PoolCorp and Exalead Complete a High Scoring Deployment
October 6, 2010
PoolCorp. has immersed itself in Exalead’s search enabled applications framework, CloudView. According to information from Exalead, in 2009, PoolCorp evaluated its existing e-commerce platform and decided that a complete ground-up rewrite was needed to improve the ability for their customers to find products easier and faster. PoolCorp has always provided value-added tools for its dealers to grow their businesses and saw this as an opportunity to combine the best features of all of those tools into a new solution that would address all of the current customer adoption obstacles. With 35 percent of all
customer feedback surrounding search and search related functions, it was clear that in order for the new e-commerce site to provide an industry-leading customer purchase experience, an enterprise search solution was required.
Before deciding upon CloudView, PoolCorp reviewed a number of enterprise search solutions including Microsoft FAST, Endeca, Autonomy and open source Solr. Exalead told Beyond Search, “PoolCorp chose Exalead because it was cost effective, scalable and much easier to install than competing products.”
Dustin Hughes, the senior software archtect of PoolCorp said:
Great software like Exalead is like a ball of clay. You can easily push and mold it into how you need to use it. We had an extremely tight timeline for installing this software – due in part to Exalead’s fantastic customer support we got our beta up and working within weeks and rolled out to 500+ customers within 2 months. The entire system became generally available to 30,000+ U.S. customers within four months of the start of development and initial customer feedback has been very positive.
Beyond Search learned that since the POOL360 beta test in July 2010, PoolCorp found:
- The Exalead-based system offered remarkable response times, often within 1/50th of a second even when the application was pulling information directly from PoolCorp’s existing ERP system.
- Exalead’s ability to compress data from its original SQL format resulted in a 10:1 compression reduction, significantly reducing the amount of hardware necessary to deploy the POOL360 solution.
- PoolCorp saved more than $30,000 in hardware costs and licensing fees over alternative SQL-based solutions.
- The Exalead CloudView technology would be an ideal system for an internal enterprise search system.
Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.
For more information about Exalead visit the firm’s Web site at www.exalead.com. Beyond Search uses Exalead’s technology for its blog indexing demonstration here. Our experience has positive with zero set up hassles and exceptional stablity and performance.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2010
A Google Goal? Capture Indian SME Market
October 6, 2010
Matching its size and reputation, Google now has a suiting target. The Financial Express article “Google has 35m Indian SMEs on its radar,” reveals that India presently has only 200,000 SMEs having online presence, which is even less than 1 percent of its entire SME sector. As per the article, Google wants to convert the entire Indian SME sector into a potential customer base, and is on a “large-scale mission to educate smaller businessmen about the viability of the Internet for finding a market for their products.”
Even though the article reports about Google’s doubling of Indian SME customer base in a year, aggressive campaign for online advertising and plans for doubling its call center support, we reckon it will still be tough for Google to change the mindsets of most Indian businesspersons. Having said that, we note that the Internet usage is on a rise in India, which increases the chances of these business persons being lured to Google’s plan. I am not writing from the goose pond in Harrod’s Creek. I am writing from India. Different perspective perhaps?
Harleena Singh, October 6. 2010
The Reed Is Bending from Winds of Change
October 6, 2010
I don’t pay much attention to the traditional publishing sector. Most of my attention goes to data fusion, an area of considerable promise. Traditional publishing is not into data fusion the way it is practiced by Fetch Technologies, Digital Reasoning, and other up and coming outfits.
I did try to work my way through “Reed Business Information Gets Sued for Computer Usage Violations.” I was confused by the litany of executive changes and passages like this one:
Anglo-Dutch multinational Reed Elsevier is in debt to the tune of billions of US dollars and has been desperately trying to pay it off, even going as far as trying to sell RBI in 2008. Yes that is the year 2008 when the world financial markets were in the worst situation since the 1929 Wall Street crash. So bad was it that Reed Elsevier had to arrange what is called “vendor financing” for RBI’s sale. Meaning it had to get a group of banks to offer any buyer of RBI what money was needed to clinch the deal.
My goodness. The article explains a legal dust up and allegations of a traditional publisher using computer technology to make life exciting for another outfit.
If the write up is accurate, I may have to start tracking the traditional publishing sector again. Exciting stuff. Desperate times, desperate measures. I thought these executives played golf and croquet too.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2010
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The Google PSE as a Context Aggregator
October 6, 2010
I may be one of the few people outside of the Googleplex who pays much attention to Ramanathan Guha. I know that none of my neighbors in Harrod’s Creek pays much attention to world outside of University of Kentucky football, the fall machine gun shoot, and squirrel stew.
If you want to keep an eye on the Google and its nifty programmable search engine, you may want to read US20100250513, “Aggregating Context Data for Programmable Search Engines.” That plural is, in my opinion, important. Here’s the official abstract:
Search results are generated using aggregated context data from two or more contexts. When two or more programmable search engines relate to a similar topic, context data associated with the programmable search engines are aggregated. The context is then applied to a query in order to present, in an integrated manner, relevant search results that make use of context intelligence from more than one programmable search engine.
I want to let you know that I realize patent applications may not be much more than the outputs of some idle engineers and attorneys. In fact, the systems and methods may not exist or even work in the real world. Nevertheless, the programmable search engine strikes me as a particularly interest innovation. Work on it has been documented in the open source literature for several years.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2010
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A Linux Warning: Information or Disinformation
October 5, 2010
A reader sent me a link to a story on TechNewsWorld. “Penguins Old, Penguins New, Penguins Battered and Penguins Blue” provides some cautionary words about open source in general and Linux in particular. I am not able to say whether the information in the article is 100 percent spot on, but I did want to capture its main points. The arguments may be germane as open source software continues to chug forward. Later this week I will be at the Lucene Revolution Conference, and I want to make sure I know the pros and cons of the commercial versus open source landscape.
The key point in the TechNewsWorld write up is that Windows 7 is a better option for the use case described in the story. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
The project’s afflictions included implementation delays, immature software and “disgruntled employees whose displeasure allegedly culminated in the creation of a home page dedicated to venting their gripes and who were so busy grappling with Linux that they no longer managed to do their jobs,” explains a special report in The H.
After indicating that there may be a role for Linux in this particular client situation, the author says:
Three “not-so-easy lessons” can be taken away from the Solothurn story, Hudson suggested:
Problem #1: “There will always be a significant minority that will resist any change.”
Lesson #1: “Plan for resistance, and be ready to modify plans accordingly. Giving up a little early on can mean not losing everything later. No battle plan survives the first engagement intact.”
Problem #2: “Trying to change from one computer monoculture to another ignores practicalities.”
Lesson #2: “Be practical. Save ideology for church on Sunday or discussing politics at the family reunion.”
Problem #3: “Nothing was ready on time, and a lot didn’t work as promised.”
Lesson #3: “Don’t over-promise, don’t over-sell. You’re not the 800-pound monkey — you can’t sell vaporware and then fling poo at your customers and hope some of it sticks.”
Yep, without resources, knowledge, and commitment, change is tough. I suppose that’s why 66 percent of Windows users are still running XP.
I am not convinced that this use case is necessarily representative.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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Yahoo and Prediction
October 5, 2010
Yahoo’s public relations machine is working hard to deal with the flood of news about executive turnover and the questions about Yahoo’s management leadership. I wanted to snag this “What Can Search Predict?” item before it becomes unfindable. Google Instant and Bing are wonder services but pinning down specific documents in the brave new world is getting more difficult in my opinion.
The point of the write up is that user behavior at a point in time provides information about what’s hot and what’s not. I understand this. Analyzing usage data is not a new thing, nor is the math used to clump clicks and plot them, massage them, and extrapolate from them. Most college grads had a chance to try their hand at this type of math in classes from psychology to biology and statistics. (I can hear the groans now.)
Yahoo says:
In many cases, we found that these traditional predictions performed on par with those generated from search. Although search data are indeed predictive of future outcomes, alternative information sources often perform equally well.
The idea is that big data are good but specific, narrow sets of data from specific corpuses may deliver better indicators of user future actions.
Makes sense to me. Big data are big. More precisely constrained data are narrower. When looking for a specific indicator, why not consider the constrained data? Makes sense to me, but I would prefer a method that uses big data, when available, and more constrained data. Two sets of outputs can be examined.
Yahoo adds:
The potential for search-based predictions seems greatest for applications like financial analysis where even a minimal performance edge can be valuable, or for situations in which it is cumbersome or expensive to collect and parse data from traditional sources. Ultimately, search can be useful in predicting real-world events, not because it is better than other traditional data, but because it is fast, convenient, and offers insight into a wide range of topics.
Several questions waddled across my mind:
- What is the current Yahoo use case for its insight? I know that each time I return to my Yahoo Mail, the system does not remember me, nor does it present options to me based on my behavior or a larger group’s in my view. I have to click, click, click to see a list of email. Maybe Yahoo can provide some concrete examples?
- In the midst of the shift to Bing search, where does this predictive stuff fit. I was looking for a “mens black watch” on Yahoo Shopping. Try the query. I am not sure what can be done to improve the results, but search results mixed ranges with specific prices on specific models. Huh? With user data – either big or constrained – predictive methods should reduce confusion, not create a “huh” moment for me.
- Is this a “level” problem? Here’s what I am thinking. The problem in search that Yahoo is addressing seems to be down in the weeds. There are larger findability problems with Yahoo’s system. For example, in the shopping example a user must click on a “more” link in order to access the shopping search feature. Most users don’t know to what that “More” refers. Is this a contributing factor to user frustration which in turn may explain some of the loss of polish on the purple Yahoo Y?
Worth reading and then finding a use case (which I may be missing) before recycling information already in the channel in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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Exclusive Podcast: Dave Kellogg, CEO, MarkLogic
October 5, 2010
I wrote about Mark Logic’s remarkable series of sales in the publishing market. I tracked down the genial Dave Kellogg and convinced him to answer some questions about the secret to Mark Logic’s success in 2010. You can listen to the 25 minute interview at this link. For more insights from Mr. Kellogg, be sure to check out the Search Wizards Speak interview as well. Great insights for anyone interested in making sales in a tough economic climate.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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IBM: Accurate or Confused about Agility?
October 5, 2010
I seem to have been flooded with IBM information and client requests for data about IBM. I am baffled. I don’t pay too much attention to IBM. At age 66, my fond memories of my first computer class can be easily sullied by a few go rounds with IBM ServeRAID and other darned exciting IBM software.
Mostly because of the headline “Why Is IBM Declaring War on Cisco?”, I read the Register’s interesting article. The main idea is that giant IBM is picking on Cisco, a company which is working hard to pump up its revenues, diversify, and become a big player in rich media. I think the odds are against Cisco. (See “Seven Cisco Vulnerabilities.”) The main point of the Register’s article struck me as:
IBM’s networking strategy has been poor.
With the shift from on premises and unlimited spending for IBM’s engineering services, IBM has to find new ways to make money. With a revenue of $100 billion or so, getting growth that moves the top line is not an easy task. The Register’s write up makes clear that IBM may be making decisions that are tough to figure out. I know that IBM baffles me.
The company is a mix of open source and proprietary systems. The company has old technology and new technology. In short, the situation reminds me about one of those wacky Psychology 101 case studies. A dog or pigeon gets caught trying to cope with two inputs and behaves in a manner that shows an inability to make a choice. I forget the name of this behavior, but IBM seems to want to be everything, just like in the good old pre-DOS and Bill Gates days.
Interesting premise, and I think that IBM, like SAP, warrants close observation. I keep flip flopping between brilliant and confused, just like a poor lab pigeon or goose.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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Google Tangled in Patent Barbed Wire
October 5, 2010
Thanks to Florian Mueller for “Android Caught in a Crossfire of Patents.” I am no attorney (thank heaven). If you are interested in having a list of pre-season players for the winter line up of legal eagle fights, you will want to download a copy of the post. If you want copies of the patents, you can try the fine, fine USPTO or www.freepatentsonline.com.
What’s the net net of the long write up?
While I’ve been following patent disputes in our industry for some time, I can’t remember that any software platform has ever been under pressure from such a diversity of patents — held by several powerful competitors — as Android. This is a uniquely precarious situation for Google and its partners (the vendors of Android-based smartphones and the group I mostly care about: application developers).
This is a nice way of saying that Google’s competitors by happy coincidence want to flip the Google bull over, brand it, put it on a truck to the slaughterhouse, and produce dog food, shoes, and hamburger for McDonald’s.
Will the play work?
Tough to say.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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Content Conversion: A Subset of Connectors
October 4, 2010
There is certainly some excitement in the technical backwater of content conversion. I wrote a post for someone’s blog about the legal matter involving i2.co.uk and www.palantir.com. You can do some poking around on this issue or wait until my Information Today column on the subject becomes available.
Over the years, I have had to take content from System A and convert it to a type of content or form of content that System B could process. I wanted to call attention to two outfits who provide these services.
The first is an outfit on Long Island that we used at Ziff Communications lo those many moons ago. The company is called Data Conversion Labs. I visited the firm a couple of times and sat through some demos. The take away for me was these folks can do the System A to System B work quite well. You can read about this company at
The second is an outfit one of my UK clients used. Stilo does the A to B think, and its output worked well as memory serves me. Stilo has added an on demand service, which I thought was quite nifty.
Why do I mention these two companies? I think there is a mid tier consulting firm and a search vendor suggesting that file conversion is some sort of cabal. In fact, file conversion is widely available from lots of people. The suggestion that file conversion is anything other than a widespread service, available from vendors throughout the world is just plain wrong. Marketing is one thing. Ignoring the vendors who perform conversion, code custom filters, and perform transformation on premises, via appliances, or using proprietary methods is one more example of search marketing distortion.
Ah, young people. So eager to become important and hit their numbers.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2010
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