Google, Micro-Blogging: Makes Perfect Sense
May 14, 2009
Google, the tarantula of the web, purchased Jaiku in October 2007, a service that allows it’s users to gather micro-blogs from other Web sites. The content can be viewed via the Web or by mobile phone. Google open sourced Jaiku in January 2009, just as Twittermania was gaining momentum.
Google’s decision could be a vote of confidence for open source, or it could be a response to Google’s failure to gain traction among the Twitterati.
Sites like Twitter, Flickr and MySpace each offer their own twists and user-friendly ways of appealing to mass amounts of micro-bloggers and furthermore, potential customers, but using a site that collects each feed and makes it accessible through one’s cell or computer, just makes sense.
In a business world where it’s crucial to keep in contact and notice emerging trends, it would be easy to spend your entire day signing-in and utilizing the sites previously mentioned. Google, despite its success in other search spaces, recognized the importance of real time search in its recent Searchology mini-camp.
The reality may be that Twitter, despite the hype, may be a challenger to Facebook. Facebook’s recent redesign nods in the direction of Twitter. Google, on the other hand, acknowledges the importance of real time search, making a distinction between Twitter’s indexing of tweets and the larger, Google-scale challenge of real time search of Web content.
“Less talk and more indexation” is the goose’s cry.
Hunter Embry, May 15, 2009
Google Apps Click Forward
May 13, 2009
Valeo, according to Computer Weekly here, has signed a three year deal for Google Apps. The account will be serviced by Capgemini. The article said:
About 30,000 workers will use Google’s software, which is delivered over the internet as a cloud computing service. The automotive components maker wants to reduce its administration costs so is using a communication and collaboration platform based on Google Apps Premier Edition. Valeo has 192 locations in 27 countries.
Important global deal for the GOOG in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
Creating Search Confusion
May 13, 2009
In the old days of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, one could count of giant software companies to baffle customers. The idea was that if a customer is not sure what to do, that customer will do nothing or go with the name brand.
Now media giants are creating FUD in the Web search space and, in some cases, muddying the water for enterprise search systems as well. Not a great example but a pretty good one is the article “New Search Engines Aspire to Supplement Google” here. The story ran on the CNN.com Web site.
The write up runs through a laundry list of alternative search engines; for example, Hakia (semantic system), Kosmix (Google centric mash up system), Wolfram Alpha (yet to be released system). The main point of the article, in my opinion, was this statement:
Instead of trying to be Google killers, these sites have more humble aspirations: to be alternatives to the industry giants.
The idea is one that I have been stating since the publication of my 2005 The Google Legacy here; namely, Google’s advantage is scale, cost control, and incremental improvements that are tough for most users and competitors to spot.
There’s another message in this article, and I think it is important. Newcomers in search are not going to knock off, slow, or kill Google quickly. Most of the systems are utilities.
The problem that is not addressed is that the average user has zero information about which search utility to use, under what circumstances, and how the returns enhance or duplicate what Google outputs.
In my work, when a user is confronted with a new search system, some users will test the system. The vast majority of users follow the well worn ruts that have worked in the past. For an astounding number of people worldwide, search means Google.
The challenge for the user is to figure out which new system delivers a payoff and then the new system vendor has to work quite hard to get those users habituated. With new search engines creating a global PR knee jerk, the result is that users will do the turtle; that is, pull in their head and go with what they know. The choice right now seems Google.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
Microsoft Dismissing Rumors
May 13, 2009
Investment mavens love buy out rumors. Chatter causes churn. As long as one gets a commission on buying and selling, the commission cash register rings. A number of top drawer news outfits reported that Microsoft was once again thinking about gobbling the software giant SAP. Bloomberg here reported that Microsoft is done with SAP and tossed in the observation that Microsoft was done with job cuts.
I heard a rumor about an enterprise acquisition road map. On that cartographic view of the future, Microsoft thinkers had identified a number of potential acquisitions. Some of these were in the enterprise space. I don’t have any details about the hypothetical targets, but I got the impression that Microsoft like Autonomy and Oracle is thinking about buying customers and market share in certain enterprise market sectors.
SAP is an interesting company. But there are other potential targets as well; for example, what about certain telecommunication players?
Microsoft may have to start buying and buying big. The reason? Structural changes are now taking place in enterprise applications. Even if the economy turns around, the punishing costs of on premises software may suck revenue from Microsoft’s core revenue streams. A loss of a few percentage points could ripple through the company. Rumors usually arise from a tiny crumb of fact. Acquisition thinking is in the spring breeze, but we don’t know the targets… yet.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
Text Analytics Data from Hurwitz and Associates
May 13, 2009
IT Analysis published Dr. Fern Halper’s “2009 Text Analytics Survey” here. The core of the essay was data from a longer Hurwitz and Associates study, which I have not seen. Based on the data in the article, you may want to get the full study. Two items jumped out at me.
First, customer and competitive intelligence were text analytics drivers. The also ran? Compliance. Second, and more surprising, implementation was as software as a service.
Interesting data.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
Some Google in the White House
May 13, 2009
A month ago, I received a call from a journalist asking about the Obama White House’s uses of Google. I did not answer the question because big time journalists ask me question, and I am not a public library reference desk worker any more.
One insight can be found here. Google said:
App Engine supports White House town hall meeting
In late March, the White House hosted an online town hall meeting, soliciting questions from concerned citizens directly through its website. To manage the large stream of questions and votes, the White House used Google Moderator, which runs on App Engine. At its peak, the application received 700 hits per second, and across the 48-hour voting window, accepted over 104,000 questions and 3,600,000 votes. Despite this traffic, App Engine continued to scale and none of the other 50,000 hosted applications were impacted. For more on this project, including a graph of the traffic and more details on how App Engine was able to cope with the load, see the Google Code blog.
How Googley is the Obama White House? Pretty Googley I hear.
Ste3phen Arnold, May 13, 2009
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Google Time
May 13, 2009
Searchology strikes me as a forum for Google to remind journalists, the faithful, unbelievers, and competitors that the GOOG is the big dog in search, You can read dozens of reports about Google’s search enhancements, A good round up was “Google Unveils New Search Features” here. Don’t like AFP, run this query on Google News and pick a more useful summary. For me, the key announcements had to do with time. The date of a document and the time of an event are important but different concepts. Time is a difficult problem, and Google’s announcements underscore the firm’s time expertise. Timelines? No problem. Date sort? No problem. For me what’s important is that time prowess is a tiny tip of much deeper underlying technical capabilities. The Google has some muscles it is just starting to flex.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
Open Source Surprise
May 12, 2009
CNet here reported that up to 24 percent of software purchases are open source. Are the data 99.9 percent accurate? No. Are the data instructive? Yep. The reason is that a decade ago, open source would have been almost unmeasurable. Matt Asay wrote:
Today, if you look at the most successful open-source businesses, none of them pass the ideologues’ unrealistic and counterproductive “100-percent freedom” litmus test. Not a single one of them.
What emerging is a new business model and one that cannot be ignored.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
More on Search Performance
May 12, 2009
Search performance remains a bit of a mystery in many organizations. Once a search system has been deployed, the team is thrilled that the users can run queries. Performance often becomes an issue when the system crashes, and the licensee discovers the meaning of “just rebuild the index”. In other situations, a merger may create a surge in demand, and the system simply times out or falls over under heavy query spikes.
Some useful performance information appeared in Information Management’s article by Chris Kentouris here. “BNP Speeds Risk Calculations With Hardware Acceleration” made clear that improving search performance often requires more than routine tweaking. The article touches upon the performance characteristics of graphics chips or GPU and field-programmable gate arrays or FPGAs. For me the most interesting part of the write up was this segment:
Exegy ran a test in November using CPUs, FPGAs and GPUs to perform Monte Carlo calculations on a portfolio of 1,024 equities. According to Exegy, “a calculation that would normally take 15 minutes on a multicore CPU now only takes 12 seconds with all three technologies.”
I profiled Exegy in my 2008 study Beyond Search for the Gilbane Group here. Exegy specializes in high volume content processing for governmental and financial institutions.
The short take: if you want to improve search performance, you may need sophisticated hardware and specialized engineering. Cosmetics and easy fixes may not do the job.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
Wolfram Alpha and Beta PR
May 12, 2009
At the airport this morning, I flipped through a beta wave of publicity for the Alpha search system, actually the soon-to-be-released search system. I found
Christopher Dawson’s write up a useful example of beta PR. The article “More Details Emerge on Wolfram Alpha” here representative. For me, the most interesting comment in Mr. Dawson’s story was:
Google has also attempted to add semantic search capabilities (and I’m sure will get there sooner than later; they’re Google, after all), but so far, this doesn’t give you much.
The view seems to me to be that Google is not in the semantic search race. Wolfram Alpha, with its demo and previews, is.
My research for my three Google studies suggests otherwise. You can scan information about my Google studies here. I can’t easily summarize the research I have conducted over the last six or seven years. Making the situation more tricky is the fact that some of my work has been published by BearStearns’ and IDC as client-only reports.
Nevertheless, the notion that a demo makes Wolfram Alpha ahead of Google strikes me as incorrect.
The interesting question that i have been thinking about is, “Why are observers so keen on finding an alternative to Google?” What surprised me was the high expectations for Cuil.com by former Googler Anna Patterson and her team. Cuil.com has improved, but I have picked up hints that the GOOG has not been far from the Cuil.com project, particularly with regard to some tests on message collections.
What’s happening is a bit of cover your tail combined with wishful thinking. The pundits saw Google as Web search and ads for a decade. Now that anyone with a willingness to look at its mobile, shopping, maps, and other services can see that Google has been a platform and is now sufficiently diverse to make the Web and ads crowd look, well, anachronistic.
Enter a new search system.
The pundits claim that it is a Google killer without setting forth much in the way of a yardstick by which one can measure the progress of Google death. Here are some examples:
- Cost of infrastructure, to date, to grow, over five years
- Number of users of sophisticated search outputs. (Remember only about five percent of search users take advantage of advanced search features)
- Number of documents processed by time unit, including transformation, parsing, and indexing
- Business model (ads are okay but will advertisers pay Google scale cash flows to reach a sophisticated service)
These four points need some consideration. But when speculating about “to be” products and services, one has the advantage of working with modest evidence.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
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