Microsoft and Its NLP Info Page
August 30, 2011
Microsoft is making a concerted effort to tackle natural language processing with its Redmond-based Natural Language Processing Group. The Microsoft page devoted to the group highlights current and older projects, downloads, and researchers involved.
The goal of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group is to design and build software that will analyze, understand, and generate languages that humans use naturally, so that eventually you will be able to address your computer as though you were addressing another person. This goal is not easy to reach. “Understanding” language means, among other things, knowing what concepts a word or phrase stands for and knowing how to link those concepts together in a meaningful way.
Of particular interest are the recent publications authored by those in the group. Work includes everything from social media implementation, to multi-lingual Wikipedia content, to syntactic language modeling. The papers are well worth a read for anyone interested in the pressing field of natural language processing. Microsoft is definitely putting time and energy into the project, but it remains to be seen who of the tech giants will emerge the victor in the battle for natural language processing supremacy.
If you track NLP, including the newly minted azure chip consultants, you will want to monitor this aspect of Microsoft’s many, many search and text processing activities.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 29, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Calculated Field Formulas for SharePoint Made Easy
August 30, 2011
Interview with John Steinhauer, Search Technologies
August 29, 2011
Search Technologies Corp., a privately-held firm, continues to widen its lead as the premier enterprise search consulting and engineering services firm. Founded six years ago, the company has grown rapidly. The firms dozens of engineers offer clients deep experience in Microsoft (SharePoint and Fast), Lucene/Solr, Google Search Appliances, and Autonomy systems, among others. Another factor that sets Search Technologies apart is that the company is profitable and debt-free, and its business continues to grow at 20 percent or more each year. It is privately held and headquartered in Herndon, VA.
John Steinhauer, vice president of technology, Search Technologies
John Steinhauer
On August 8, I spoke with John Steinhauer, vice president of technology of Search Technologies. Before joining Search Technologies, Mr. Steinhauer was the director of product management at Convera. He attended Boston University and the University of Chicago. At Search Technologies, Mr. Steinhauer is Responsible for the day-to-day direction of all technical and customer delivery operations. He manages a growing team of more than 75 engineers and project managers. Mr. Steinhauer is one of the most experienced project directors in the enterprise search space, having been involved with hundreds of sophisticated search implementations for commercial and government clients. The full text of the interview appears below.
What’s your role at Search Technologies?
Search Technologies is an IT services provider focused on search engines. Working with search engines is essentially all we do. We’re technology independent and work with most of the leading vendors, and with open source. The things we do with search engines covers a broad spectrum – from helping companies in need of some expert resources to deliver a project on time, to fully inclusive development projects where we analyze, architect, develop and implement a new search-based solution for a customer, and then provide a fully managed service to administer and maintain the application. If required, we can also host it for the customer, at one of our hosting facilities or in the cloud.
My title is VP, Technology and I am one of the three original founders of the company and have been in the search engine business full-time since 1997. I am responsible for the technical organization, comprised of 70+ people, including Professional Services, Engineering, and Technical Support.
From your point of view, what do customers value most about your services?
We bring hard-won experience to customer projects and a deep knowledge of what works and where the difficult issues lie. Our partners, the major search vendors, sometimes find it difficult to be pragmatic, even where they have their own implementation departments, because their primary focus is their software licensing business. That’s not a criticism. As with most enterprise software sectors, license fees pay for all of the valuable research & development that the vendors put in to keep the industry moving forward. But it does mean that in a typical services engagement, less emphasis is put on the need for implementation planning, and ongoing processes to maintain and fine-tune the search application. We focus only on those elements, and this benefits both customers, who get more from their investment, and search engine partners who end up with happier customers.
In your role as VP of Technology, what achievements are you most proud of?
I’m proud that we have built a company with happy customers, happy employees, and good profits. I’m also proud that we’ve delivered some massively complex projects on time and on budget, even after others have tried and failed. It is gratifying that we have ongoing, multi-year relationships with household names such as the US Government Printing Office, Library of Congress, Comcast, the BBC, and Yellowpages.com.
But our primary achievement is probably the level of expertise of our personnel, along with the methodologies and best practices they use that are now embedded into our company culture. When we engage with customers, we bring experience and proven methodologies with us. That mitigates risks and saves money for customers.
Do you recommend search engines to customers?
Occasionally, but only after conducting what we call an “Assessment”. We start from first principles and understand the customer’s circumstances; business needs, data sets, user requirements, infrastructure, existing licensing arrangements, etc. Based on a full knowledge of those issues, we offer independent advice and product recommendations including, where appropriate, open source alternatives.
So you also work with customers who have already chosen a search engine?
This is our primary business. Often, our initial engagement with a customer is to solve a problem; they’ve acquired a software license, spent significant time and money on implementation and are having technical problems and/or trouble meeting their deadlines and budgets. Problems include poor relevancy, performance and scaling issues, security issues, data complexity issues, etc. Probably 70% of our customers first engaged with us by asking us to look at a narrow problem and solve it. Once they discover what we can do and how cost effective we are, they typically expand the scope into implementation of the full solution. We help people to implement best practices to reduce complexity and ownership cost, while dramatically improving the quality of the search service.
So, what’s your secret sauce?
With search projects, usually the secret sauce is that there is no secret sauce. Success is down to hard work and execution at the detail level.
What makes Search Technologies unique?
Sure. If there is any secret to building great search applications, it is usually in showing greater respect for the data and how best to process and enhance it to enable sophisticated search features to work effectively through the front end. That and just experience from hundreds of search application development projects. When a customer hires a Search Technologies Engineer to participate in their project, they are not just getting a well-trained, hard working and hugely experienced individual who writes good code, they are getting access to 80+ technical colleagues in the background with more than 40,000 person-days experience on search projects. We’re great at sharing experiences and best practices – we’ve worked hard at that since the beginning. Also, our staff turnover is really low. People who like working with search engines like it here, and they tend to stick around. That huge body of experience is our differentiation.
So you’re pure services, no software of your own?
In customer engagements we’re pure services. That’s our business. But as a company of largely technical people, of course we’ve developed software along the way. But we do so for the purposes of making our implementation services more efficient, and our support and maintenance services more reliable and sustainable.
Where is the search engine industry heading?
There are now two 800 pound Gorillas in the market, called Microsoft and Google. That’s a big difference from the somewhat fractious market that existed for 10 years ago. That will certainly make it harder for smaller vendors to find oxygen. But at the same time, these very large companies have their own agendas for what features and platforms matter for them and their customers. They will not attempt to be all things to all prospective customers in the same way that smaller hungrier vendors have. In theory this should leave gaps for either products or services companies to fill where specific and relatively sophisticated capabilities are required. We see those requirements all over the place.
Open source (primarily SOLR/Lucene) is making major inroads too. We are seeing a lot of large companies move in this direction.
So is innovation dead?
Not at all. Actually we see lots of companies doing really cool and innovative things with search. Many people have been operating on the assumption that search software would reach a sort of commodity state. Analysts have predicted this for years, that once all the hard problems had been solved, then all search engines would have equivalent capabilities and compete on price. What we’re seeing is very different from that. People are realizing that these problems can’t just be solved and then packaged into an off the shelf solution.
Instead the software vendors are putting a ring fence around the core search functionality and then letting integrators and smart customers go from there. With search, there are now some firmly established basics: Platforms need good indexing pipelines, relevancy algorithms that can be tweaked to suit the audience, navigation options based on metadata, readable, insightful results summaries. But that’s just the starting point for great search.
Here’s an example we’ve been involved with recently. Auto-completion functions have been around for years. You start the search clue, the system suggests what you’re looking for, to help you complete it more quickly. We’ve recently implemented some innovative new ways of doing this, working with a customer who has a specific business need. This includes relevancy ranking and tweaking of auto-completions suggestions, and the inclusion of industry jargon. Influencing search behavior in this way not only helps the customer to provide a very efficient search service, it also supports business goals by promoting particular products and services in context. Think of it as a form or relevancy tuning, but applicable to the search clue and not just the results. These are small tweaks that can have a big impact on the customer’s bottom line.
Another big innovation is SaaS models for search applications. This has also been talked about for years, but is really just now coming into focus in practical ways that customers can leverage.
I understand that your business is growing. Where are you heading and what might Search Technologies look like in a couple of years?
Perhaps the most pleasing thing of all for me personally, is that a lot of our growth, which is averaging 20%+ year on year, comes from perpetuating existing relationships with customers. This speaks well for customer satisfaction levels. We’ve just renewed our Microsoft GOLD partner status, and as a part of that, we conduct a customer satisfaction survey and share the results with Microsoft. The returns this year have been really great. So one of the places we are heading is to build ever longer, deeper relationships with companies for who search is a critical application. We initially engaged with all of our largest customers by providing a few consultant-days of search expertise and implementation services. Today, we provide these same customers with turnkey design and implementation, hosting services, and “hands-off” managed services where all the customer does is use the search application and focus on their core business. This model works really well. Through our experience and focus on search we can run search systems very efficiently and provide a consistently excellent search experience to the customer’s user community. In the future we’ll do a lot more of this.
Finally, tell me something about yourself
I grew up in Michigan, have lived in Chicago, Boston, DC, London and now in San Diego. The best thing about that is I can ride my bike to work most mornings year round. I have two boys (4 years old and 6 months old), neither of whom have the slightest clue what a Michigan winter entails. I expect that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Don C Anderson, August 29, 2011
Sponsored by Search Technologies
Lucid Imagination an Emerging Vendor
August 29, 2011
Short honk: We noticed the news item “Lucid Imagination Named a 2011 CRN Emerging Technology Vendor.” The original story is here. We learned:
Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, today announced it has been selected by Everything Channel as a 2011 CRN Emerging Technology Vendor. The annual list features the most innovative vendors who not only deliver technology that is easy to use, but can generate the high margins solution providers require. Thousands of companies rely on the power of Apache Solr/Lucene open source technology to deploy search applications; Lucid Imagination enables companies to optimize search and performance results with their Lucene/Solr search applications, by offering a platform that is accessible, flexible, scalable, and cost-effective.
More information about Lucid Imagination is available at www.lucidimagination.com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Exclusive Interview: John Steinhauer, Search Technologies
August 29, 2011
A few days ago we were able to interview John Steinhauer, Search Technologies’ vice president of technology. In the discussion, Mr. Steinhauer talked about the rapid growth and Search Technologies’ approach to search-related engagements.
He told me:
We bring hard-won experience to customer projects and a deep knowledge of what works and where the difficult issues lie. Our partners, the major search vendors, sometimes find it difficult to be pragmatic, even where they have their own implementation departments, because their primary focus is their software licensing business. That’s not a criticism. As with most enterprise software sectors, license fees pay for all of the valuable research & development that the vendors put in to keep the industry moving forward. But it does mean that in a typical services engagement, less emphasis is put on the need for implementation planning, and ongoing processes to maintain and fine-tune the search application. We focus only on those elements, and this benefits both customers, who get more from their investment, and search engine partners who end up with happier customers.
I asked him about where the search industry was heading. He told me:
There are now two 800 pound Gorillas in the market, called Microsoft and Google. That’s a big difference from the somewhat fractious market that existed for 10 years ago. That will certainly make it harder for smaller vendors to find oxygen. But at the same time, these very large companies have their own agendas for what features and platforms matter for them and their customers. They will not attempt to be all things to all prospective customers in the same way that smaller hungrier vendors have. In theory this should leave gaps for either products or services companies to fill where specific and relatively sophisticated capabilities are required. We see those requirements all over the place.
For more information about Search Technologies, visit the firm’s Web site at www.searchtechnologies.com. The full text of the interview is located in the Beyond Search interview collection.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
EasyAsk Right Choice for InkJet Superstore
August 29, 2011
Have you ever tried to find ink or toner for a not-so-new printer? The process can be confusing, and shoppers are unlikely to feel warm and fuzzy about any ink seller whose Web site only adds to the frustration.
One purveyor of ink and toner made a wise choice when it picked EasyAsk’s eCommerce Edition. EasyAsk asserts, “NetSuite Customer InkJet Superstore Jets Past Competitors Using EasyAsk Natural Language E-Commerce Search Software for SaaS.” The press release states,
Using EasyAsk eCommerce edition, InkJet Superstore has dramatically simplified finding the right printer cartridges and accessories, providing the easiest online experience for customers, increasing online orders and revenue. The news release said: “InkjetSuperstore.com sells toner and ink cartridges for virtually every make and model of printer, copier, and fax machine, with over 6,000 items. InkJet Superstore’s vision is clearly articulated on the company website: ‘To be the best, the easiest, the cheapest and friendliest place to buy printer accessories.’ To back this up, InkJet Superstore offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee, which includes paying for return shipping cost.
Source: http://www.inkjetsuperstore.com, powered by EasyAsk NLP technology
EasyAsk is helping InkJet Superstore deliver on its promises. Since the business implemented the solution, the site has had 80% fewer “no results” returns; increased order conversion rates by six percent; and decreased its phone calls and live chat requests, indicating that customers are more easily finding what they need.
The solution didn’t stop there. With their its rapidly expanding, Inkjet Superstore is taking advantage of the EasyAsk’s auto-sync feature to assimilate new products into the Web site. Furthermore, rich analytics mine customer search terms for items that are in demand, suggesting potential new products.
Protected: SharePoint Content and Tweaking Styles for Web Sites
August 29, 2011
StumbleUpon Finally Moves into Search
August 28, 2011
We wondered why StumbleUpon was dragging its feet in search. We the erosion of Digg.com and the ups and downs of Reddit.com. Then the Yahoo Delicious.com event. StumbleUpon looked like the go to service for curated Web site recommendations.
For anyone with free time sitting in front of a computer, StumbleUpon is the site to go to. Imagine Pandora met Google and had a love child. Welcome to StumbleUpon. Upon registration users check off topics of interests, the brain behind the website cherry-picks websites it believes will be interesting, and then the user can thumb–up it or thumb-down it, improving future recommendations.
A new feature has been introduced to the ‘inquiring minds wish to know’ website: search. While it may look like a search engine, it truly is not. The article, StumbleUpon Starts Exploring, Looking More Like Search, on Search Engine Watch, explains how the new explorer bar is not a search engine, but a marketing genius.
Even the best computer brains aren’t psychic. They cannot know what an individual is interested in at the moment. By adding the explorer bar, StumbleUpon users can point the program in the right direction. Similar to traditional search engines, when one enters a word into the explorer box, suggestions appear. But unlike search engines, StumbleUpon is a Russian roulette of searches; the user gets no say in which website will pop up as a result of the search. What risk!
While cute, many only care about the bottom line. In this case, that bottom line has just added a few digits. As the article explains,
…StumbleUpon is making a move that looks beautiful for businesses. While 60,000 marketers have used the “paid discovery” program to date, the Explore Bar may be able to offer far more targeted advertising opportunities.
This great Web site just got better, in our opinion. We can’t wait to see what comes next and what other similar sites (and search engines) will take away from StumbleUpon’s exercise in usefulness. Now, Beyond Search wants more, more, more.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Attensity and Capgemini Team Up on Social Media Service
August 28, 2011
We see that Attensity is moving beyond its roots. Research reports, “Capgemini and Attensity Partner in Social Media Management.”
Capgemini Group provides a wide range of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services to industries that range from defense to financial services to entertainment.
Attensity has traditionally provided semantic solutions to the intelligence community and now serves Global 2000 companies and government agencies. They pride themselves on the accuracy of their analytic engines and their intuitive reports.
Now, in this partnership with Capgemini, Attensity is branching into the social media game. The write up explains:
The service offers real-time web listening and analysis by feeding results through to the firm’s offshore and onshore centers in Dallas, Guatemala City and Bangalore. Attensity’s text analytics platform is then used to examine content created by social media users. “Feedback gathered and analyzed at the these centers can then be used to modify marketing campaigns or improve overall customer experience, the firm said.”
Paul Cole, Capgemini’s VP for BPO Customer Operations, sees a unique opportunity. While most companies know social media can be valuable, few know exactly how to tap that power. Capgemini and Attensity intend to address that need and, of course, profit handsomely.
Now, is Capgemini ahead of its consulting competitors or lagging? A band wagon is going by. I will consider the question later.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Text Processing for Gender Info
August 27, 2011
Apparently researchers are proving what we have known all along, men and women communicate differently. In all seriousness, language patterns of tweets are being studied by the Mitre Corporation to determine if gender can be accurately assigned. Read more from, “Study shows how some tweeters can identify their gender without even trying.”
As the Mitre team shows in their report, there are certain “buzzwords” that can often be found by analyzing the output of female tweeters. Phrases such as “chocolate” and “shopping” are among the most repeated for women tweeters. The most popular phrases for men, you ask? “Http” and “Google”…hey we never said either gender was more interesting than the other.
The team determined that the female/male ratio on Twitter is 55/45, so a guess of “female” would prove correct 55% of the time. However, the team found success 75% of the time through analyze of certain phrases, like those mentioned above. Perhaps such research could lead to targeted gender-specific advertising. It is interesting regardless, and the full report could be worth a look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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