The Microsoft UX Wins AP Love
October 14, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me the link to Gawker’s “AP’s Betting the Farm Microsoft Will Crush Google”. The story reports that Microsoft’s new interface (user experience or UX) approach is going to allow Microsoft to catch up with Google. If you are a fan of the AP’s view of technology, check out the article. If you think that Google’s 80 percent market share is too large a gap to narrow, you may want to skip the article. For me the most interesting point in the write up was the hint that Google and the AP have not been engaged in productive, frequent discussions. I don’t think the AP is sufficiently Googley to click with the Mountain View crowd.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2009
Oracle Upshifts from Search to Enterprise Application Documents
October 14, 2009
The source – Earthtimes – struck me as an unusual one. I wanted to capture this reference before I fly to England, the country with a less than stellar ambiance. The headline that snagged my attention was “Oracle Announces First Comprehensive Approach to Enterprise Application Documents”. I read the story which seemed to be written by a person unfamiliar with the notion of text without dot points. The phrase “Enterprise Application Documents” was unfamiliar to me. I think – and I may be wrong about this – is that EAD refers to a mash up of information in various enterprise systems. When I thought about the announcement, I realized that Oracle wants to get into the enterprise publishing game with Hewlett Packard, MarkLogic, and IBM.
For me, one of the quotes seemed to describe the same wonderful world of information access that many firms are promising customers:
“We are always looking for ways to make Oracle Applications even more powerful, easier to use and simpler to maintain,” said Steve Miranda, senior vice president, Applications Development, Oracle. “Our approach to integrating Enterprise Application Documents into Oracle Applications helps our customers accelerate their business processes within CRM and ERP, find the documents they need faster and manage these documents more efficiently and effectively.”
“Easier” and “simpler to maintain” are highly desirable. In my experience, the word “oracle” does not evoke either term. The article includes a number of links to Oracle information sources. These can be useful because Oracle’s Web search system offer befuddles me.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2009
Published without the slightest compensation from Oracle. Sigh.
Paranoia Blossoms
October 14, 2009
The article “5 Ways You’re Secretly Being Monitored” is interesting and may represent a growing interest among Internet users. The idea is that when you run a query or ride a bus, you may be monitored. The data feed into repositories where the everyday activities get crunched, transformed, and analyzed. The article is a trifle heavy handed, which disturbs the addled goose. Worth reading, particularly if you live outside the US and plan a trip to popular destinations like the big cities, will use the Internet, and ride mass transit.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2009
Google and Its Econ 500 Method
October 14, 2009
“How Google Is Trying to Hold Up the Microsoft-Yahoo Deal”, if on the mark, provides insight into how Google handles strategic challenges. Michael Learmonth provides a fascinating glimpse of the behind-the-scenes activity related to the tie up between Microsoft and Yahoo, two companies caught, bypassed, and left in the dust by 11-year old Googzilla.
He wrote:
The Mountain View, Calif.-based giant hasn’t taken an official position on the proposed deal, but it is quietly disseminating a view to regulators, politicians, analysts and journalists: that the need for scale is not a valid case for approving Microsoft’s search deal with Yahoo.
The use of information to gum up the works strikes me as interesting. Google’s method has created a battle among economists, almost certainly a situation that will leave regulators, journalists, and bystanders wondering what the heck is being said. Economists—along with lawyers and MBAs—are the grandparents of tortured prose, part of the present financial crisis, and bottlenecks in regulators’ offices. Ah, the joys of an economic theory argument. Who has the popcorn?
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2009
No one bought me a donut to offer this opinion.
Relief for Oracle Users Struggling with Performance and Large Data Sets
October 13, 2009
The news from Oracle World, now underway, has been ho hum. I learned yesterday that Perfect Search, a company who has had me do briefings about the problems big data poses to relational database systems, alerted me to one of its new engagements. Perfect Search is one of the companies developing systems that can cope with petascale datasets. The Perfect Search approach pivots on proprietary technology that chops down the hardware footprint needed to deal with billions of rows and columns. I have interviewed company executives and my team has put the Perfect Search system through a series of tests using my Google patent collection. You can see the system in action on my test corpus on ArnoldIT.com. Like Aster Data and InfoBright, Perfect Search took a clean sheet of paper and figured out how to scale without compromising the client’s budget. The Perfect Search technology can run on premises, in an appliance, or as a hosted service.
OneGreatFamily.com has contracted to install the Perfect Search Database Search Appliance for Oracle to search the more than 200 million names submitted to OneGreatFamily.com that are stored within their Oracle database. At www.OneGreatFamily.com, users enter names, dates, and facts about their family tree. The site compares this information against its details for more than 200 million names already published in other family trees – and it continues searching as hundreds of thousands of new names are added each week. When exact matches of information are found, the trees are automatically merged.
Oracle and IBM have been working overtime to find ways to give clients ways to index, query, and serve results for petascale datasets. The solutions are new and expensive. The problem that any Codd database system faces is that today’s data flows don’t fit into the Codd approach. Not surprisingly, the solutions are expensive and tough to configure, maintain, and optimize.
Perfect Search and a handful of other data management firms have found ways to deal with large data flows without the server footprint and attendant power and cooling problems, performance woes, and ever rising costs.
Ken Ebert, CTO of Perfect Search, states,”Companies that have massive amounts of data struggle to index and search these large content repositories in a timely, cost-effective manner. We are able to search over a billion records on a single Database Search Appliance. We are excited to be able to be involved in the important work of genealogy and be associated with such a visionary company as OneGreatFamily.com.”
You can get more information about Perfect Search at the company’s Web site and by reading the interview I conducted with Mr. Ebert in November 2008. If you are struggling with RDBMS scaling and performance issues, you will want to do a deep dive into the Perfect Search approach. Data swimming is enjoyable with the Perfect Search system. Similar exertions with Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server can give me a headache.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009
(I briefed Perfect Search executives twice on the woes of the Codd system for fruit juice and sushi. No Kentucky Fried Chicken, however.)
Kartoo Tweaks Its Interface
October 13, 2009
I have found the Kartoo.com service useful and innovative. I learned today that the company has rolled out a new interface and links that make it easier to locate the company’s other content processing technology. The new interface provides thumbnails of the top hits. You can explore other results by clicking on the links on the page. The default interface for the query “text mining” appears below:
Other new features include:
- E-reputation tools
- Metasearch functions
- Support for anonymous search
- Support for French, English and Dutch language.
If you have not explored the Kartoo service, give it a whirl.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009, published because I like the French
The Enterprise App Interface
October 13, 2009
Short honk: A Ford social media expert posted a visual example of the difference between an enterprise application and the interface approach of Google and Apple. The blog post is “Why Apple & Google Win – and Your Company Doesn’t”.
Pretty clever. Pretty accurate. Click here for the post.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009
SEO for Bing
October 13, 2009
I don’t know too much about Bing.com’s relevance ranking algorithm. The last time I invested time in Bing.com was three months ago. I did find “5 Simple Steps to Optimize Your Website for Bing, the New Microsoft Search Engine” more evidence for following Google’s guidelines for Web sites. Regarding the point about outbound links, in our tests, outbound links are useful because such outbounds may result in a reciprocal backlink. The rest of the tips seem to come straight from the Google playbook.
Stephen Arnold, October 12, 2009
Predictive Content from DailyPerfect
October 13, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to DailyPerfect. The company says:
[DailyPerfect] is a showcase for our innovative personalization technology, which can predict a user’s interests through an automated semantic analysis of publicly available information. Our predictive content engine will generate a personalized news feed customized just for you.
The company profile says:
This news site is a showcase for our innovative personalization technology, which is able to predict a user’s interests through an automated semantic analysis of publicly available information on the web and minimal or no input from the user. Yes, it’s pretty clever. You can find out a little more about how we do this right here. We have been operating in stealth/closed-beta mode for over a year and are pleased to be opening our flagship news site to the public. Give it a try here, and let us know what you think! The DailyPerfect project was initiated by Ambient Sound Investments (ASI, www.asi.ee) and Curonia Research (www.curonia.com). After being hatched at ASI’s Incubator, DailyPerfect has attracted a group of visionaries, startup veterans and developers to commercialize our progressive approach to behavioral targeting. The team is led by our CEO Louis Kanganis, Co-Founder Asko Seeba – the former Engineering Manager at Skype – and Co-Founder and CTO Ahti Heinla – a partner at Ambient Sound Investments and the former Lead Architect at Skype.
One application of the service is to use it to create custom news feeds.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009
Exclusive Interview with CTO of BrightPlanet Now Available
October 13, 2009
William Bushee, BrightPlanet’s Vice President of Development and the company’s chief technologist, spoke with Stephen E. Arnold. The exclusive interview appears in the Search Wizards Speak series. Mr. Bushee was among the first search professionals to tackle Deep web information harvesting. The “Deep Web” refers to content that traditional Web indexing systems cannot access. Deep Web sites include most major news archives as well as thousands of specialized sources. These sources typically represent the best, most definitive content sources for their subject area. For example, in the health sciences field, the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, PubMed, Mayo Clinic, and American Medical Association are all Deep Web sites, often inaccessible from conventional Web crawlers like Google and Yahoo. BrightPlanet supported the ArnoldIT.com analysis of the firm’s system. As a result of this investigation, the technology warranted an in depth discussion with Mr. Bushee.
The wide ranging interview focuses on BrightPlanet’s search, harvest, and OpenPlanet technology. Mr. Bushee told Search Wizards Speak: “As more information is being published directly to the Web, or published only on the Web, it is becoming critical that researchers and analysts have better ways of harvesting this content.”
Mr. Bushee told Search Wizards Speak:
There are two distinct problems that BrightPlanet focuses on for our customers. First we have the ability to harvest content from the Deep Web. And second, we can use our OpenPlanet framework to add enrichment, storage and visualization to harvested content. As more information is being published directly to the Web, or published only on the Web, it is becoming critical that researchers and analysts have better ways of harvesting this content. However, harvesting alone won’t solve the information overload problems researches are faced with today. The answer to a research project cannot be simply finding 5,000 raw documents, no matter how good they are. Researchers are already overwhelmed with too many links from Google and too much information in general. The answer needs to be better harvested content (not search), better analytics, better enrichment and better visualization of intelligence within the content – this is where BrightPlanet’s OpenPlanet framework comes into play. While BrightPlanet has a solid reputation within the Intelligence Community helping to fight the “War on Terror” our next mission is to be known as the commercial and academic leaders in harvesting relevant, high quality content from the Deep Web for those who need content for research, business intelligence or analysis.
You can read the full text of the interview at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/brightplanet.html. More information about the company’s products and services is available at http://www.brightplanet.com. Mr. Bushee’s technology has gained solid support from some professional researchers and intelligence agencies. BrightPlanet has moved “beyond search” with its suite of content processing technology.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2009
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