A Search Hum-Dinger
July 28, 2010
We all knew the day would come when we could hum an unknown melody and our computer or phone would name that tune. What is surprising is how this wondrous little gadget will populate its data. Technology Review recently broke down the frontier Tunebot is trying to conquer in the article, “Query-by-Humming Musical Search Engine Launched”. Tunebot essentially allows users to hum their song and the possible results appear, but the designers had to find a way to populate the millions of songs with a user’s inability to match key, notes, timbre and other factors. The ingenious answer, which the article considered, “an elegant solution to the problem of melody recognition,” was to have a karaoke contest where users populate all the possible hums themselves. Tunebot’s brilliant collision of search technology and online community, makes this upstart a program to watch.
Pat Roland, July 28, 2010
Freebie
Computer Does Stand Up. Sucks.
July 28, 2010
Did you hear the joke “What a grizzly memorial park?” Give up. “A gray-veyard.” Don’t believe me. Navigate to “The Joking Computer” and give it a whirl. You will how far content processing has come and how far it has to go. I don’t what to know what university funded this service. I don’t want to use the service. I will stick to my Tess does computers humor, the azurini references, and my persona as an addled goose. No smart computer needed.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2010
Freebie
Content Risks and Rewards
July 28, 2010
My field is open source intelligence. I can’t reveal my sources, but I have heard that an intelligence unit can duplicate anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of its classified information from open sources. The trick of course is to know what is important. Most people can look at an open source document, dismiss it, and go about their day unaware of the key item of information that was right in front of them.
For that reason, this blog and my other blogs are open source. I use my Overflight system to suck in publicly accessible content. I look at what the system spits out and I highlight the important stuff. The magic in the system is not the software nor the writers whom I pay to create most of the content in Beyond Search and my other writings. I am sufficiently confident in my method that when I talk with a so called expert or an executive from a company, I am skeptical about what that person asserts. In most cases, experts lack the ability to put their information in context. Without context, even good information is useless.
When i read about Wikileaks publishing allegedly classified information, I wondered about the approach. Point your browser at “Next Step for Wikileaks: Crowdsourcing Classified Data” and learn what is ahead for information dissemination. The idea is that lots of people will contribute secrets.
Baloney.
The more stuff that is described as secret and sensitive, the more difficult it will be to figure out what is on the money and what is not. I have some nifty software, but I know from my tests that when information is weaponized, neither humans nor software can pinpoint where the train went off the tracks.
In my view, folks publishing allegedly classified information are looking for some rough sledding. Furthermore, the more baloney that gets pumped into the system, the greater the likelihood for disinformation.
If these documents had become known to me, I would have kept the puppies to myself. I would have used my Overflight system to verify points that my method identified as important. I would not accept any assertion, fact, or argument as valid until some more work was done.
Wikileaks is now famous, and sometimes fame can be tough. Just ask John Belushi if you can find him. People ask me what I don’t provide some color for some of my remarks. Well, that is because some information is not appropriate for a free blog. This is a lesson that I think some folks are going to learn in the School of Hard Knocks.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2010
Freebie and open source
Quote to Note: YouTube and Cold, Hard Cash
July 27, 2010
Here’s a quote that caught my attention. The source is “Google Exec Speaks Of YouTube, Imminent Profitability.” The Googler making the statement is allegedly Nikesh Arora, a Google executive and super smart person. Did you update your business controlled vocabulary to make Google a related term for “wizard”. I did. Anyway, here’s the alleged quote:
“YouTube is on the verge of imminent profitability.”
Okay. l think I understand. There’s the payout price for YouTube.com. The litigation. The marketing costs. The expense of making YouTube into a quality video service. Bandwidth. Staff. Yep, imminent with interest.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2010
Freebie.
What Does Google Read?
July 27, 2010
Want to read like a Google exec? Don’t expect any laughs. Book recommendations have become a burgeoning online obsession and we’re not just talking about blogs. There are several sites allowing you to look at another person’s bookshelf and get a peek inside their mind. Google’s Profile page now has a bookshelf section where people, like its Research Director, Peter Norvig, list favorite books. Not surprising, Norvig is a big reader on AI, but his Humor shelf is vacant. Looking for something a little more interactive? Goodreads and Shelfari combine social networking and literature, sort of like Facebook for librarians. The fascinating part of this technology, much like Norvig’s shelf, is how much you learn about a person by browsing their collection.
Pat Roland, July 27, 2010
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Webnocular
July 27, 2010
I looked at this metasearch system a couple of weeks ago. I revisited it because a reader sent me a link to it, asking for my opinion. You can locate the site at http://www.webnocular.com/. Metasearch and mobile search are popular. The reason is that the cost of brute force Web indexing has made it impossible for smaller firms to compete. Exalead, now a unit of the French superstar services firm Dassault, has built an index of about eight billion Web pages. I use it first and then Google for my research. Google returns too many irrelevant results to keep this goose happy. Exalead’s method, on the other hand, does a much better job for the types of queries I routinely run. I also use Exalead to index Google’s own Web logs. I find that Google’s consumerist approach makes it tough to pinpoint some of Google’s own blog content. You can try the Exalead Google blog index at http://overflight.labs.exalead.com/.
Now what about Webnocular?
The system takes a query, performs some normal metasearch tricks, fires off the request, gets the results back, and performs some special magic. The idea is that metasearch systems do not have to brute force index the Web like Exalead, Google, and Microsoft do. Heck, it is expensive and more complicated than it looks to the home economics majors who end up working at the azurini (second and third tier consulting companies).
A query for “enterprise search” returned some results after some chugging. The results were okay, but not as useful to me as a query for the phrase on Exalead, Ixquick, or Red Tram, which is becoming one of my favorite current information indexing services.
I did not download the add in toolbar. I find these invasive. I don’t tweet and I don’t post to Facebook. Who cares what an addled goose likes. If you are into tool bars and social media, you may want to give Webnocular a test drive. The company offers code “extenders” such as an Instant Messenger service which is “a full-featured chat program.” The company says:
[Webnocular Messenger] includes features such as Moderated chat, high load support, font/color/ customization, emoticons, private messaging, private chat room, profanity filtering, ignoring users, file Transfer, and many more!
Our take on the service is that it implements some good ideas, and it could catch fire among some user segments.According to Most Popular Websites, Webnocular is in the top million most popular Web sites.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2010
Freebie
Social Media Disappoints Some
July 27, 2010
For the very first time, social media has been rated on the ACSI E-business report that scores customer satisfaction in a number of areas including social media sites as well as search engines and portals and the results are a less than favorable. Is the social media apple harboring an ugly worm?
The report from ForeSee Results scores social media low on the scale but notes at the same time that Web sites like Facebook can still enjoy a monopoly with abysmal customer satisfaction ratings. While a score in the report of lower than 70 is considered poor, Facebook only managed to get a 64. It should be no surprise that customers who inked their concerns about Facebook put privacy and security issues at the forefront. (Keep in mind that the goslings at Beyond Search have some concerns about pop up, in your face surveys. We dismiss these as annoying intrusions. Thus, the samples on which the results are based may contain a bias that makes these data as wacky as the addled goose when he goes without sleep.)
The Daily HaHa nailed the goslings reaction to both the pop up data collection method and the findings reported by ForeSee. Source: http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/gift_of_disappointment.jpg
On the other side of that fence was Wikipedia that had a score of 77. As far as the news and information sites went there was a constant mean score of 74. It’s also interesting to note that while Google’s overall score stayed high , it suffered an overall decline of seven per cent. (Keep in mind the nature of the sample and the omission of the margins of error.)
Still, the social media scores are the alleged big story since they entered the rating system for the first time. The ForeSee Results Annual E-Business Report with the ACSI had some interesting assertions based on numbers for social media including:
- The ACSI measured 30 online companies and MySpace and Facebook were the lowest scoring sites. (This is interesting since Facebook recently passed 500 million members and MySpace has been either stable or in decline for years.)
- The customer satisfaction issues with Facebook are generally age related. Older people were generally more critical of the site than younger people. (In the absence of demographic anchor data, perhaps older folks are judging Facebook on factors not queried in the survey questions via the pop up? Perhaps those filling in pop ups were biased to be more critical? Hard to tell because the report seems to have an knife to sharpen in our opinion.)
Yahoo! and Microsoft, Wedded Bliss?
July 27, 2010
Yahoo! and Microsoft have exchanged rings, gone to the chapel and returned from their honeymoon (http://www.internetnews.com/search/article.php/3894486). Now the world waits to see what kind of baby they’ll make. The two search also-rans are in the process of combining Microsoft’s Bing (www.bing.com) search technology with Yahoo!’s established presence in an attempt to compete with Google. “As we continue to make progress implementing various aspects of the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance,” a spokesman said. “Our two companies continue to work together towards the goal of providing a quality transition experience for advertisers.”
While we’re all curious if this merger will produce a Rosemary’s Baby, securing its advertising first strikes us as a wise approach. It’ll take big bucks to stop Google’s dominance and this might be the key.
In fact, MarketWatch’s “What’s wrong with Yahoo?” makes the point that Yahoo has a knack for turning a blue ribbon into an also-participated certificate. The article said:
Everything it does is second rate, or when they buy a company they put it on a track to become second rate. When they develop or buy something that is not only first rate or fundamentally a world-beater, they have no clue as to how to market it.
MarketWatch focuses on the firm’s management, which is skilled in cursing may lack the touch required to make the marriage work. The addled goose has yet to recover from the verbal baloney tossed at him after the publication of his analysis of Google’s attempt to corner the semantic Web. Not only did Google fizzle, so did Yahoo. What’s that tell you about the difficulties of the semantic stuff and the overweening confidence programmers have in their own team’s abilities? The goose learned a lot.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2010
Exclusive Interview: Eric Gries, Lucid Imagination
July 27, 2010
It’s not everyday that you find a revolutionary company like Lucid Imagination that’s blazing a new trail in the Open Source world whose CEO described the firm as being at 90 degrees to the traditional search business model.
Still, that’s the way that Eric Gries refers to Lucene/Solr’s impact on the search and content processing market. “The traditional search industry has not changed much in 30 years. Lucid Imagination’s approach is new, disruptive, and able to deliver high value solutions without the old baggage. We have flipped the old ideas of paying millions and maybe getting a solution that works. We provide the industrial strength software and then provide services that the client needs. The savings are substantial. Maybe we are now taking the right angle?”, he asked with a big smile?”
This pivot in the market reflects the destabilizing impact of open source search, and the business that Mr. Gries is building at supersonic speeds. “Traditional search is like taking a trip on a horse drawn cart. Lucid Imagination’s approach is quick, agile, and matched to today’s business needs.”
A seasoned executive in in software and information management, Mr. Gries uses the phrase to capture his firm’s meteoric rise in the Open Source world and how the success of its Open Source model is giving traditional competitors such as Autonomy, Endeca, and Microsoft Fast indigestion.
Mr. Gries’s background speaks of the right pedigree for a professional who is at the helm of a successful startup.
He got his start at Cullinet Software. “I started in the computer sciences and joined my first company as part of the development team,” Cullinet Software was an early leader–databases were young, and relational databases, made famous by Larry Ellison, were just getting out of the gate,” he recently told Beyond Search. After he got his MBA, he moved more into the business side, among other things, building the Network System Management Division at Compuware. He’s brought solid credentials in software services from his experience to the new venture at Lucid Imagination, a start up with substantial venture backing.
Eric Gries, the mastermind of the Lucene Revolution. Source: Lucid Imagination, www.lucidimagination.com
He was first attracted to search and data and the relevant issues there. The lure of Open Source came later.
“The thing that attracted me to Open Source at first was the fact that search was really growing in leaps and bounds,” he said and he’s understandably proud of what the company has been able to accomplish so far.
“Lucene/Solr is software that is as good or better than most of the other commercial offerings in terms of scalability, relevance and performance.”
He talked recently about how it was important to him to put together the right kind of advisory guidance, drawing on people with real world experience in the technology and business of Open Source.
“I was new to the space, so very early on I put together a very strong advisory board of Open Source luminaries that were very helpful.”
Lucid Imagination, of which Gries is President and CEO, was launched in 2009, and is only in its second year of operation. Lucid closed millions of dollars worth of business in their first year. The recipe for success that includes a deep level of involvement and collaboration with the community outside Lucid, communities and and ensuring the technology gets the right kind of attention in terms of vital needs like quality and flexibility that drive the appetite of organizations for search technology.
The value of the business is about search, not open source. The company is riding on the trends of search and Open Source which Mr. Gries says is being accepted more and more as a mainstay of the enterprise.
The establishment has taken notice as well with companies who understand the value of trailblazers like Red Hat — ‘opening doors’ for Lucene/Solr according to Mr. Gries — and in turn helping them to establish themselves as a second generation supplier of Open Source technology solutions.
Mr. Gries’s enthusiasm for his new type of business model is infectious and he enjoys pointing out the pride and dedication that goes into the work that gets done at Lucid, located in the heart of Silicon Valley.
“We added low cost to the metrics of scalability, relevance and performance so there’s really no good reason to use any commercial software with all due respect,” he added.
One of the more interesting aspects of Lucid is the fact that the firm has received $16 million in venture funding and is already getting an impressive list of clients on their roster that includes names like LinkedIn, Cisco, and Zappos, now a unit of the giant Amazon.
It’s clear that Mr. Gries has been able to understand that Open Source has been able to displace some commercial search solutions, and for him the reasons are simple that the software is downloaded at the blistering pace of thousands of units a day.
“Now the software is good and industry sees that there is a commercial entity committed to working with them, we want the enterprise to see they can work with Open Source,” he noted.
Still, while there is what’s been described as considerable momentum among some developers for this technology, some senior information technology managers and some purchasing professionals are less familiar with Open Source software and Lucene/Solr.
That’s where Mr. Gries understands the need to get the word out on the firm. He has learned that the education of the market is critical and hopes to build on the successes that Lucid Imagination achieved with sponsoring a developer conference in Prague earlier this year . It was so successful another—the Lucene Revolution— is planned for Boston in October.
Mr. Gries prides himself on the fact that the products created are all about a fresh business model with no distance between the developer and user. He’s proud of the success that the Lucene/Solr technology and community, along with his company, have enjoyed so far and likes to point out in his own way that one of their biggest goals beyond added value is increasing their market exposure for what he call this second generation Open Source.
“We are at 90 degrees to the typical search business model. We’re disruptive. We are making the competition explain a business model that is not matched to today’s financial realities. The handcuffs of traditional software licenses won’t fit companies that need agility and high value solutions,” he said. “ The software is already out there and running mission critical solutions. One of our tasks to to make sure people understand what is available now, and the payoffs available right now.”
He points to the fact that success came so early for Lucene/Solr the company has just put their 24/7 customer service in place.
Open source means leveraging a community. Lucid combines the benefits of open source software with exceptional support and service. For more information about the company, its Web site is at www.lucidimagination.com.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2010
I have been promised a free admission to the Lucene Revolution in October 2010.
Summer Search Rumor Round Up
July 26, 2010
The addled goose has been preoccupied with some new projects. In the course of running around and honking, he has heard some rumors. The goose wants to be clear. He is not sure if these rumors are 100 percent rock solid. He does want to capture them before the mushy information slips away:
Source: http://oneyearbibleimages.com/rumors.gif
First, the goose heard that there will be some turnover at Microsoft Fast. The author of some of the posts in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog may be leaving for greener pastures. You can check out the blog at this link. What does this tell the goose? More flip flopping at Microsoft? Not sure. Any outfit that pays $1.2 billion for software that comes with its own police investigation is probably an outfit that would scare the addled goose to death. The blog is updated irregularly with such write ups as “Crawling Case Sensitive Repositories Using SharePoint Server 2010” and “SharePoint 2010 Search ‘Dogfood’ Part 3 – Query Performance Optimization.” Ah, the new problem of upper and lower case and the ever present dog food regarding performance. I thought Windows most recent software ran as fast as a jack rabbit. Guess not.
Second, a number of traditional search vendors are poking around for semantic technology. The notion that key words don’t work particularly well seems to be gaining traction. The problem is that some of the high profile outfits have been snapped up. For example, Powerset fell into the Microsoft maw and Radar Networks was gobbled by Paul Allen’s love child, Evri. Now the stampede is on. The problem is that the pickings seem to be slim, a bit like the t shirts after a sale at the Wal-Mart up the road from the goose pond here in Harrods’s Creek. For some lucky semantic startups, Christmas could come early this year. Anyone hear, a sound like “hack, hack”. Oh, that must be short for Hakia. You never know.
Third, performance may have forced a change at HMV.co.uk in merrie olde England. Dieselpoint was the incumbent. I heard that Dieselpoint is on the look out for partners and investors. The addled goose tried to interview the founder of the company but a clever PR person sidelined the goose and shunted him to the drainage ditch that runs through Blue Island, Illinois. Will Dieselpoint land the big bucks as Palantir did.
Fourth, the goose heard that a trio of Microsoft certified partners with snap in SharePoint search components were looking for greener pastures. What seems to be happening is that the easy sales have dried up since Microsoft started its current round of partner cheerleading. The words are there, but the sales are not. Microsoft seems to want the money to flow to itself and not its partners. Who is affected? The goose cannot name names without invoking the wrath of Redmond and a pride of PR people who insist that their clients are knocking the socks off the competition. However, does the enterprise need a half dozen companies pitching metatagging to SharePoint licensees? I think not. If sales don’t pick up, the search engine death watch list will pick up a few new entries before the leaves fall. Vendors in the US, Denmark, Germany, Austria, and Canada are likely to watching Beyond Search’s death watch list. Remember Convera? It spawned Search Technologies. Remember the pre Microsoft Fast? It spawned Comperio? When a search engine goes away, the azurini flower.
Fifth, what’s happened to the Oracle killers? I lost track of Speed of Mind years ago. There was a start up with a whiz bang method of indexing databases. I haven’t heard much about killing Oracle lately. In fact, stodgy old Oracle is once again poking around for search and content processing technology according to one highly unreliable source. With SES11g now available to Oracle database administrators, perhaps the time is right to put some wood behind a 21st century search solution.
If you want to complain about one of these rumors, use the comments section of this blog. Alternatively, contact one of the azurini outfits and get “real” verification. Some of their consultants use this blog as training material for the consultants whom you compensate. No rumor this. Fact.
Stephen E Arnold, July 26, 2010
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