Is Another Search Engine Is Struggling
December 9, 2009
Updated: December 10, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the Danish ComputerWorld story about the break up and planned sale of this property. You can read “Mondo indgiver konkursbegæring” for the basics and get more color in “Kollapset Mondo splittes op i fire dele”. You don’t need much knowledge of Danish to figure out Kollapset. With more than 300 search and content processing vendors in my files, I think it may be difficult for the herd to survive given the available vegetation. Translation: too many hungry wallets, too little money to satisfy their appetites. Stay tuned because SharePoint 2010 may have claimed its first casualty. I can’t figure out who gets what in this business defriending. Once again those with unbounded confidence in their abilities demonstrate that some folks don’t know what they don’t know. Note: the addled goose has conflicting information regarding the ownership and products of Mondo. More info as it flows from the land of the Danes.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
I must report to the United Nations that I was not paid for this fuzzy wuzzy, imprecise, vague news item. Big surprise, eh?
SAP Wins an Award
December 8, 2009
This is the season for awards. I receive dozens of announcements about companies that are on someone’s Fast 50, Hot 100, and Top 10 list. The lust for awards is linked to sales. I don’t think a company that is generating significant revenue gets too excited when a real, imagined, bogus, or hackneyed award plops on their doorstep. I have received a few awards in my time, and I don’t think I did much marketing around them. I enjoyed the recognition, but I was busy. I took my check, ribbon, or trophy and went back to Kentucky. I used one award to hold ties. When my father in law said, “That is a good idea,” I gave him the trophy. He used it as a tie rack until his death.
You can test my hypothesis that companies in trouble make a big deal out of certifications, awards, and honors. Navigate to “SAP Earns Palladium Kaplan-Norton Balanced Scorecard Certified Software Designation”. With SAP’s revenues drifting south and TREX (SAP’s search system) nearly invisible, I think the award puffery tells more about the SAP need to have something—anything—to make the company relevant again.
The era of big, expensive, and overly complex software is drawing to a close. Bad news for SAP, but it is good news for the sponsors of the Palladium Kaplan-Norton Balanced Scorecard. The more revenue pressure, the greater the need to embrace this type of honor. Just my opinion. I would prefer surging revenues, happy customers, and a revivification of TREX. Maybe the certification comes with a trophy that can hold ties?
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
I wish to disclose to the Marine Mammal Commission that I was not paid to write about what may become an endangered species of enterprise software vendor.
New Features in SharePoint Search
December 8, 2009
I saw a link to a new white paper about SharePoint search. I clicked the link. I had to provide my user name and password and fill in a bunch of check boxes about how much money I spent on computers, my title, and my phone number. I registered Tess, my rescued boxer. When the paper displayed, I was informed that the MSDN Tech Net document was not in the “hi bin.” What I saw was an ASCII rendering of a bunch of boilerplate. The direct link to “What’s New in Enterprise Search (SharePoint Server 2010)” reveals a November 10, 2009, document even though the newsfeed showed that the story came down the wire earlier today (December 7, 2009). If the link doesn’t work, try the Google Microsoft index here.
What does the white paper disclose? Lots of features. My impression is that Microsoft gathered up the marketing collateral of Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, and other vendors. The company then took a pinch here and a pinch there, including for good measure a farm connector wizard. Amazing. I think a white paper should have some facts, hard data, and useful information. A white paper now means brochureware it seems.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
I am breathless with excitement to disclose that I was not paid to point out that this white paper is a collection of marketing lingo. Which agency has jurisdiction over this type of silly blog writing? I know. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Poetic, right?
Googzilla Switches Its Tail and Imperils Some Real Time Search Services
December 8, 2009
One this about scale is that it is often big. Big in data is good. The addled goose will leave it to you to read Google’s “Relevance Meets the Real-Time Web”. You can wade through the punditry. For this goose, here is the key paragraph in today’s (December 7, 2009) announcement:
Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.
Several comments:
- Folks pumping dough into the many real time indexing operations are likely to have second thoughts and will be asked some tough questions like “So, how is your service better than Google’s?”
- Users will have convenience delivery. This is like the 7-11 approach to shopping. The “cost” is irrelevant. The service makes the experience valuable.
- Forget the UX or user experience. The Google delivers data. Microsoft will have to come up with a hat and then find a rabbit in it.
Now what does this mean for “real” news? Interesting question. I will wait until a pundit, satrap, wizard, or azure chip consultant elucidates. I am a reactive goose.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to disclose to the Greenwich Observatory that I was not paid to make this comment. Lots of tourists in Greenwich.
Search, Its Biggest Change, and Yawns
December 8, 2009
I try to steer clear of the search engine optimization crowd. A reader sent me a link to a write up called “Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention”. The idea is that Google can personalize search results for every user in the world. Search Engine Land slaps the word “biggest” on this Google announcement. The idea is that users should be revved up, excited, concerned, involved, etc.
I suppose I should be excited, but the personalization can be turned off. I have noticed shaped search results for quite a while. The scale interests me. Personalization is one consequence of Google’s adaptive functions. Newly visible to users, not new.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to disclose to the Geological Survey (USGS) that this new world has been explored already. I did my write up without any payment. Tough to charge money to state the obvious.
Exascale, What about Exalead?
December 8, 2009
The Industry Standard ran an enigmatic and short news item in an article called “Scientists, IT Community Await Exascale Computers”. The write up is a collection of statements about super fast computers. The only problem I have with an article that references a computer with 100 million cores is that I struggle with its relevance. Google chugs along quite happily with mid range, commodity hardware. The bottlenecks are well known and not resolved with a dusting of technical verbiage. There is an outfit called Exalead. Its technology is able to handle petascale challenges. So Google is in the game as is Exalead. The demonstration systems referenced in the Industry Standard article give the impression that exascale is something that wanders in deep space like a quark star. Not true. For more information, navigate to www.exalead.com.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Government National Mortgage Association. I was not paid to point out that I did not mortgage my soul to point out that speculation that ignores the existing exascale solutions helps me not a whit.
Libreka: Belgium Builds a Google Killer for the Europeans
December 8, 2009
I am not sure if this headline is accurate, but that’s what I wrote in my notes after I saw a demo of Libreka. This is not a new service. Ars Technica wrote about it in October 2007. You may find this write up useful: “German Publishers Challenge Google Book Search with Libreka.” The article said:
The new program, called Libreka, has attracted plenty of German publishers who like its “opt-in” approach. Publishers who don’t want to make snippets or sample pages of their works available have that option, unlike with Google, which shows tiny snippets of text even from copyrighted works. Those who want to offer sample pages and make their books searchable can do that too.
I saw a document on Wikileaks that suggested that the Libreka service was not scoring hat tricks at the cash register. You can find that document here.
Libreka has hit my radar a number of times. I have in my files a copy of presentation given a year ago. You can find the document online here. The Libreka business model is quite ambitious, maybe too ambitious:
The document asserts:
- 100,000+ books fully searchable online
- 30m+ book pages online
- 11,000+ E-Books for sale
- 1,200 participating publishers
- 600 participating booksellers.
According to my source in London last week, Libreka is software built by Bureau Marcel van Dijk. You can run queries on the system. Notice that it has a number of Google Books features. The service offers a “wish list”, which allows me to “reserve a book”. I am not sure I will use this feature. User query terms are highlighted in the page displays. I set up a user account, and then I was able to run a query and display a number of pages. I installed the Adobe Digital Editions software. (Once I ran a couple of queries, I uninstalled this software. Yuck. Adobe.) The system also supports PDF “flavors”. (Yuck. Adobe.) My estimate is that the pages displayed are dictated by the publisher participating in the program. If you read German, there’s an FAQ at http://www.libreka.de/help#faq. If you are a Google Translate fan, the Google system cannot parse this particular url, so you will be on your own or you will need to find a German reading friend to assist you.
Too little, too late in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Library of Congress. I wish to disclose that I am writing this article for free and in English. My German is rusty but I figured out enough to conclude that German booksellers are pushing the wrong way in the digital data flows.
Kindle Craziness
December 7, 2009
For some interesting MBA logic, read “Kindle Fantasies Are Running Wild — But, For Now, Amazon Is Losing Its Shirt.” I am not too keen on Amazon or the Kindle. Amazon’s financial reports are not too informative, and the data about its cloud services are expressed in mythical Amazon units. Spare me. The Kindle is annoying in its various incarnations. Among the reasons is the dorky snap on cover that can break the device and the when-pigs-fly search system that often launches itself when packing the gizmo away when the pilot tells me to turn off electronic devices. I have learned to live with the gray on dark gray screen and the clumsy keyboard, the experimental browser, and odd buttons. Kindle 1 had buttons that were too easy to push. Kindle 2 have buttons that are tough to use when reading on the elliptical exercise machine. The big Kindle is an invitation to breakage. PDFs and graphics generally are miserable experiences.
The article cited above sidesteps my points and goes into a more murky area; namely, the finances of Amazon’s selling eBooks. The key passage in the write up in my opinion was:
Publishers should be able to sell e-books to distributors like Amazon at $5 and still maintain the profit margins they enjoyed on print book sales. In turn, distributors like Amazon should be able to sell e-books at the current $9-$10 price and still enjoy a healthy profit. The bad news for authors is that their royalties will decrease since they are based off of retail sales price.
I think that books of any type are going to be a financial challenge whether in print, online, or on a device like the Kindle. In case you have not noticed, books are not the way folks under 20 get their info. I don’t see the demographic bulges that are bursting with video, Web, and tweet consumers suddenly jumping on the book bandwagon. There are 320 million or so people in the US and most book readers are concentrated above 42nd Street, in university burgs like Charlottesville, Virginia, Washington, DC, and a half dozen other major cities.
The numbers presented in the write up appear rational, but the thinking that gives rise to this type of analysis is oddly disconnected from the reality of the publishing business. Can traditional publishing survive with a shrinking pool of book readers? Check out the argument in Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America. That 1992 future is now here. When a blockbuster fails to materialize for book publishers, the decline will be sure and steady. In fact, that’s what is happening right now in publishing. When Google provides good enough options to get nuggets of information, the revenue bleeding will be slow and the open wound will lead to financial Streptococcus pneumoniae. Prognosis: no marathons for the victim. Publishing outfits may just wheeze along.
Don’t expect gizmos and price wars to change the descent. Just take a look at your kids. Reading a book? Not likely for the majority of families I assert.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to disclose to the Department of the Army that books are not what they once were. If you know someone in the Army responsible for recruit training, run your book argument by that non commissioned officer and let me know what you hear. By the way, this is a free blog. You will have to pay the author of the cited article to get their reasoning for financial bonanzas.
Microsoft Academic Research
December 7, 2009
Microsoft’s answer to Google Scholar is publicly available at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/. I saw the service in 2006, but then I lost track of it. I saw a post in Research Shelf in late October 2009. I fiddled with the system today (December 5, 2009) and found it useful. There are more than three million research papers accessible via the system. For a full run down of the service’s features, navigate to “Here they Come Again? Microsoft Research Launches Academic Search Database (Beta)”. I am not a scholar and some of the functions won’t be of much use to me. My test queries for various Google wizards and technologies were in line with what my team has gathered over the years. Here’s what a query for Ramanathan Guha generated:
The tabs across the top of the page slice the data by authors, conferences, and journals. I looked at the results gathered under each tab, but for my work, these were not particularly useful. The related authors listings were interesting. My particular approach is to read the abstract and look at the list of authors, paying particular attention to the order in which each is listed in the source document.
The system–object-level vertical search research–was responsive but there was none of the value added hyper linking that is now being used in Google’s legal collection.
When I ran a query for “Jeffrey Dean”, I got some false drops and hits that pointed to authors named “Dean” working in fields unrelated to computer science.
My view of the service is that it is useful. I would use the service, but it would not be my starting point. My own collection of Google information struck me as more conclusive. When researching academic content, I need to be able to jump to patent documents by a particular author and access Web log posts by the individual whom I am researching.
The content seemed okay for the technical fields in which i have an interest, but I was not able to determine how frequently the index is being refreshed. I have some newer Google technical papers I downloaded directly from the Google.com repository. Microsoft may want to make some changes to its crawler. I think Google does a better job of indexing Microsoft than Microsoft does of indexing Google.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2009
Listen up. I was not paid to write this blog post. I wish to report its status as a freebie to Lead Hazard Control (Housing and Urban Development Department).
Government 2.5: Traditional Information Technology Evolves
December 7, 2009
I have just returned from my endnote at the International Online Conference in London. On December 14, 2009, I will be taking one of the 10 trends for 2010 from my London UK talk and expanding on the idea of dataspaces, not databases. Most governmental entities are anchored in traditional database technology. Although state of the art in the 1970s, the RDBMS framework is ill suited for the rigors of Government 2.5 information.
I will be attending the CoolBlue Government 2.5 conference in Washington, DC, on December 14 and 15, 2009. You can get full details about the conference from the program’s Web site.
You can get a glimpse of what’s in my talk. Just search this Web log for the term “dataspace”, and you will get some background information. The dataspace technology is one of Google’s crown jewels, and it a core capability little known outside of a small circle of wizards. You can see a tiny fragment of the dataspace technology in action if you navigate to the Google Wave information page and do some exploration.
My remarks created quite a stir in London on Thursday, December 3, 2009, and I anticipate a similar reaction in Washington on December 14, 2009. Googlers are largely unaware of the dataspace technology, how it embraces the Google programmable search engine, and the company’s push to become the Semantic Web.
I will be linking these technologies to likely government use cases. If you want to talk after the event, just write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com. I will make time to visit with Government 2.5 attendees.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to alert the mayor of Washington, DC, that I was not paid to write this blatant self promotion or mention the CoolBlue conference. I think the conference’s PR manager will buy me a Diet Pepsi. I have my Web feet crossed.
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
