HOLD Going Fast and Skidding: Search Technologies Can Steer You to Safety
July 18, 2011
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 don’t want to speculate.
We, like you, read:
[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). Funny, I was just drafting a blog post today on ‘the future of FAST’ and I’m glad I hadn’t finished; I never would have guessed this at all.
Let’s assume that the rumor is false. Search Technologies remains committed to providing the technical and engineering support a Fast Search Server licensee needs to wring the maximum from the system.
Let’s assume the rumor is true. Search Technologies will continue to support Microsoft Fast as well as other Microsoft search technologies as long as our clients require top notch engineering.
Let’s assume there is uncertainty about the Fast search technology. Our view is that deep experience in search is more important than speculating about what a very large company is doing to manage its products and services for its clients.
One of the people tracking the search and content processing sector wrote about the “new landscape of enterprise search.” The point is that powerful forces are operating on search vendors, licensees, and users. We agree.
The Search Technologies value proposition is easy to articulate.
First, we have the depth of experience to cope with our clients’ engineering and technical requirements for Fast search as well as a number of other systems.
Second, most organizations with enterprise search installations will continue to use these systems even if staff changes or organizational restructuring occurs. Search Technologies can deliver the services required to derive maximum benefit from the installed software.
Third, our engineering approach embraces change. This means that if a client wants to replace an existing solution, our team can create the business case and implement the shift with little or no business disruption.
So, let’s put aside the issue of a single shift in a product. The focus at Search Technologies is helping our clients solve business problems. Software, while important, is just one facet of a broader commitment at Search Technologies to deliver value throughout the findability ecosystem.
To learn more about Search Technologies, navigate to www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, July 25, 2011
Search Technologies
Breaking Relevance: The TrackMeKnot Method
July 18, 2011
Okay, with ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog about to jump into the statistical fog of relevance, I fell pretty glum. Most old school searchers prefer to type in explicit commands; for example
b 15
ss cc=77? AND cc=76?? AND esop
When the new “fuzzified” version of the commercial search system for ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog-type users, good luck with that. In the new commercial systems, the old school, brute force, Boolean approach would return consistent results search in and search out. Take it to the bank.
Change is afoot so queries will return somewhat unpredictable results depending on what pointers get jiggled in an index update.
If we shift to the free Web search engines, the notion of relevance is based on lots of “signals”. A signal is something that allows the search system to disambiguate or add context to an action. If you are running around an airport, the mobile search wizards want to look at your search history and hook those signals to your wandering GPS input. The result is search done for you.
Why is relevance lousy? Well, search engine optimization is to blame. The focus on selling targeted ads is a contributor. And there are some interesting software tools that aim to confuse certain traffic analysis systems. So far, no one wants to confuse the ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog-type systems, but the Web search world is like catnip.
One of our readers alerted us to TrackMeKnot, which is an obfuscation software designed to defeat certain types of usage tracking. Here’s what the developers say:
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to ‘evolve’ each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for ‘logical’ future query terms with which to replace those already used.
If you want to cover your search clicks, give it a whirl. Obfuscation methods, if used by lots of people, may have an adverse impact on relevance, particularly when personalization is enabled. Lucky me.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com (www.pandia.com), publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
Inteltrax: Top Stories, July 11 to July 15
July 18, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, particularly the explosion of social media-oriented business intelligence.
Our week jumped off with a lengthy feature article, “Facebook Becoming Data Mining Powerhouse,” draws a surprising correlation between the recent Supreme Court data mining ruling and how Facebook’s advertising arm might use this to tighten its impressive lead on the rest of the advertising world.
Facebook’s bite-sized rival, Twitter, also got a lot of column space this week. First, in the article “Twitter Joins the Analytic Race,” which explored the micro-blog sites recent purchase of analytic house, BlackType and asked, “Why?”.
Like an entertaining Twitter feed, the company popped up frequently over the week, next in the article, “Mining Twitter Mountain.” This story focused on the numerous analytic apps and programs designed to pluck sentiment and cohesive data from millions of 140-character chunks of info.
It’s no secret that social media is producing more savory data for advertisers, investors and trend-spotters than ever thought possible. We were excited to see the social media companies themselves taking a role, but also intrigued about the analytic companies springing up around them, not unlike mining camps around an Old West gold strike. We’ll be watching these claims and others, rest assured.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of Stephen E Arnold’s new monograph, The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Infinite on a Web Page. Yep, Infinite Annoyance
July 18, 2011
Have you noticed that “innovations” in search get in the way of finding relevant information quickly.
Quick example. I am at my desk at 0900 on July 16, a Saturday in Nowhere, Kentucky. Our houseguests were on the way to the Louisville Zoo to see the polar bear. (I thought these poor creatures had been eliminated in the global warming that some folks in Harrod’s Creek don’t think is real. Guess I was wrong.)
Now I get a call. Bzzz.
My wife wants to know the phone number of the tire story on Goose Creek Road (no joke, it’s really Goose Creek) and Westport Road. I think the tire store is a BF Goodrich affiliate. I key in to Bing, then Google the following “BF Goodrich Goose Creek Road Louisville Kentucky”. Guess what! No tire store. I could not locate the tire store which I saw last night on the way home from the gym.
How did I find the tire store? I looked in an old copy of the Yellow Pages.
So much for the personalization, the fancy mash up functions, and the other baloney generated in pursuit of clicks and ad revenue.
Now I learn that I may not see tidy result pages with a reasonable number of hits. I like these fixed length pages because I have some weird ability to remember where I was in a fixed space like a Web page or a giant spreadsheet. When the fixed page is infinite, I have no clue where I was “located.”
Google Experimenting with Infinite Scrolling on Search Result Pages! reminded me of the infinite pictures display on Bing. The latency of that “feature” was enough to relegate Bing.com to the last seat on the goose’s softball team. Bing often never gets in the game. Google imitated the function which I had seen demonstrated a long time ago by an outfit in Israel, whose name I lost when I looked for it a moment ago in Google. Sigh.
My view is that if someone thinks “infinite”, the thought is addled. If you have to do these silly user experience features, rethink where the search box is. Who wants to scroll up an infinite – x vector to reframe a query. Oh, I forgot. Google will predict what I want so who needs to reframe a query.
Wow. Wow. Wow. The real world exhibits latency. I guess in Google Land, latency is trivial, maybe irrelevant. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
Freebie just like ad supported search engines. But at what “cost”?
Microsoft: Project Crescent, a Business Intelligence Tool
July 18, 2011
There have been whispers about a Microsoft project dubbed Project Crescent buzzing around the invisible web since last November. It is a new business intelligence tool designed for nontechnical users to create visually impressive reports. SearchSQLServer.com wrote, “Microsoft Plays All the Self-Service BI Angles with Project Crescent” that explains the latest news on the new tool.
Project Crescent is intended to bring “BI for the masses,” in other words, help users present data in powerful and useful ways. The goal was for Crescent’s applications to be accessed with one or two clicks. Microsoft has accomplished that.
The technical details are described as an intersection between PowerPivot and Excel. Crescent was designed to run within SharePoint, but that option is expensive in the Enterprise Edition and is hard to install. There is no way around this option, however, as Microsoft is using SharePoint to bring together all their BI solutions. We learned:
Microsoft calls Crescent “an interactive data exploration and visual presentation experience.”
After watching TechEd demos by Redmond’s program managers, I have to agree. Building reports and analyzing data looks almost fun. The rest of the article explains features and deployment. Project Crescent sounds like it will be the arts and crafts of business intelligence. I hope they have a varied color pallet selection. Microsoft will need to consider semantics and indexing for the next version of Crescent. Pretty graphs and charts will only go so far if you can’t organize the data.
Since you will be using Crescent to create data models, use SurfRay Ontolica to search data.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
Sponsored by SurfRay
Belgium and Google: A Messy Waffle
July 18, 2011
I saw this headline: “Belgian Newspapers Claim Retaliation By Google After Copyright Victory” and I was nervous clicking on the link. SEO news services make me nervous. The idea of any “retaliation” story makes me think of long lists of words on a watch list somewhere.
I clicked on the link, and the story seemed okay, just a bit thin on substantive details. Quoting the Associated Press is in and of itself is reason for concern.
Here’s the main idea:
Publishers in Belgium did not want their content indexed by Google. (That strikes me as less than informed, but forget the knowledge value angle.) So publishers get the fluid legal system to notify the Google. Shortly thereafter, some Belgium publishers note that their content is tough to find at the top of a Google results list. Bottomline line: Some folks believe Google is jiggling the results to make some Belgian content familiar with the tedium of clicking through lots of pages to find the desired hit.
My view is that accusations are definitely good for “real” news outfits like the publisher of the retaliation story. I also think that considerable care must be taken before yip yapping about why a particular results list does not show what one wants, expects, believes, or hopes will appear.
Google has lots of people working on the search system. I once believed that these teams were coordinated and working like a well oiled robot arm assembling nuclear fuel rods. Now I know that the method is more like “get it working”. Good enough is going to earn a search wizard an A from the Google system.
Messy waffles. Image source: http://eatbakelove-todayistheday.blogspot.com/2011/06/weekend-warrior.html
If there is a difference between publishers’ expectations and what is in a particular result list, I suggest several things:
First, get a trained and expert online searcher to run queries in a methodical manner to verify what is and what is not “findable.” Keep in mind that 99.9 percent of the people who claim to be search experts are not. If you don’t believe me, give Ulla de Stricker a buzz. You can also try Anne Mintz, former director of the Forbes Magazine information center. You can also ping Marydee Ojala, editor of online. Folks, trust me. These individuals are certifiable online search experts and can get the information needed to put some data behind the hot air. Data needed.
Patent Uncertainty: Another Step Backwards for Innovation?
July 17, 2011
I am not a legal eagle. In fact, when one circles, casting a shadow on the goose pond, I head for the leafy glade and kick back. I read the disturbing article “App Developers Withdraw from US as Patent Fears Reach ‘Tipping Point’”, 2hich appeared in the UK newspaper the Guardian on July 15, 2011. (With the UK newspaper sector in a tizzy over the News Corp. dust up, I am not sure if the information flowing from the UK is spot on. Nevertheless, I did find the story suggestive.)
The Guardian’s point is that litigation in the US related to intellectual property drops ice cubes down the jumpers of some programmers and coders. I noted this passage:
App developers are withdrawing their products for sale from the US versions of Apple‘s App Store and Google’s Android Market for fear of being sued by companies which own software patents – just as a Mumbai-based company has made a wide-ranging claim against Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and a number of other companies over Twitter-style feeds, for which it claims it has applied for a patent. Software patent owners in the US have latched onto potential revenue streams to be earned from independent developers by suing over perceived infringements of their intellectual property – which can be expensive for developers to defend even if they are successful. Now developers in Europe are retreating from the US to avoid the expense and concern such “patent trolls” are causing.
What I find interesting is that I learned in Hong Kong earlier this year, that some executives no longer travel to the US. There is no “fear”, but the hassle of getting through the security, the time required to do simple things like get from the airport to a meeting, and the frantic business climate have kept some sharp folks out of the Estados Unidos de América
My view is that a number of important business processes are succumbing to friction. I think travel and patent issues are now working like stuck brake on my ratty 1973 Pontiac Grandville. The auto can go, but it does not make the trip particularly relaxing. When business related systems fail to work, there are some interesting effects.
When I lived in Brazil many years ago, well before the present business renascence, I noted the need to “tip” for certain services. I remember watching a man jump the auto registration line because he had folded a “conto” around the form which had to be stamped. I also observed extra curricular deals from a wide range of business services. The only way to get the systems to work was to freelance. Little wonder my father suffered some headaches trying to open the Tratores do Brasil plant in Campinas, near São Paulo.
What does “snafu” mean? Image source: http://goo.gl/BAXng
If the Guardian is correct, there are some issues that appear to point to pulling the US backwards, not forwards.
So what’s this got to do with search. Three points:
First, with consolidation of certain findability functions, there is literally zero way to determine if the information displayed is shaped, or, in my lingo, weaponized. Think about. Do you know the provenance of the information displayed? I try to figure out what’s what, but I must admit that verification is getting downright difficult. Even the social revolution moves forward without users remembering the New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet no ones knows if you are a dog.”
Second, the stultification of research or the shifting of innovation outside the US spells trouble for high technology and other sectors. Some of the most innovative approaches to content processing that I have reveiwed so far this year come from Russia, Scotland, Denmark, and other far flung points of the compass. If I were graduating from university this year at age 21 or 22, I would high tail it to Shanghai, Paris, or Moscow, where there is tech action in content processing.
Third, the dysfunctionality of certain systems is getting tough for me to ignore from my polluted pond filled with mine drainage runoff. There’s the budget thing. There’s the patent thing. There’s the carmageddon thing. (My hunch is that the patent situation is going to generate big growth for companies like ArticleOnePartners.com, which specializes in crowdsourced patent expertise.)
Net net: The Guardian is going to be writing about more than apps getting pulled from US vendors.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, Oslo, Norway, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
Identifying Microsoft Partners
July 17, 2011
Here’s an interesting list: WordPress has published the full “Microsoft WPC2011 Exhibitor Guide.” Though there are no links embedded in the list, it is revealing to see who is exhibiting at the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. The Microsoft Partner Network benefits participants with software, training and support, and sanctioned use of the Microsoft logo.
According to the Conference’s site:
“The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is the premier event for Microsoft partners. WPC provides a forum for you to connect with other partners and with Microsoft staff, and to learn about the latest Microsoft programs, strategies, and cutting-edge technologies.”
It occurs to me: Google, maybe you want to check this out too.
Cynthia Murrell July 17, 2011
Freebie just like SharePoint search. To track SharePoint news, navigate to www.sharepointsemantics.com, our sister publication.
BA Insight Flexes Its Muscle in the SharePoint Sector
July 17, 2011
“BA Insight Offers Instant Search Result Preview as a Service to Hosted SharePoint Providers,” declares the press release at Government Newswire. BA Insight encourages SharePoint hosting companies to offer this new tool to their customers. The write-up describes the product’s advantages:
“BA Insight’s new subscription-based service provides hosted SharePoint users with instant, fully formatted previews of all search result content, regardless of file type. Because the new offering enables SharePoint users to view search result content without the need to download the file, and automatically directs users to the most relevant page of their search content, Longitude Preview for Hosted SharePoint makes finding enterprise information more rapid, precise, and resource-efficient.”
Ken Toth at the SharePoint Semantics blog has also taken note of this development.
The highlight of this product, of course, is the ability to peruse a document without spending the time and bandwidth to download the entire file. Another advantage is the rigorous security, courtesy of the underlying Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
BA Insight works with their customers to get the most out of their Microsoft SharePoint and FAST applications. They serve over 300 clients, including a number of Fortune 500 companies and major government agencies.
Cynthia Murrell July 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Google Caves: Schmidt to Testify in DC
July 16, 2011
Apparently in an effort to avoid a subpoena, Google has agreed to send Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt to talk to the feds, reveals The Register in “Google gives in: Schmidt to face US antitrust grilling.” At first, Google didn’t want to commit its top executives. Writer Gavin Clarke states,
“Google had resisted a request to send either Schmidt or CEO Larry Page. Instead, the search giant offered its senior vice president for corporate development and legal affairs Dave Drummond.”
Schmidt is now expected to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights this fall. At issue is whether Google’s search rankings treat some web enterprises unfairly. The committee also wants to examine the company’s acquisitions, of which there have been many.
Keep a close eye on this one. The decision, whichever way it goes, will have a large impact on the future of the Web. Oh, Google is not yet a nation state; otherwise, Google would summon the feds to the Googleplex.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2011
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