Web Search Market Share
October 27, 2009
A 20 something bristled in 2007 when I pointed out in a paid lecture that Google had won the search battle. The person insisted that Microsoft, Yahoo, and a raft of newcomers were going to Grandpa Google’s ankle. I dismissed the 20 something and promptly learned that she embarked on a campaign of telling anyone who would listen that I was addled. No big deal since I am addled and I document my addledness in this Web log each day.
However, I somewhat reluctantly, point you and her to “Bing’s Search Share Uncertain as Yahoo’s Share Falls”. A 20 something will probably believe another 20 something before she accepts facts from a person old enough to be her grandfather.
The write up said:
Microsoft had high hopes for gaining search-market traction at Google’s expense when it announced a search partnership with Yahoo earlier this year. However, Yahoo racked up a search loss of one percentage point in September in comparison with August, and a loss of five percentage points since the same time last year, according to Compete. Google served fewer queries in the month as well, “but because of the drop in overall volume across the engines, Google’s search share stayed stable at close to 73 percent,” Madjarac explained. Looking at the bigger picture, StatCounter reported that Bing’s search share declined on a global basis from 3.58 percent to 3.25 percent in September. Moreover, the same global trend was mirrored at Microsoft’s new search partner, the Web analytics firm said. Yahoo saw its search share fall to 4.37 percent from 4.84 percent, said the Dublin-based firm, which bases its worldwide analyses on 4.6 billion search-engine clicks. By contrast, Google boosted its status as the global search leader by increasing its share by more than two percentage points in September to 80.08 percent, StatCounter added.
With Google’s market share into the 80 percent range, plus or minus five percent, I am not sure if the wild and crazy, uninformed 20 something understands that the Google has won the Web search war. Maybe the Google is vulnerable in real time search? Maybe the Google will stumble as Microsoft rolls out the stellar Fast ESP. Maybe?
Looks like the Google is doing its Googley thing despite the 20 somethings delusional view of what is going on in Web search.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2009
A freebie from a train station no less. I did get a free apple juice. Does that count?
The Trust Survey, Google and Microsoft
October 27, 2009
“IT leaders trust Microsoft more than Google, 2-to-1” opened a line of thought for me that I had not considered. Large, publicly traded companies and “trust” are not concepts that I juxtapose. In fact, I don’t think I ever considered a company’s “degree” of trust. Google has the Guha patent document which reveals a system and method for determining trust. Asking humans what big company is more trusted seems somewhat subjective. Dr. Guha’s approach has the benefit of using a specific numerical recipe and data. A survey is a more slippery beast. There’s the notion of the sample, the sample size, and the mechanics of the interview. For example, I just received a second email reminding me to provide a search vendor called SLI Systems with my “views” of the search industry. The fact that a second email is required to get a response tells me quite a bit about the methodology of the survey and, of course, about the credence I will give to the “results” if I see them.
The “score” for Google and Microsoft on the “trust-o-meter” is another kettle of fish. Enron was publicly traded. I wonder what that firm’s trust score is / was. Tyco? You get the idea. Large publicly traded companies create an impression of trust. The reality of the company are often opaque to me until I see news reports of an alleged issue. Sometimes I get a view of trust when I watch a high profile executive in the warm embrace of law enforcement.
Degree of trust? That’s a new thought.
Jason Hiner’s write up reported that Microsoft is more trusted than Google. He said:
We decided to examine that question. On October 20, TechRepublic polled its 90-member panel of U.S. IT executives and asked, “Who do trust more as a technology partner, Microsoft or Google?” The jury – made up of the first 12 respondents – voted 8-4 in favor of Microsoft.
If you are a survey fan, you will want to read the results of this study.
If you are like me, you may want to get additional data and more information before deciding that one large, publicly traded company is more or less trusted than another. As an addled goose, I see some larger philosophical issues in this type of survey. One thing is reasonably certain. Philosophy does not play too much of a role in business when it comes to hitting those quarterly numbers. And what about the issue of public relations spin and marketing wordsmithing?
Trust? An interesting notion, but I don’t accept that there is much difference among large publicly traded companies in the information technology space. Google and Microsoft are similar, just at different points on the capitalist timeline in my opinion. This survey is a great way to generate traffic, however. Trust? Hmmm.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2009
Internet Laws Revisited
October 27, 2009
I am an old, addled goose. I read “Internet Rules and Laws: The Top 10, from Godwin to Poe”. I was puzzled. The laws struck me as an odd mix of CollegeHumor.com and an Onion article. The source was the Telegraph, a newspaper that is printed on very large sheets of paper. The Web site’s bread crumbs indicated that the story was News and tagged Technology. I understand the Internet is a buzzword used without definition. Technology makes the Internet chug along. The laws indicate that the Internet is a pretty miserable place. In fact, one law—Rule 34—converts information into pornography. Nice.
Here are three observations from the Beyond Search regulatory archive:
- The business processes of the Internet will erode the revenues of traditional publishing and information companies.
- The children of traditional publishing company executives use tools, software, services, and systems that undermine the efforts of their parents to prevent such erosion.
- The Internet has given birth to a “digital Gutenberg” that marginalizes traditional publishing and information companies.
Unlike the Telegraph’s story, I am not joking.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2009
Flagship Magazine Heads to the Bone Yard
October 27, 2009
I was in some far off country and remarked about the large number of ships anchored offshore. I asked the captain of the ship about these vessels, “Headed for the bone yard. Maybe scrap. Pence on the pound they are.” I thought about this bone yard example when I read “Business Week’s Fire Sale Nets McGraw Hill $5.9 Million, or $15,000 Per Staffer.” Properties change hands frequently. What struck me about this particular transaction is that the Economist seems to be sailing along quite nicely. The US business flagship—Business Week Magazine—is not doing so well. I thought about the $15,000 per staff member angle as well. I rejected it. Knowledge workers are a dime a dozen today, so finding replacements should not be much of a chore in New York or even Louisville for that matter. The point that struck me was this passage in the article about the rendering of Business Week:
Today the company told investors just how much it will net from the sale of the 80-year-old title: $9.3 million, or $5.9 million after taxes.
I wondered if buying out of service ships would provide a more lucrative return for the buyer. I will refrain from using such colorful and emotion charged language as “rusting hulk”, “coal fired”, or “sailing into the sunset.” Too painful even for me. Imagine what the magazine publishers are thinking about the value of their publications. Hopefully the full text of Business Week’s articles will be available somewhere. There used to be quite a bit of useful information in the publication, but I stopped reading it three or four years ago. Sad and somewhat unnerving even to an addled goose in rural Kentucky. Business Week. Pence on the pound.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2009
Perfect Search Vortex White Paper Now Available
October 27, 2009
The Beyond Search team at Arnold Information Technology is releasing a white paper titled “Solving Search Problems with Perfect Search.” The study addresses how enterprise companies are struggling to search and organize huge amounts of data and how Perfect Search can help. Perfect Search, http://www.perfectsearchcorp.com/, software uses semantic technology and allows clients to index and search massive data sets with near real-time incremental indexing at high speeds without latency.
The paper sets the stage by explaining that the world is awash in data stored in a wide variety of sources. Workers face a grim reality: huge amounts of data, limited access options, and uncontrollable costs related to information location. The answer is proposed in the form of the new Perfect Search Vortex system.
“Perfect Search delivers excellent content processing and query processing speed without the hardware imposing the often onerous server requirements needed to make certain data management systems usable,” Stephen E. Arnold, president of Arnold Information Technology and Beyond Search team leader, said.
Keyword search has been the high-water mark in search and retrieval. But ambiguity can return so many results that the search is essentially useless. The solution indicated is a more organized “federated” search. Federating systems send queries to other systems to save time and bother of sending a query to multiple systems one at a time. Perfect Search and its Vortex system are taking federation one step further: Vortex processes content at high speed from multiple sources and creates a single, optimized index using very little hardware and low power consumption.
The paper outlines how Vortex processes huge volumes of data and indexes content, ideas and meaning to “spin” results that precisely match the user’s information need. The system then “unwraps” the bundles of information and delivers a relevant, on-target information answer. Vortex runs so efficiently that one or two servers can do the work of six or eight servers in equivalent vendor systems.
Also included are explanations of Perfect Search’s Vortex infrastructure, power consumption, latency, performance under pressure, and heavily customized functions. Detailed charts and graphics support the data.
The white paper is available at http://arnoldit.com/files/perfect-search-white-paper.pdf. This special report was commissioned by Perfect Search in August 2009 and is the work of the Beyond Search team: Jessica Bratcher, Donald Anderson, Anthony Safina, and Stuart Schram IV, Profiles of Perfect Search technology programs are at http://www.perfectsearchcorp.com/technology-benefits. To contact Perfect Search for more information about Vortex, please contact James Watanabe at James.Watanabe [at] perfectsearchcorp.com, http://perfectsearchcorp.com, or 1-801-696-7383.
Perfect Search is a software innovation company that specializes in development of search solutions. A total of eight patents have been applied for around the developing technology. The suite of search products at http://www.perfectsearchcorp.com/our-products is available on multiple platforms, from small mobile devices, to single servers, to large server farms. Perfect Search is a recent winner of KMWorld’s trendsetting products of 2009.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2009
Yep, Perfect Search compensated ArnoldIT.com to research and write this document. Success.
Lawyers, Content and Business Savvy
October 26, 2009
I enjoyed “Lawyers Discussing Business Models.” You may find it interesting. TechDirt does a good job of deconstructing a podcast about business models in which no business people participated. Sure, some of these folks work in commercial organizations, but the lawyers are overhead, not the individuals who have to make sales and make the business work. One comment I noted was:
The last analysis I’ll talk about that is again faulty from an economics standpoint again comes from Scott Martin at Paramount, where he tries to defend the importance of DRM, noting that if he flies into JFK he has various price options on transportation: he can buy a car, rent a car, take a cab or take a train. So there are price differentials. He says that without DRM, content is like saying his only option is to buy a car. That is, if he had DRM, they could offer different “rental options” for content, with “one day pricing or one week pricing.” But that’s totally wrong again. There’s a reason for the differential pricing in the transportation options: it’s related to the marginal cost of each option and the competitiveness of the market. That’s what sets the prices. But with content, the marginal costs are zero, so what he’s doing is trying to set up an artificial barrier to pretend the markets are the same. While I like listening to these discussions, I just find the economic fallacies frustrating.
TechDirt and I are on the same page. Lawyers make money by finding angles within the legal system and charging for time. Pretty exciting stuff, just not the business model that works in an online environment or for most business organizations yet.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2009
No one paid me to write this. I am safe from the Railway Retirement Board’s oversight of bloggers. I think.
The Cloud Computing Bandwagon and Open Source
October 26, 2009
I don’t think too much about open source software unless a client prods me. There are three reasons:
First, I have some clients who think they are smarter than any other outfit on earth. These folks prefer to “roll their own” even if the technology folks don’t know enough to realize that a financial swamp awaits them.
Second, there are rules and regulations that make it impossible for anyone but the most motivated procurement manager to figure out how to swizzle open source software into certain security obsessed and tightly regulated environments.
Third, quite a few information technology professionals are not up to speed on what’s available. Examples range from the KoolAid drinkers who imbibe IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle flavors. Open source is a not synonymous with job security. Forget technology. The paycheck and health benefits argue for the commercial solutions even if the information technology folks know these solutions don’t work very well. Lousy commercial software is a warrant for job security.
I read the Linux Journal article “Cloud Computing: Good or Bad for Open Source” against the background of these three ideas. The article jumps on the cloud computing bandwagon and then backs into the open source issue. For me the key passage was:
Ideally, what we need is a completely open source cloud computing infrastructure on which applications providing people with things like (doubly) free email and word processing services could be offered. Now, it’s clearly not possible to create the kind of huge facilities that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building around the world. Not even Mr Shuttleworth, with all his millions, could sustain that for long without charging somewhere along the line. So simply running open source programs like Eucalyptus is not going to work. The trick here is not to fight the battle on the opponents’ terms, but to come up with something completely different. For example, how about creating an open source, *distributed* cloud? By downloading and running some free code on your computer, you could contribute processing power and disc space that collectively creates a global, distributed cloud computing system. You would benefit by being able to use services that run on it, and at the same time you would help to sustain the entire open source cloud ecosystem in a scalable fashion. Collateral benefits would be resilience – it would be almost impossible to take down such a cloud – plus integral privacy if data is scattered across thousands of machines in the right way.
In my opinion, open source vendors are not much different from commercial software vendors. The idea is to hook a customer and then charge for services or extra code ornaments.
The “real” open source folks often have a different motivation factor. But once the market driven forces blow, the ideals of open source may be blown away unless anchored to firmer stuff. The cloud is going to become a proprietary “space” if the present trend set by Amazon and Google continues. Sure, some technology is open source and released to the community. But in my opinion, these companies will use whatever techniques are available to deliver to their shareholders. When money is involved, the ideals of open source are like a fried egg on a Teflon pan. Some bits will stick, but the goal is to move the omelet so it can be consumed. That consumption drive is more powerful in some sectors than others. But money trumps ideals in some organizations and in today’s economic climate, the cloud will not be exempt from proprietary plays from very big, competitive organizations whose agendas are set by the stakeholders, not a group working for the benefit of everyone.
Cloud computing will move forward with or without open source in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2009
You can bet your socks that no open source outfit paid me for this essay. In fact, no one did.
User Generated Video Stats
October 26, 2009
The flawed world of video search is getting bigger and quickly. Good news for companies able to index rich media are these data. You will want to buy the full research study described in “User Generated Video 2005 – 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream”. Conducted in 2007 and published in 2008, I think the data may be stale, but I found the data useful as a benchmark. (I was curious about an “old” item turning up as news in my newsreader, but not sufficiently curious to research the odd time delay.)
For me, the interesting data points were:
- It’s estimated YouTube added 831,147 videos to its library in 2007 (net of all video removals). Note: this figure is close to the one million videos uploaded each day to Google that I heard at the end of 2008 from a person who seemed to have some confidence in his research capabilities.
- The market grew by an estimated 70% in 2007, up from a total 13.2 billion views generated in 2006. Note: seems like a robust figure which may be getting a boost from mobile devices with video capability.
- The market is forecast to grow at 52% in 2008, and reach 34 billion views, as indicated by straight line linear regression analysis of current market data. Note: this is spreadsheet fever, but a number is a number.
In terms of search, I think current video search struggles to keep pace with the flow of content. To locate videos, the same query must be run across different services.
For more current information about the volume of video transfered by Google, read “YouTube Gets Record 10B Video Views“. Yep, 10 billion. That’s a number too.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2009
Social Security needs to know that I was not paid for this write up.
Google Timeline Ignores 2006 Pivot Point
October 26, 2009
PC World (New Zealand) ran a story that sucked me to it. “Eleven Years of Google: A Look Back” exemplifies the problems pundits, mavens, and authorities have when making sense of what Google did and has become. The principal flaw in the article is that each set of examples is like an earthworm segment. None is differentiated to the sophomore biology student. the year 2006 is an important one in the short history of Google. But PC World points out that Google bought YouTube.com and ignores an acquisition and key hire that have had considerable impact on the products that Google offers today. Google’s PR team must be delighted with the superficial understanding of the company despite the many words written to explain Google.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2009
A freebie, dear reader. Don’t tell anyone at Fish & Wildlife, please.
Autonomy and Its Third Quarter Uptick
October 26, 2009
Autonomy, the search company that has reinvented itself as an enterprise applications giant, reported its third quarter results last week. I think the company will get very close to $700, maybe $800 million, in revenue by the end of calendar 2009. “Autonomy Corporation Plc Announces Results for the Third Quarter and Nine Months Ended September 30, 2009” reported “Record Q3 Results With Strong Organic Growth; Highest Q3 Revenues And Profits in Autonomy’s History; Q3 Revenues Up 51%; Q3 Profit Before Tax (Adjusted)* Up 20% To $64.3 Million”. A bit of poking around revealed nine month revenue of $515 million. Most search vendors are in the $3 to $20 million range. Autonomy is the big dog in this kennel. But the company has been diversifying into hosted services, eDiscovery, and social networking services built into its content management system. I include Autonomy in the Search Trends 2010 briefing, but I am inclined to shift the company into my enterprise applications category. Autonomy remains the premier marketer of content centric software, and it signaled no signs of slowing its pace. Autonomy is a pacesetter. Although its core technology is getting long in the tooth, the firm continues to move quickly and adapt. The approach has given Autonomy a way to grow that its competitors in search and content processing have not been able to emulate. Will Oracle or another search challenged company buy Autonomy? In my opinion, the company may be too expensive but a double dip economic situation might lower that price. IBM and Oracle have made it clear to me that neither has a search solution that can deal with the petascale data flows some companies face.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2009
A freebie. Alert the FDIC.
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