Google Embraces Its Status Quo Despite Govt Inquiries
June 11, 2009
I am fearful of quoting from an Associated Press story. You may be able to find the story “Google Unfazed by 3 US Government Inquiries” here. The author is an AP technology writer, but the story seems to be about business methods, not technology. Puzzling to me in Harrod’s Creek it is. The story carries a Newsweek logo as well, and I don’t have the energy to try and figure that out. The point of the write up seems to be that Google says, “Business as usual.” Its position is to keep on truckin’ on as various government entities think about the Google.
A blog post by David Lawsky here made a comment I found interesting. He wrote:
“The sense that I [a Googler working in DC] get is that their [Halliburton’s] corporate values may be a little different from Google’s, on some things.”
A company for which i worked became part of Halliburton. I wonder if these writers and Googlers have first hand experience that lets them make a definitive statement? From my goose pond choked with mine drainage run off I see some similarities “on some things” too. But the view from rural Kentucky is certainly not as crisp as those who are close to the firms mentioned in these write ups.
Stephen Arnold, June 11, 2009
Certified SEO Expert Program
June 11, 2009
The economy may be in la poubelle, but for $3,500 you can try your hand at becoming a certified search enigne marketing professional. Forget Malcolm Gladwell’s premise that an expert needs 10,000 hours to sharpen his or her intellectual blade. You can get acdpted for the program with a credit card, an Internet connection, and some time. Click here to take advantage of this Market Motive offer. Seems quicker than struggling with a medical, legal, or MBA degree. Wow.
Stephen Arnold, June 11, 2009
Google Microsoft: He Said, She Said
June 10, 2009
The battle between Google and Microsoft will be fascinating. I don’t know if I will enjoy the thrashing of the professional journalists, pundits, and mavens more than the jibes, japes, and jousts between Googlers and Microsoft softies. Toss up.
Example: Reuters carried a story with the headline: “Bing and Google Get Testy” here. The idea is that Bing’s market share is or is not rising faster than the temperature of my aging 1974 Pontiac Grandville convertible. Chris Thomspon of of The Big Money, listed as the author of the Reuters’ story, wrote:
With 793 tests, Bing took an early lead, beating Google 38 percent to 36 percent. Then Matt Cutts, a Google employee, pointed out on FriendFeed that Kordahi works for Microsoft. “I worry a little bit about self-selection bias,” he wrote. As the tests came pouring in, Google retook the lead, but Yahoo came roaring down the track and jumped ahead with 45 percent of the vote. That, everyone began to think, was a little too pat. “Yahoo is rising suspiciously fast,” declared Google Blogoscoped writer Philipp Lensen. “Perhaps the poll is being hacked.” Indeed, Kordahi eventually yanked all the poll results altogether, complaining about “some douche gaming the system.” Hmmm. There’s gotta be a better way to build buzz than this, Carol Bartz.
Wow, one paragraph cites folks from a range of companies and sources, including the top Yahooligan.
Step back:
“New” is a potent world today. Once the “new” wears off, marketers figure out how to introduce another variation of spaghetti sauce. The problem with new is that most “new” products are not. So, hype, novelty, and dust ups take center stage.
The key points in my mind have little to do with Bing, Web search, or even the individuals who represent Google and Microsoft. In my opinion, here’s what’s happening:
- Google is playing slow chess. Microsoft is playing speed chess. Advantage: Google. Microsoft is in a hurry and Google is not. In fact, the company is just now beginning to push directly at Microsoft because the company for the first time is vulnerable on several fronts. Google’s probes are increasing in frequency and are more overt. The Outlook connector is a recent example. Small probe but the first of many I suggest.
- The Bing Google search battle is over. The appeal of “new” is short lived and Google has about 70 percent of Web users defining search as “google”. Microsoft will have to pull some rabbits from its hat to make a dent in this type of market share. Closing the gap will take years. It took Google years to build its share, and I don’t see a reversal any time soon.
- The squabbles are PR chaff, just like the junk tossed from aircraft to befuddle crude radar. The real activity is taking place elsewhere. Think dataspace.
What’s a dataspace? Sigh. That’s where the action is.
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2009
Bing.com Ad Has a Sharp Edge
June 10, 2009
Dan Neil’s “Microsoft’s Bing TV Ad: Huh” made me want to see the actual commercial. You can read his story in the June 9, 2009, Chicago Tribune here. I know that Microsoft plans to spend $80 to $100 million to make the verb “google” go the way of the Colinus virginianus ridgwayi. Mr. Neil wrote:
As an opening gambit, Microsoft’s campaign for its new Bing search engine accuses Google of causing global economic ruin. That’s cheeky.
I agree. He continued:
The bigger problem has to do with the Bing campaign’s notionally flawed phrase “decision engine.” Bing is promoting itself as a better class of search engine that returns results that are more restricted and more relevant, which is to say, more what the user had in mind. To which I say “maybe.” I just searched for “non sequitur” in Google and got back 1.8 million results, while the same search on Bing returned a scarcely more helpful 800,000. Nevertheless, “decision engine” goes astray because it suggests that Bing itself, the algorithmic software, the wizard behind the curtain, is making the decision and not the user. Also, the Bing campaign’s take-away argument, that online users are suffering from “search overload,” flirts with a kind of information totalitarianism. “Less is the new more,” Microsoft’s general manager for advertising, Gayle Troberman, told AdAge. That sounds alarmingly like “The choice is the burden.”
The write up accomplished one thing: This addled goose wants to see the commercial that caused BearStearns to implode over the weekend in April. Darn Google. I just sold BearStearns a project on Friday and the company was history on Monday. I knew I would find out the truth sooner or later. Thank heavens for Bing.
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2009
Thunderstone Appliance Adds Muscle
June 10, 2009
Thunderstone has been a long-time player in the enterprise and Web search market. The company was either the first or among the first to offer a search appliance. The company’s Thunderstone Search Appliance is now in Version 7. This new version adds a number of features. You can get more information on each at the Thunderstone Web site here. In addition to a performance boost, the company has spiffed up its interface. Other changes include:
- Enhancement of federated search. Thunderstone sometimes refers to federated search as metasearch. The idea is to present results from different collections of content.
- Better support for Unicode queries
- A method for indexing the content of MySQL databases.
The Thunderstone Appliance offers more dials and knobs for licensees to adjust. Some appliance vendors “lock out” licensees from certain administrative functions. Thunderstone makes tuning and hit boosting much easier than some vendors’ systems.
You can read an interview with the president of Thunderstone here. The interview dates from April 2008, but it contains useful insights into Thunderstone’s approach to search and content processing.
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2009
Wolfram Alpha Update: Not a Search Engine
June 10, 2009
The world wants a company to compete with Google. I survived the Cuil.com hype. Then I endured the Wolfram Alpha début. Then a drop off. Wolfram Alpha owes Wired Magazine a hug or maybe a double truck color ad. Ryan Singel’s “Wolfram Adds Updates, Still Not a Search Engine” here to keep the company in the search game. Ooops, Mr. Singel pointed out that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. He wrote:
In this first update, the engine is adding some new data sets, changing how it handles comparisons between units that can’t be compared, and tweaking how it handles what users type into the search box. It’s also fixing some touchy issues about geography, including the borders of India and China and “naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions.” For certain queries, it’s unbeatable. Try for instance, “tides Santa Cruz tomorrow” or “odds three aces” or “weather san francisco march 14 2008.”
Wisely Mr. Singel included some sample queries. I have spoken with a number of people about the Wolfram Alpha search system. One theme was that queries returned no useful data or a cute response. The naked search box and formulating a query that makes use of the Mathematica engine may be at odds with what the folks with whom I spoke want in a a finding system.
My hunch is that Web search systems have to deliver the goods to those who sit smack in the middle of a Gaussian distribution. A bit of a drift right may not be too harmful, but aiming at the outliers is not going to make Jim and Jerry Normal happy with their search results.
Several observations:
- Bing.com may be closer to what the folks splat in the middle of a normal probability density function require. Wolfram Alpha is too abstract for that crowd. The notion of the central limit theorem has to be delivered to the user no matter what wackiness is typed in the search box.
- Wolfram Alpha requires the user to think. Google, on the other hand, does not. Which of the two systems has more math is a topic for a bar argument. In terms of market share, the GOOG’s approach wins hands down.
- The sadness of those who must explain that Web search engines intended to nibble at Google’s scales and claws is becoming more bittersweet. Those writing about Web search may want to include anigifs of tears running down the page because contenders can’t last one full round of mixed martial arts against the Google.
The good news is that Wolfram Alpha was the subject of a follow up story in Wired. Poor Cuil.com seems to have dropped off the edge of the “wired” earth. Kosmix? Where’s Kosmix? ChaCha? What happened to ChaCha?
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2009
Google Snuggles with Microsoft Office
June 10, 2009
Short honk: You have been inundated with information about the most recent stick in the ribs administered by Google to Microsoft. Reuters’ news item here summarized the information revealed at one of Google’s Googley meetings on June 9, 2009. The pointy end was a product called Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook or GASMO. One tiny step toward a dataspace in which Microsoft Office is little more than a rivulet of information. What’s Microsoft’s next move? Could Microsoft coders make an error that renders the Google widget inoperable? No, never.
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2009
Coveo Inks Deal with Verndale
June 10, 2009
Coveo, a leading provider of information access and search solutions, has a new resale partner. Verndale, a Web design company, just partnered with them to add Coveo’s secure, anywhere-access enterprise search as their preferred search provider in its Web site packages. See Verndale’s press release and company profile here.
Google Shows It Has Feelings Too
June 9, 2009
I wish I had been present to here this statement reported by the Industry Standard:
There’s a bit of a double standard at work, he argued. When most technical systems have a minor outage, the press doesn’t say anything. On the other hand, if Google has “a service disruption of any size, it gets picked up.”
You can read the original article “Google’s David Girouard on the Company’s Cloud Computing ‘Perception Problem’” here.
Okay, if a service is down, I guess it is okay to pretend the service is working. This is the kinder, software, less logical Google I suppose.
Stephen Arnold, June 9, 2009
At Yahoo Is Bartz Topedoing Search or Search Torpedoing Bartz
June 9, 2009
I read a long analysis by Dan Sullivan here called “Bartz Continues Torpedoing Yahoo Search”. I found the information useful because it provides a run down of recent announcements and developments in the ossifying world of Web search. I urge you to read the essay. I found this comment quite suggestive:
Geez, it’s like Bartz handed a gift to Microsoft. Here Microsoft wants to build awareness that there’s an alternative to Google, and Bartz effectively tells people that Yahoo’s out of the game. It was somewhat similar to how Ask screwed up last year … and now still struggles to be counted among the major search engines. Who thought Yahoo would shoot itself the same way?
Several thoughts crossed my mind.
First, the analysis touches only indirectly on the issue that I think is adding basil to Ms. Bartz’s recipe for a Yahoo turnaround—cost. If one can look beyond the posturing, Ms. Bartz has access to the cold hard facts of the cost of search at Yahoo and how those costs match against Yahoo’s actual revenues. My hunch is that the business of search is one that is one rooted in how much money it takes to operate search, feed the warring engineering factions, and manage the set up. Leaving cost out of an analysis means that Yahoo is able to conduct business in a predictable way in terms of operations. I think costs toss predictability out with the burned vegetables.
Second, the mixing of signals is neither unusual nor unexpected. Yahoo is a mini AOL but it has a different series of revenue streams. Dealing with these strong currents is confusing job, just ask any corporate captain who has had to deal with incomplete or flawed financial information and projections. One day the weather is clear; the next Matilda is knocking on the door.
Finally, the search market is ossified. Now I know that there’s considerable hope for the start ups in search like Wolfram Alpha. I know that Microsoft is spending $80 to $100 million to supplant “just Google it” with “just Bing it”, but Google’s market share continues to creep upwards. I think the data that suggest Google has a 60 to 70 percent market share are wide of the mark. Think in terms of 80 percent in the US and 90 percent in some other areas such as northern Europe. A big push in search is going to yield exactly what return? My hunch is that when cost is factored into the equation, Ms. Bartz is doing a pretty good job of keeping investors reasonably stable while she tries to make sense of the Web’s Balkan conflict.
Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, June 9, 2009
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