemployment in the tech sector, Twitter can have the pick of the litter. Hire. Improve Twitter search. This is a gentle goose honk to the Twitter top dogs.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Google Leximo Tie Up
April 2, 2009
Leximo is a social dictionary; specifically, “a Multilingual User Collaborated Dictionary that lets you search, discover and share your words with the World.” Google snapped up the company. You can read the Leximo manifesto here. One of the tenets is:
Open community-based and user-friendly functions promote participation, accountability and trust.
What’s Google need a dictionary for? In my opinion, the GOOG wants a flow of new words plus definitions to fatten up its existing knowledgebases. I am confident the idealism of Leximo will persist at the GOOG.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
YAGG Alert: Google’s XPlatform Ad Strategy
April 2, 2009
I don’t pay much attention to online advertising, hit boosting, link baiting, or the other prime rib for the hustling set. As an aged and addled goose, I watch the world go by and the plastic trash floating in my pond. Today I noted a story with the title “Google’s Cross-Platform Advertising Strategy Is a Shambles” by Matt Marshall. You can read the article here. The idea is that there’s yet another Google glitch in the wild. According to Mr. Marshall:
Another problem is that many Internet companies compete against Google — or are anxious about Google’s agenda — and want to promote their own services and ad-selling platforms. Take Google’s DART ad-serving technology. It targets the top 200 publishers, seeking to serve high-priced ads. These top 20 or so publishers account for half of the DART unit’s revenue, but they are hurting in the downturn, and many don’t want to use the service anymore. Yahoo, the largest online publisher, but a fierce competitor to Google, doesn’t use it. AOL, another large publisher, doesn’t use it on its own higher-end properties. Microsoft, the No. 3 publisher, owns its own ad-serving technology, Atlas. And Viacom, another large publisher, recently announced its intention to move away from DART. Aside from that, the massive ad agencies that control the real dollars, lack trust in Google.
This sounded like a botch to me. Mr. Marshall seemed to reach the same conclusion. He wrote:
Regardless, it looks like Google overshot its bounds, a rare misstep for a company that once seemed invincible. Will the fissures continue to grow, making room for some of its more wiley competitors? Or will it quietly shut down the divisions that aren’t producing and act like nothing happened?
In a soft economy, Google can ill afford technical and ad problems in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Digital Video Delivery Cost
April 2, 2009
Short honk: ZDNet Blogs ran a short item called “$400 Mln Spent on Delivering Video via CDNs in 2008” here. Note: the link to the story is longer than the news item. So, $400 million spent hosing digital video. Question: who pays for this stuff? Not me. I prefer text which allows me to acquire information quickly, not at a fixed speed in linear streams. Will Google continue to subsidize YouTube.com? Stakeholders may want some of that money returned as dividends or invested in services that return a profit. Just my opinion and I am not a video person.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Oracle 11g Revealed without Much Info about Search
April 2, 2009
I downloaded a 26 page description of Oracle 11g. You can get a copy of this document here or directly from Bitpipe if you a registered user. I wanted to see if there were any references to search and retrieval in the document. On page 12 I learned that Oracle 11g “lets companies go beyond the manual searching and querying of information to quickly and automatically look through massive amounts of data in order to predict, understand, and develop new insights.”
I also noted this statement on page 17:
“Douglas County School District has been using Oracle SQL Developer for the past year,” Tony Golden, programmer analyst, Douglas County School District, recently noted. “Particularly nice is the ability to have multiple database connections open at the same time and search across all database objects. It is readily available, easy to install, free, much more robust than our old tool. And it just keeps getting better.”
Then on page 24 I noticed:
To help ensure the security of the database, the Oracle Configuration Management Pack provides customizable search and compare features; historical change tracking; policy frameworks and compliance assessment; and a critical patch advisory.
I may have missed a reference, but it is clear to me that search and content processing is not a core focus of the Oracle 11g database. I have been unsuccessful in locating updated information about Secure Enterprise Search. The last version I have documented in SES 10g.
Has enterprise search been marginalized at Oracle? Oracle is a Google partner or was a Google partner. Is that solution available? What about the Triple Hop technology? If a reader has information that sheds light on these questions, please, post in the Comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Google: Jettison the Evil Catchphrase
April 2, 2009
This may be an April 1, 2009, joke. Tom Foremski’s “Google Drops “Don’t Be Evil” Motto” surprised me. Mr. Foremski wrote here:
Google is reported to be searching for a new corporate motto to replace its famous “don’t be evil” because it has become an easy target for its critics.
My addled goose mind conjured up a fresh new slogan: “Do evil.” Any other suggestions.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
QuePlix: Legacy Data Search
April 2, 2009
Several years ago I listened to a presentation from Index Engines. The company developed an appliance that sat in a back up stream. The idea was that an authorized user could search for a document processed by the back up system. I thought the idea was an interesting one. A number of eDiscovery firms address the legacy data issue via other methods. Today the organization wanting to query legacy information has a number of options.
QuePlix offers a search system for legacy data. Troy Dreir’s “QueSearch: A Search Engine for your Legacy Data” here alerted me to another vendor in this market space. Mr. Dreir wrote:
QuePlix has just released the second of its platform-agnostic programs which are each designed to retrieve information from legacy applications. The first solution was QueWeb, which not only extracts legacy application metadata, but then builds a user interface on top of it. The allows the company to make a transition toward new applications while still using the data from legacy apps. Because it’s based on existing systems, there’s no need to train staff on how to use it and that allows for a smoother migration. The program’s simplicity and usefulness translates into a huge ROI, Tenberg says. QueWeb was launched in 2001 and is already up to its third version.
I did have some information in my files about this company. The key points I had noted when I got a demo in 2007 included:
- The company is a Google partner so there’s an integration capability available to its customers
- Customers can use QuePlix’s cloud option and shift some of the hassles to hosted services such as Amazon’s S3
- A white paper provides more detail. You can get it here.
More information as I locate it.
Stephen Arnold, April 2, 2009
Traditional Journalism Is Dead, Well, Not Exactly
April 1, 2009
Short take: the Huffington Post has a way to keep investigative journalism alive. I hope so. Since Gannett bought the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co. in 1986, the investigative and the journalism have disappeared from the newspaper. Click here to read “Huffington Post Launches Investigative Journalism Venture” here. I think this warrants close observation. Great idea.
Stephen Arnold, March 31, 2009
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