Protected: A Tips Spreadsheet for SharePoint Columns
July 27, 2011
Endeca Woos Facebook and Earns a Training Session
July 27, 2011
Endeca, a leading provider of agile information management solutions, is setting itself apart from other search vendors as a leader in social media marketing and commerce by forming a well-timed partnership. The news of the David and Goliath tie up appeared in “Endeca and Facebook to Host Webinar on the Social Network’s Growing Impact on Retailers’ eCommerce Strategies.” (Note: Links to news releases often go dark. Nothing we can do about this practice of removing news from open source access.)
Endeca has announced a partnering deal with Facebook. The two companies will host a webinar on how to maximize the Social Network’s impact and improve eCommerce for companies of all sizes. The story revealed:
With over 750 million users globally, Facebook has become an advertising and marketing channel for retailers, and today, it’s beginning to grow into an important revenue source as well,” wrote Alison Durant, Endeca’s senior director of corporate marketing. “in fact, analysts at Booz & Company are predicting that commerce from Facebook will hit $30 billion by 2015.
You can register for the event at this link.
If Booz & Companies predictions are correct, it would be a wise decision for other businesses to follow Endeca’s lead and invest their resources in the social media giant. However, consulting firms are under considerable financial pressure and often cook up trends and insights in order to generate business. Facebook may be behind the eight ball as a result of Google+. Social media is great but who will be the belle of the ball?
Our view is that social media alliances should be like dating in high school: fluid.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Quote to Note: Google Is Polluted
July 27, 2011
Quote to note: A routine day in Kentucky. A transformer adjacent the goose pond exploded at 1 15 pm. A little curiosity from the local police, the fire department, and the electrical company. Sigh. When the power flickered to life after a seven hour outage, I read “Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why Social Is Over.” The write up had a video to a speech in which the quote to note allegedly appears. I am not a video goose, so I focused on the write up. The alleged quote from a superstar and venture type was:
Google is a victim of its own success: its search has become polluted by SEOs. What shows that Google has failed is all those “non-search” services that really solve a search problem, like Match.com or Realtor.com. If you add them all up, they account for 50% of searches.
Accurate? Who knows. I quite liked the turn of phrase in “polluted by SEOs”, however.
Stephen E Arnold, July 24, 2011
Freebie
Going Fast and Skidding
July 26, 2011
Search Technologies Can Steer You to Safety, If Necessary
Last week we heard a number of rumors about layoffs and other organizational shifts at the Microsoft FAST Search units. We are not sure whether the news reported at Enterprise Search: The Business and Technology of Corporate Search was accurate.
We noted the coverage in Beyond Search here and found this section interesting: “[We] just learned that most of the FAST people we work with here in California and across the country have been laid off by Microsoft, apparently effective immediately. This is the team that was responsible for selling the FAST ESP products – FSIS and FSIA – as well as working with the Microsoft sales teams on FAST Search for SharePoint (FS4SP). ”
There’s been similar stories and rumors in the UK too. What does it all mean?
We think the talk is related to the consolidation of FAST into the Microsoft ecosystem. There’s always a reason or two to dislike change and where job losses are concerned, we all sympathize.
But here’s a broader view.
First, let’s remember that FAST is a darned good search engine. You can scale it forever, it is rock-steady in mission-critical applications and it has plenty of tweakability so you can tune it to precisely support specific business needs and applications.
Second, don’t forget that FAST, as much as any company back in the early noughties, pioneered the use of search navigators that told you exactly how many documents would be left in your results set if you clicked the navigator link. This is now established best practice, from Amazon and Ebay down to small departmental intranet applications.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, let’s not forget our search fundamentals. Just like the proverbial needle in a haystack, your chances of finding something depend largely on the size of the haystack. An awful lot of large companies are intent on using SharePoint to front their data haystacks, and although they don’t all realize it yet, they are going to need tools like FAST during the next few years.
Perhaps like you, when Microsoft bought FAST Search & Transfer a few years ago, my initial reaction was, “How much?” That said, most things are expensive in Norway, not just search engine companies and vodka.
But if the FAST technology helps a lot of large corporations to drive real ROI from SharePoint over the next few years – and I for one suspect that it will – then just like a good bottle of Christiana, the original price will come to seem reasonable once the content has been fully explored.
By co-incidence with these changes within Microsoft, , we at Search Technologies announced this week our 100th FAST Search customer for implementation services. We’ve delivered more than 25,000 consultant days of services to FAST customers since becoming FAST Worldwide Partner of the Year back in 2006.
It takes time before people appreciate what’s brewing.
Iain Fletcher, July 25, 2011
The Mongo Mambo: NoSQL Is Tireless
July 26, 2011
Okay, so this isn’t exactly search-related, but we think it’s worth a mention. The blurring of search and data management is starting to become a more common symptom of the big data world.
OpenMyMind.net provides helpful information with “Practical NoSQL—Solving a Real Problem with MongoDB and Redis.
Blogger (and software developer) Karl Seguin details his process of making an improvement to the Mogade game developer site. He is eager to share his use of a new tool coupled with a new modeling approach. In his conclusion, Seguin states,
“This reinforces my opinion about NoSQL in general. MongoDB has a couple specializations that are truly awesome (geospatial, logging), but it’s largely a general purpose data store with a number of advantages over RDBMS’. Many other NoSQL solutions are more specialized. Redis, while capable of more than what I’m using it for, is more specialized, and handles/looks at/views data differently. These solutions work well together and not only make it fun to work with data again, they make it easy and efficient.”
We appreciate the effort that Mr. Seguin put into his write up. We think that the blend of technologies is one of the harbingers of a significant shift in the data management world. One can only go so far with the traditional RDBMS before money crushes one’s big data aspirations. XML has been made to perform some interesting tricks, but under the demands of price sensitive information technology shops, there is some push back for this former prom queen. And the basic NoSQL world is being asked to deliver functions and services that extend well beyond the basics of fetching a result set.
Change is upon us and it may have a significant impact on vendors who are well positioned in the big data, search based application space. We like the moves of the Mongo Mambo but we love the music of Exalead’s CloudView approach.
Cynthia Murrell July 19, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Boounce for Firefox Consolidates your Search
July 26, 2011
So, you want to use alternate search systems? Makeuseof suggests, “Discover & Switch Between Different Search Engines With Boounce [Firefox].” The new add-on to Firefox (pronounced “bounce”) allows users to easily switch between search engines, including the more specific vertical searches.
Writer Anne Smarty lists Boounce’s highlights: “Easily Jump To Other Search Engines,” “Easily Compare Search Results (Google & Bing),” and “Quickly Search From The Toolbar.” Under each of these headings, she gives tips on how to get the most out of this new search option.
In closing, Smarty seems to issue a call to action:
“One more important note here is that the tool claims to be community-driven: recommended search engines in the toolbar are picked based on the user behavior. That being said, we can hope that the tool will get better and better when more people start using it.”
I use Firefox almost exclusively, so I gave it a try. The demo you can view when you sign up is very helpful. It can take a little experimentation to get the hang of it, but I was happy with my results.
However, with Google pulling in its horns for the Google Toolbar for Firefox, I wonder is the browser will have the legs it enjoyed when it was showered with Google love?
Cynthia Murrell July 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
IBM Pursues Analytics into the Cloud
July 26, 2011
IBM is now chasing analytics. Computerworld reports the details in “IBM rolls out cloud-based Web analytics tool.” The new application leverages two of IBM’s recent acquisitions. Coremetrics specializes in Web analytics software; and Unica’s products analyze customer data and predict business needs. Writer Patrick Thibodeau explains,
“Features from both those companies were merged to create a product that is intended to link analytics from a variety of platforms, including the Web and social media networks, and tie them to marketing efforts ranging from automated actions to sales opportunities.”
Named IBM Coremetrics Web Analytics and Digital Marketing Optimization Suite, the product will be distributed via the cloud. It will, naturally, be accessible through multiple platforms. It also allows for the inclusion of non-Web based data, like that from emails and display ads. Users will be charged based on the volume of interactions, not on the amount of storage they use.
The amount of activity within IBM with regard to metrics and analytics is astounding. The company offers different brands such as Cognos and SPSS. The firm has multiple initiatives. Our view is that analytics means big money for IBM. We are confident that IBM will generate revenue, but it is also creating a wake of confusion as its fleet of high speed boats speeds across the data ocean as it blasts past Web Fountain. Even search has morphed into content analytics. Quite a flotilla.
Cynthia Murrell, July 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
The Cost of Search: Bing Edition only $2.6 Billion
July 26, 2011
In July 2008, I wrote “Yahoo Cost Estimate”. Here’s the key passage:
I wanted to run through some of the cost data I have gathered over the years. The reason is this sentence in Miguel Helft’s “Yahoo Is Inviting Partners to Build on Its Search Power,” an essay that appeared in the Kentucky edition of the New York Times, July 10, 2008, page C5: “Yahoo estimates that it would cost $300 million to build a search service from scratch.”
At the time, the estimate was what I call a “crazy number.” How crazy was Yahoo’s guess-timate? According to “At Microsoft, Bing Too Costly to Keep,” on July 25, 2011, New York Times, section B 2 and in the July 24, 2011 article “Bing Becomes a Distraction for Microsoft”, we get some numbers. Yahoo couldn’t do search and it owned Inktomi and Fast Search’s Web search system. In 2008, Yahoo had $300 million and couldn’t do search then. Today Yahoo does not do search. Yahoo recycles Bing results. Now Bing is, if the New York Times is correct, too costly for Microsoft. Yikes. Search is expensive.
How does this sound? “Bing lost $2.6 billion in the latest fiscal year.” The Yahoo estimate was off by a factor of eight. Give Yahoo a break for inflation over the last 36 months, and the Yahoo number was wrong by a little less. On the other hand, when one adds up the total costs of Bing, the cost of Web search reaches Greek debt-scale levels.
What’s with the cost of Web search?
I have written extensively about the cost of search. You can get a run down of the various monographs which contain my thoughts about enterprise and Web search costs by running a query on this blog or looking at one of my books, monographs, and journal articles which explore search costs.
Here’s a rundown of the challenges.
First, on the Web information expands rapidly. Within the last three weeks, Google+ ran out of space. Search is not really tightly integrated with that service. If Google has problems scaling, other companies will too. And scaling is a black hole of search costs. As information expands, the infrastructure must be able to accommodate the data and the outputs of the indexing process. So lots of information to process equal lots of costs. In Microsoft’s case, we have a number which may or may not be accurate. But $2.6 billion is interesting. The New York Times does some fancy dancing around the $2.6 billion, but with the Web search landscape reduced pretty much to a handful of companies, the costs are a factor.
Second, I think that digital content is growing rapidly. No one knows exactly how fast, but I know from my test queries that certain content is either not indexed or it is no longer available. I think that indexing systems are becoming more selective and organizations, particularly government agencies, don’t have the money to make the information available as in the past. The result is that we may never know how much digital information is “on the Web” and it’s a safe bet that finding non indexed content is going to be more and more difficult. As a result, costs go up for what’s there, and there is neither money nor appetite for what is not indexed. Will commercial database producers pick up the slack? Nope. Too expensive. So the free Web index ride is over. Commercial services won’t move in. The economics of everything related to low value information mean content is going to be less findable. Maybe a breakthrough will reverse this situation, but I predict a worsening of content access for the foreseeable future.
Third, users want systems which think for them. The costs of transforming content and then using next generation methods to make that content via “search without search” methods are costly to “invent” and costly to maintain. As a result, the information which becomes available will be content that can be easily monetized. The only way to make the numbers work is to focus on what sells and then find a way to monetize that content. Getting the “what sells” part wrong will sink a search engine before the ink is dry on the VC’s first check. Getting the “monetize” part wrong means the company will be shut down, probably more quickly than in the past.
To sum up, the costs of search are interwoven. There’s the plumbing cost, the technology cost, the marketing cost, the sales cost, and the opportunity cost. When Microsoft cannot afford search, who can? Right now, there are just a few answers. Do you use Google, Blekko, Exalead Web Search, Yandex, Baidu, Jike, or Bing? How many will be financially viable in one year? History teaches us that there will be attrition in this cost battle.
And if information is indeed infinite, won’t the cost be infinite too or at least $2.6 billion?
Stephen E Arnold, July 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Making Libraries Easier to View in SharePoint
July 26, 2011
Working with a single monitor and multiple windows open is a constant pain, especially with a teeny, tiny laptop. Switching between the windows is frustrating, but the smart computer user averts this problem by hooking up two or more monitors to their operating system. SharePoint users face a similar problem when working with multiple libraries at once, but it’s not as simple as hooking up another cable to a computer. The wonder Laura Rogers at SPTech Web wrote a great article called, “Display Multiple Libraries in SharePoint 2010” that helps explain the many ways to handle this issue. The article said:
A frequent requirement in SharePoint projects is to display documents from multiple libraries together. There are several different methods in which this can be achieved in SharePoint 2010, ranging from simple out-of-the-box Web parts to more advanced data view Web parts. Of course, as with most tasks in SharePoint, it can be done with custom development, but I usually try to steer towards out-of-the-box functionalities before going that route.
The different methods for opening documents are outlined in this article along with the pros and cons of each one. The web part she describes are the “relevant documents,” “constant web query,” “what’s new,” “data view-merge sources,” “data view-content roll-up,” and “data view-search results.” Read about each one to learn which method will work the best for you.
While you’re at it, head on over to SurfRay.com to learn how to improve your SharePoint search.
Stephen E Arnold, July 26, 2011
Sponsored by SurfRay, developers of Ontolica.
New Search Engine on the Horizon from Ness Computing
July 25, 2011
There’s a new search engine coming down the information superhighway. PR Newswire reports, “Ness Computing Announces $5M Series A Financing to Develop Personal Search Engine.” What makes this project different from every other search engine out there? Personalization. According to the write up:
“The Likeness Engine is different from traditional search engines that are useful for finding fact-based objective information that is the same for everyone, such as weather reports, dictionary terms, and stock prices. Ness Computing’s vision is to answer questions of a more subjective nature by understanding each person’s likes and dislikes, to deliver results that match his or her personal tastes.”
That’s quite a goal. Beleaguered privacy issues aside, Ness may be on to something. Especially as the amount of data online continues to expand, more tailored information will be welcome to many. However, I have to wonder whether about the unintended consequences of limiting information in any fashion.
The company, already a global provider of IT solutions, inspired investors with its new vision and established track record. We send a happy quack for success to the company.
Cynthia Murrell, July 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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