Coveo Video
August 5, 2009
Kudos to Coveo, http://www.coveo.com, for performing a no-brainer: they’ve posted a thirteen-minute guided tour of their Coveo Enterprise Search product for all the world to see on their web site at http://www.coveo.com/en/resource-videos/guided-tour-video. It starts at “this is what we do” and goes through “how it works,” “this is what gets searched,” and “how you can use it” (my simplifications). The video is simple to understand, has good, clear graphics, the lady has a nice speaking voice, and the tour keeps moving. I’ve watched lots and lots of these videos (Anyone out there listened to the Salesforce training modules?), and this is a good one.
Microsoft Plucks Washington for Bing
August 5, 2009
Check out this article: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Washington-Googles-Its-Way-to-Bing-118041.shtml. The state of Washington chose Bing search over Google and Yahoo! to power its web site, and Microsoft is partnering with the state’s information services department to work the program. Here’s what caught my attention: “The deal will cost Washington taxpayers no money, authorities revealed.” So is Microsoft giving away its Bing search system, or is this a “foot in the door and get a reference” sort of plan? I’m not sure it’s a wise decision to start a search engine price fight, especially against the almighty GOOG.
Magazines Go Digital, Almost Unusable
August 5, 2009
At lunch today, one of the goslings mentioned a Lifehacker post about MagMe.com. We fired up the Dell Mini 9, our lunch companion and took a look. On the Dell Mini’s screen, there was not much that was legible. The wireless connection provided by the restaurant bogged down with job seekers surfing Craigslist.com for a lead made the interface slow, very slow. You can try the service once you register. A couple of the fields on the registration screen did not work too well; for example, the city field popped the cursor to the last name field. Magazines are in a world of hurt because their business model seems out of sync with what is happening online. MagMe.com may be one way to save a once vital information sector. You can check out a competitor called Magazines.net. Slightly different approach but clunky. At least Magazines.net has a search engine. Judging from the line up of magazines on these two services, you have an eclectic range of titles to browse. Not for me and my Dell Mini 9.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2009
Autonomy Enters Search Engine Marketing
August 4, 2009
Search has become a commodity. Every SharePoint installation includes search. Content management systems have been struggling to bridge the gaps that exist among Web page output, eDiscovery, and repurposing of information for print. Search vendors have had to scramble to make sales as open source solutions like Lemur Consulting’s FLAX, lower cost solutions such as Gaviri, and marketing centric such as those introduced by Attensity have flowed into the marketplace.
Autonomy has been among the most agile search vendors I track. The company diversified into rich media before most organizations knew that video could be digitized. Then the company hopped into print-to-digital services with some key acquisitions. Most recently, Autonomy added to its Zantaz services with its acquisition of Interwoven, a content management company.
The most recent Autonomy innovation is a landing page service. The idea is that an organization buys a Google AdWord. The user clicking on the AdWord will be sent to the page that provides information referenced or promised in the ad. That page is a landing page and most content management systems don’t produce these without cartwheels, fireworks, and a brass band. In short, Autonomy’s announcement about a “hosted Web landing page” indicates that Autonomy is moving quickly again. The key for me is the word “hosted”. Autonomy is becoming a cloud-services company. Maybe the word “utility” is appropriate? I think landing pages are a new service for a search vendor. This is not a bad thing, just not a search thing. In my opinion, the market for one-size-fits all search seems to be softening.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Microsoft Embraces Scale
August 4, 2009
The year was 2002. A cash-rich, confused outfit paid me to write a report about Google’s database technology. In 2002, Google was a Web search company with some good buzz among the alleged wizards of Web search. Google did not have much to say when its executives gave talks. I recall an exchange between me and Larry Page at the Boston Search Engine Meeting in 1999. The topic? Truncation. Now that has real sizzle among the average Web surfer. I referenced an outfit called InQuire, which supported forward truncation. Mr. Page asserted that Google did not have to fool around with truncation. The arguments bored even those who were search experts at the Boston meeting.
I realized then that Google had some very specific methods, and those methods were not influenced by the received wisdom of search as practiced at Inktomi or Lycos, to name two big players in 2000. So I began my research looking for differences between what Google engineers were revealing in their research papers. I compiled a list of differences. I won’t reference my Google studies, because in today’s economic climate, few people are buying $400 studies of Google or much else for that matter.
I flipped through some of the archives I have on one of my back up devices. I did a search for the word “scale”, and I found that it was used frequently by Google engineers and also by Google managers. Scale was a big deal to Google from the days of BackRub, according to my notes. BackRub did not scale. Google, scion of BackRub, was engineered to scale.
The reason, evident to Messrs. Brin and Page in 1998, was that the problem with existing Web search systems was that the operators ran out of money for exotic hardware needed to keep pace with the two rapidly generating cells of search: traffic and new / changed content. The stroke of genius, as I have documented in my Google studies, was that Google tackled the engineering bottlenecks. Other search companies such as Lycos lived with the input output issues, the bottlenecks of hitting the disc for search results, and updating indexes by brute force methods. Not the Google.
Messrs. Brin and Page hired smart men and women whose job was “find a solution”. So engineers from Alta Vista, Bell Labs, Sun Microsystems, and other places where bright folks get jobs worked to solve these inherent problems. Without solutions, there was zero chance that Google could avoid the fate of the Excites, OpenText Web index, and dozens of other companies without a way to grow without consuming the equivalent of the gross domestic product for hardware, disc space, bandwidth, chillers, and network devices.
Google’s brilliance (yes, brilliance) was to resolve in a cost effective way the technical problems that were deal breakers for other search vendors. AltaVista was a pretty good search system but it was too costly to operate. When the Alpha computers were online, you could melt iron ore, so the air condition bill was a killer.
Keep in mind that Google has been working on resolving bottlenecks and plumbing problems for more than 11 years.
I read “Microsoft’s Point Man on Search—Satya Nadella—Speaks: It’s a Game of Scale” and I shook my head in disbelief. Google operates at scale, but scale is a consequence of Google’s solutions to getting results without choking a system with unnecessary disc reads. Scale is a consequence of using dirt cheap hardware that is mostly controlled by smart software interacting with the operating system and the demands users and processes make on the system. Scale is a consequence of figuring out how to get heat out of a rack of servers and replacing conventional uninterruptable power supplies with on motherboard batteries from Walgreen’s to reduce electrical demand, heat and cost. Scale comes from creating certain propriety bits of hardware AND software to squeeze efficiencies out of problems caused by physics of computer operation.
If you navigate to Google and poke around you will discover “Publications by Googlers”. I suggest that anyone interested in Google browse this list of publications. I have tried to read every Google paper, but as I age, I find I cannot keep up. The Googlers have increased their output of research into plumbing and other search arcana by a factor of 10 since I first began following Google’s technical innovations. Here’s one example to give you some context for my comments about Mr. Nadella’s comments, reported by All Things Digital; to wit: “Thwarting Virtual Bottlenecks in Multi-Bitrate Streaming Servers” by Bin Liu and Raju Rangaswami (academics_) and Zora Dimitrijevic (Googler). Yep, there it is in plain English—an innovation plus hard data that shows that Google’s system anticipates bottlenecks. Software makes decisions to avoid these “virtual bottlenecks.” Nice, right? The bottleneck imposed by the way computers operate and the laws of physics are identified BEFORE they take place. The Google system then changes its methods in order to eliminate the bottleneck. Think about that the next time you wait for Oracle to respond to a query across a terabyte set of data tables or you wait as SharePoint labors to generate a new index update. Google’s innovation is predictive analysis and automated intervention. This explains why it is sometimes difficult to explain why a particular Web page declined in a Google set of relevance ranked results. The system, not humans, is adapting.
I understand the frustration that many Google pundits, haters, and apologists express to me. But if you take the time to read Google’s public statements about what it is doing and how it engineers its systems, the Google is quite forthcoming. The problem, as I see it, has two parts. First, Googlers write for those who understand the world as Google does. Notice the language of the “Thwarting” paper. Have you thought about Multi-bitrate streaming servers in a YouTube.com type of environment. YouTube.com has lots of users, and streams a lot of content. The problems are that Google’s notion of clarity is show in the statement below:
Second, very few people in the search business deal with the user loads that Google experiences. Looking up the location of one video and copying it from one computer to another is trivial. Delivering videos to a couple of million people at the same time is a different class of problem. So, why read the “Thwarting” paper? The situation described does not exist for most search companies or streaming media companies. The condition at Google is, by definition, an anomaly. Anomalies are not what make most information technology companies hearts go pitter patter more quickly. Google has to solve these problems or it is not Google. A company that is not Google does not have these Google problems. Therefore, Google solves problems that are irrelevant to 99 percent of the companies in the content processing game.
Back to Mr. Nadella. This comment sums up what I call the Microsoft Yahoo search challenge:
Nadella does acknowledge in the video interview here that Microsoft has has not been able to catch up with Google and talks about how that might now be possible.
I love the “might”. The thoughts the went through my mind when I worked through this multi media article from All Things Digital were:
- Microsoft had access to similar thinking about scale in 1999. Microsoft hired former AltaVista engineers, but the Microsoft approach to data centers is a bit like the US Navy’s approach to aircraft carriers. More new stuff has been put on a design that has remained unchanged for a long time. I have written about Microsoft’s “as is” architecture in the Web log with snapshots of the approach at three points in time
- Google has been unchallenged in search for 11 years. Google has an “as is” infrastructure capable of supporting more than 2,200 queries per second as well as handling the other modest tasks such as YouTube.com, advertising, maps, and enterprise applications. In 2002, Google had not figured out how to handle high load reads and writes because Google focused on eliminating disc reads and gating writes. Google solved that problem years ago.
- Microsoft has to integrate the Yahoo craziness into the Microsoft “as is”, aircraft carrier approach to data centers. The affection for Microsoft server products is strong, but adapting to Yahoo search innovations will require some expensive, time consuming, and costly engineering.
In short, I am delighted that Mr. Nadella has embraced scale. Google is becoming more like a tortoise, but I think there was a fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare. Google’s reflexes are slowing. The company has a truck load of legal problems. New competitors like Collecta.com are running circles around Googzilla. Nevertheless, Microsoft has to figure out the Google problem before the “going Google” campaign bleeds revenue and profits from Microsoft’s pivotal business segments.
My hunch is that Microsoft will run out of cash before dealing the GOOG a disabling blow.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Wall Street Journal Spamming Again
August 4, 2009
The Wall Street Journal stopped spamming me for a couple of weeks. Now the Viagra-marketing-influenced newspaper is doing it again. I am now receiving two different spam messages. The first wants me to subscribe. After the WSJ stopped spamming, I resumed my subscription.
The second spam is fresh. The WSJ wants me to become a subscriber to the electronic edition of the newspaper. Here’s the latest, highly professional, quite compelling missive:
What’s interesting is that this spam does not render. Seems to me that the WSJ may want to hire a different spam marketer. The present outfit can’t code and has insufficient bandwidth to display the Viagra-marketing-influenced junk pushed at a ** paying customer **. How far newspapers have fallen? Judge for yourself.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2009
Microsoft Fast Posts Voice of the Customer Videos
August 4, 2009
I had not visited Microsoft’s enterprise search Web site for a month, maybe longer. I noted today (August 3, 2009) that Microsoft has added some videos that explain how Microsoft Fast Enterpriser Search Platform can perform “voice of the customer” functions. “Voice of the customer” is a buzzword that carries a wagon load of meanings. I think of “voice of the customer” as straddling customer service and self-service Web sites. Quite a few search vendors have abandoned the giant “one size fits all” type of sale that once was the basic approach of a search sales person. Now, search vendors are targeting. Attensity (once a darling of the intelligence community) has jumped into customer support and market intelligence. Other vendors are taking smaller findability problems and focusing on making a focused sale. The “boil the ocean” approach is a tough sale in today’s economic climate. You can locate the line up of videos on the Enterprise Search Web site. Happy customers include Seek, Accenture, Reed (part of Elsevier), Verizon, NEC, and Orion Pharmaceutical. What is clear to this addled goose is that Microsoft is attacking the enterprise search market with similarly small-scale, precision “packages” of search and content processing. I have no doubt that Microsoft can sell more sharply defined products. The strategy seems to be a shift away from the broad statements about Microsoft Fast technology’s ability to slice, dice, chop, and grate. The new approach strikes me as more workable, maybe more believable. Since the new version of Fast ESP is not in the channel at this time, the addled goose will have to wait and see what ships.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Perfect Search
August 4, 2009
The Mail & Guardian is not aware of an interesting search company called “Perfect Search”. You can read about the company at http://www.perfectsearchcorp.com and get an inside peek at the firm’s high-speed system in my interview with Ken Ebert, on of Perfect Search’s technologists in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series.
The UK newspaper’s use of “perfect search” has a different spin because the newspaper seems to unaware that there is a company with the phrase used in the story’s headline “Rivals Strive to Topple Google in Quest for the ‘Perfect Search’”. In addition, there is not too much information about rivals. Google right now doesn’t have too many in my opinion. There are “to be” rivals or “hoped for” rivals aplenty. I think that articles like this Guardian effort ehlps increases confusion about search.
The Guardian article trots out the painful reminder to publishers that Google has “enormous power”. The article points out that Google will run “more than one trillion searches”. Then comes the passage that I found interesting:
But it is also possible that the concept of search may be moving forward so fast that it will outstrip search engines themselves. The explosive growth of social networking services, such as Twitter and Facebook, is taking the concept of search into unknown areas. Both began as ways for friends and acquaintances to share information and news about themselves but then they developed a critical mass. Suddenly Facebook and Twitter became tools that could be searched by their millions of users. Search on Google for a recipe and you will get a relatively random selection. Ask Facebook or Twitter for a recipe and you will get a choice often aimed specifically at you. Nor is it just for trivia. In the recent political turmoil in Iran, Twitter became a vital tool for organising and releasing information about the violent post-election crackdown. If you wanted the latest news from Iran, it was Twitter that you turned to as well. Twitter had showed itself perfectly able to channel people’s most profound desires: in this case, political freedom of expression. You can plan a revolution with Twitter.
In my opinion, this passage makes clear that Google in particular and online change in general is why newspapers, magazines, and books in hard copy form are clueless. Instead of adapting, as this Guardian article makes clear, the reporter explains a change. Yet muddles what has happened, why the change has taken place, and what the wave of changed has washed up on the digital beach as deadwood.
The article concludes with a question: Perhaps not even Google knows exactly what the world will look like. Yet.”
No kidding. Google is an example of adaptive intelligence, exactly the type of business behavior that traditional media does not understand and, therefore, describes in confusing, often misleading ways. Google surfs digital trends and even makes some waves itself. Traditional newspapers, like this article, describe the snow falling around the grass eating dinosaurs as the Ice Age approaches.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Journalist Explains Away Information Phase Change
August 4, 2009
I enjoy finding articles that find a way to explain that what young people are doing is not important. Even more delightful is the notion that the kids with parents who are clinging to traditional media for their livelihood fuel the phase change as the parents remain clueless.
An interesting example of this type of write up is “It’s Easy to Forget that Most people Don’t Twitter, Use RSS Feeds or Read 20 Blogs a Day.” I am an old geezer, writing for my personal enjoyment as the addled goose. But I am sufficiently aware of my digital surroundings to recognize that the information environment is quite different from that of my childhood or the mid 1990s when Chris Kitze, my son, and myself created The Point (Top 5% of the Internet).
Etaoin Shrdlu pointed to a post that said:
“Publishers aren’t exactly fools to not throw everything into online. Print is where the eyeballs are; it’s where their best customers are.”
The post attracted some interesting comments as well. One jumped out:
First, you’re using the top five newspapers as the premise for all papers. Secondly, you’re comparing two different products but only using The standards of one. While the Los Angeles Times may be worth thirty minutes of my time, the Sierra Vista Herald or the Reno Gazette-Journal is not. In fact, many if not most of those small newspapers are boring once you get past the front page. This, of course, is completely subjective. Prove me otherwise and I’ll buy you a beer. Blue Moon, too. he other issue with your data is that you ignore the entire utility of the Internet. A newspaper by its physical nature, limits you to only read what was published. The Internet is all about linking, metadata tagging and search engines. People’s reading habits online are vastly different than reading a printed product. Haven’t we known that for years now?
My question is, “If I were going to start a money making information service today, would I include a print component?” I would not for these reasons:
- Too slow
- Too difficult to control costs such as printing and distribution
- The topics which interest me do not lend themselves to big, fat printed documents
- Online marketing can generate consulting work, so the “report” is mostly an advertisement.
The better question is, “What will those who depend on selling hard copies do to generate revenue in a post print world?”
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
Bing Rings Up Some US Search Share Gains
August 4, 2009
Dong Ngo’s “Bing Sees Slight Uptick in July” reported that Microsoft’s Google killer is making headway. Mr. Ngo wrote:
The combined market share of both Microsoft and Yahoo in July was 20.36 percent, up slightly from 19.27 percent in June. The commanding lead Google currently has on the market shrank slightly to 77.54 percent in July from 78.48 percent in June.
Microsoft and Yahoo combined for a less robust share of the global market. My question is, “Who will be the new number three?” A US company? Another country’s system?
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2009
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