Google and the EU: Still Grousing
January 18, 2011
It looks as though Google is suspected of having stepped over the hit-boosting line per EU Asks Advertisers: Does Google Manipulate Its Search Results?. To get to the bottom of things, the European Commission (EC) is circulating a survey to advertisers and vertical search engines in conjunction with an antitrust investigation. The questions ask things like whether or not increased ad spending improves search rankings and if Google’s AdWords makes advertising elsewhere too difficult to pursue.
Google’s Matt Cutts maintains “The only reasons I know of to go in and change [search rankings] manually is for security, a court order or spam. It is impossible to pay for a better ranking.”
For Google’s sake, they better hope those statements are true. Three companies have already filed complaints so the heat won’t be off until the investigation has time to garner some results. The threat of a damaged reputation or perhaps worse, the whole affair being thrown into the legal arena, is very real. Stay tuned for updates.
Sarah Rogers, January 18, 2011
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Is AdWords Losing Its Efficacy?
January 18, 2011
Updated results have been released for the “Natural Born Clickers” study first conducted in 2007 by comScore and Starcom USA that in theory should not leave a smile on advertiser’s faces. The number of internet users who click on display ads in a month dropped from 32% to 16% in just two years. Look out, AdWords.
What this tells marketers is that focusing advertising efforts into coaxing a click out of the internet user is a near waste of time and money. In fact, according to the SVP/Director, Research & Analytics John Lowell of Starcom USA, “A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal – and it’s certainly not to generate clicks. You want people to visit your website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep your brand top of mind, learn something new, feel differently – the list goes on. Regardless of whether the consumer clicked on an ad or not, the key is to determine how that ad unit influenced them to think, feel or do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
So at the end of the day, even poor results such as these seem to leave the advertising department undeterred at trying to get into your wallet. Click or no click, they will always seek to lure you in no matter the means.
One question: How will search change if AdWords becomes associated with less customer impact? Is a return to the Dialog and LexisNexis approach to search going to come roaring back?
Sarah Rogers, January 18, 2011
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AOL, Search, and Management
January 18, 2011
I miss Relegence.com, a property acquired by AOL and now subsumed into the various consumer services AOL offers. I used to enjoy testing AOL Search. The company once had PLS (Personal Library Software), then Thunderstone, then Fast Search & Transfer, and now I just don’t know.
What is interesting are two stories I saw today (January 17, 2011). The first appeared in the hard copy of the New York Times I get each morning. Well, most mornings. Delivery is a challenge in Harrod’s Creek when the weather does not cooperate. The article explained that AOL was doing well with Patch.com, a locality information service. You may be able to read the NYT article at this link, but, like home delivery in Harrod’s Creek, access can be a hit and miss affair. This is a Kool-Aid story, sparkling with good news. Now Patch.com is interesting because the company was the or one of the founders. See “Tim Armstrong’s Patch to Cash In on Death of Newspapers.” Xoogler Armstrong is the top dog at AOL. I find this interesting and amusing, particularly because the NYT often gilds lilies.
The other interesting story is the dust up between two AOL information services. I don’t understand what the hassle between two Web logs concerns. What does interest me is that Xoogler Armstrong is not able to manage the issue. You can one blog’s view at “Dear Michael Arrington.” You can get the other blog’s angle at “Blog Fight Rules of Engagement.”
My view is:
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- AOL management should focus on making its services and content findable
- The content side of the business may want to brand its properties so what is really a snit among siblings is easily identified as an in-house affair. Do you know what Project Phoenix is?
- The notion that working at Google translates to management expertise gets another dent in its sleek, retro rod exterior.
Just our opinion where the newspapers may not get delivered and the local citizens shoot squirrels with big guns.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2011
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Overanalyzing Microsoft SharePoint
January 18, 2011
Clever Workarounds has an amazing write-up called, “SharePoint Analysts—Stop Analysing!” It first starts off with a reassuring advice that life experience comes from making mistakes, which makes you an a better person at the end of the day. This is related to business analysts in that customers do not want and cannot connect with consultants who invade their offices and tell them what they are doing wrong. Customers want an average Joe who has been in their same situation to help them figure out the best solution to their problem.
Microsoft is pretty much doing this with SharePoint. They’re overanalyzing the program, while forgetting the customers’ needs. By ignoring the customers’ needs, Microsoft is taking the attitude that their users will adapt to anything without consideration.
“I actually don’t need to talk to them. Oh sure, someone might do some communications planning, but I don’t need to address user adoption because adoption is already there! People adapted to email, telephone and Microsoft Windows years ago.”
What Microsoft is doing is downright breech of business etiquette: being rude to clients.
Whitney Grace, January 18, 2011
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Exclusive Interview: Sam Brooks, EBSCO Publishing
January 18, 2011
We have been covering “discovery” in Beyond Search since 2008. We added a discovery-centric blog called IntelTrax to our line up in September 2010. One of the companies that caught our attention was EBSCO Publishing, one of the leaders in the commercial database, library information, and electronic publishing sectors. EBSCO has embraced discovery technology, making “search without search”, faceted navigation, and other user-centric features available to EBSCO customers. Chances are your university, junior college, middle school, and primary school libraries use EBSCO products and services. Thousands of organizations world wide rely on EBSCO for high-value, third party content, including rich media. You can get the details of the EBSCO content and information services offerings at http://www.ebscohost.com/.
I wanted to know how a company anchored in online technology moved “beyond search” so effectively. I spoke last week with Sam Brooks, senior vice president of EBSCO Publishing. He told me:
As library users have grown accustomed to the simplicity and one-stop shopping of web search engines, EDS allows users to initiate a comprehensive search of a library’s entire collection via a single search box. The true value of EDS is that while providing a simple, familiar search experience to end users, the sophistication of the service combined with the depth of available metadata allows EDS to return extensive results as if the user had performed more advanced searches across a number of premium resources.
EBSCO’s presentation is easily customized. This particular user interface matches the rich options available from such companies as i2 Ltd. and Palantir, two leaders in the “beyond search” approach to information.
The new discovery interface makes it easy to pull together a broad range of content to answer a user’s query. The interface then goes farther. Exploring a topic or following a research thread is facilitated with the hot links displayed to the user. The technology for the user interface is intuitive. Mr. Brooks told me:
By using our EBSCOhost infrastructure as the foundation for EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), the entire library collection becomes available through a fast, familiar, full-featured experience that requires no additional training. Additionally, unprecedented levels of interface customization allow libraries to use EDS as the basis for creating their own “discovery” service. Currently, users can access EDS via the mobile version of the EBSCOhost interface. Further, there will soon also be a dedicated iPhone/iPad app for use with EDS as well.
For the full text of the exclusive interview, navigate to the Search Wizards Speak feature at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2011
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Clearwell to the Cloud, Microsoft Style?
January 17, 2011
The EWeek Storage Station blog warns us that “Clearwell Now Enabling E-Discovery in Microsoft Cloud.” Cloud storage is one of the latest trends going around, but if you have sensitive information stored on it (like where you hid Jimmy Hoffa’s body or the fable Amber Room stolen by German soldiers) you should take it off.
“Clearwell Systems, which specializes in finding necessary data for litigation and audit purposes, announced this week that the latest version of its e-discovery platform now allows customers to discover information in emails and SharePoint docs from Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.”
Companies like Clearwell are using software to track and collect cloud data through ediscovery processes that can be easily gathered for legal purposes. Cloud computing is a growing marketplace, so there are millions of potential files that contain information to help in investigations. Clearwell is one of the first companies in this new market, so congratulations are in order for them.
Whitney Grace, January 17, 2011
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Google and Local Search Commitment
January 17, 2011
Google re-loads and takes aim, this time at Facebook. “Google’s Mobile Matchmaker” reports on an interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s executive in charge of “local” products. For Google “local” includes, maps, mobile, and even social activities. “Contextual discovery,” giving automatic location-based information, or “search without search” as she calls it, is the basis of the way Mayer seeks to knock Facebook off its pedestal. Google is working on taking the location information and adding social contextual information, such as showing a person in a restaurant the menu with annotations from friends or regular customers of the venue. When asked if Google might work with Facebook on some of these social applications, Mayer demurred, citing Facebook’s closed nature versus Google’s support of the open web. Instead, Mayer pointed to the Google social-esque alternatives such as Google Latitude, an application that follows the physical location of someone on a map. The social implications seem obvious: “Once you tell Google who your friends are on Latitude, that same information might eventually be used for other services like socially marked-up menus, if you permitted it. The point is that Google may have more ways to acquire social information than just by building its own competing social network.” My view is that Facebook may have reached its peak and is ripe for a serious alternative The idea of friends’ LoJacking on Latitude doesn’t appeal to me, but then I’m not a FourSquare fan either. Facebook, watch out, Google’s war is underway.
Alice Wasielewski, January 17, 2011
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Semantics, Here, Now!
January 17, 2011
Semantics are the means of taming the Internet search and information sources. Bulldog Solutions discusses semantics in the article, “Semantics Here and Now” by Seth Grimes. He reasonably argues that semantics are the key to web mining, customer engagement, and social-media analytics, but we haven’t reached the ultimate dream yet.
Grimes relates that semantics have a limited touchstone on which to base their information. By this, he means that search engines use semantics in a general sense and they’re not intended for a specific purpose/organization unless told to do so.
“These engines are great, but they’re not much help with information that resides in your organization’s own databases and operational systems, whether web-facing or accessible only to internal users. The ranking algorithms aren’t designed for enterprise priorities, the crawlers don’t reach into restricted-access systems and the interfaces don’t suit business workflows well. General-purpose tools aren’t top performers for focused business tasks such as supporting online storefronts and searching media sites.”
Semantics with a more personal touch are on their way, though. Grimes is already helping a couple enterprises with this idea and he says the market is now prime it. All you need to do is change how you view and give out information.
Whitney Grace, January 17, 2011
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Attivio Adds Transaction Like Document Processing
January 17, 2011
We learned that Attivio has added transaction like document processing to its Active Intelligence Engine. AIE is a scalable parallel asynchronous messaging system. Unlike other asynchronous systems methods, Attivio gives licensees controls to determine when a message is processed. Attivio reveals in “Transaction-like Document Processing in AIE”:
Grouped message processing allows a set (usually small) of related messages to be processed as a group (in order) when needed. This capability can be turned on or off by individual document processing transformers. What this means is that when the grouping isn’t required (the transformer doesn’t have side-effects which depend on the group ordering) then the messages are processed independently, delivering the maximum throughput. When a document transformer does require this transaction-like behavior, a simple configuration change is all that is necessary. This change causes the following semantics to come into play for the component:
- All non-document messages are blocked while processing the group. A system commit or optimize message cannot be processed until the group is complete. This means the processing of all the messages of the group will occur together before or after the commit, ensuring a consistent state.
- The documents in the group are sent to the component in the order they were added to the group.
- Only a single instance of the component is used to process the documents in the group.
The component that most heavily uses message groups is the ContentDispatcher (the gateway component for the AIE index).
You can get additional information, block diagrams, and links to special features on the Attivio Web site or in Attivio’s blog.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2011
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Oracle and Drive BI Targets SAP
January 17, 2011
Search is in the Oracle enterprise products and services. Search is just not where the action is at either Oracle or SAP. As more agile competitors like Exalead erase the boundaries between traditional big iron business intelligence and petascale unstructured information, the solution is go after established competitors. My view is that this approach will be good for those who are working in open source business intelligence and in the next generation business intelligence solutions from outfits like Digital Reasoning.
A good example of dinosaurs snorting appears in “Introduction of Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP Extends Intelligence to SAP Financial Accounting.” Oracle’s initiative is a product and service package laser sited on SAP’s ageing system. Now “ageing” is relative. Oracle’s technology is no spring chicken either. Here’s what Oracle says about the business intelligence offering for the Bob Crachits of industry:
“Organizations that rely on SAP Financial Accounting can now turn to Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP to further improve business visibility and align decision-making,” said Paul Rodwick, vice president of Product Management, Oracle Business Intelligence. “For years, SAP customers have used Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to deliver complete, relevant insight across their organizations. Having prebuilt analytic applications to support the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle’s Siebel CRM and Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, it was natural to extend that support to SAP with Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP.”
Will this work? Sure. Oracle has won its recent legal tussle with SAP and Oracle gets interest on the judgment. SAP is juicy target. The problem is that new players in business intelligence are getting more attention. Even SAS is upping its game. IBM continues to move in erratic ways but may get its act together in business intelligence.
My view is that fixation on SAP is good and bad. SAP is an outfit with some challenges. The bad is that Oracle’s concentration may leave it vulnerable for some lateral pressure.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2011
Freebie unlike some of the Oracle and SAP licensee support.
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