More Open Source Woes: Malware Problem Grows
August 25, 2011
The article, Attack on Open-Source Web App Keeps Growing, on The Register, reports of an alarming attack on the open-source online shopping application, osCommerce. The attack injects malware into the computers of users of the shopping app.
Being open-source, osCommerce is understandably a very popular product for any online vendor. There own website boasts that over 250,000 shop owners, developers and entrepreneurs utilize their product. With that being the case, Amorize’s bleak report on the number infected with the malware is no surprise. At the time of publication of the article, experts estimated over 8.3 million pages were infected.
The attack is best explained by the article:
Armorize said attackers are exploiting three separate vulnerabilities in the open source store-management application, including one that was discovered last month. Harold Ponce de Leon, the lead developer of osCommerce, said there’s only one vulnerability that’s being exploited, but he admitted that no one on his team has spoken to anyone at Armorize to reconcile the difference of opinion.
This exploitation of open-source software is bad news for not only the open-source community, but also the search industry as well. The rate at which pages are becoming infected signifies how quickly one unprotected piece of software can infect an entire community.
There is a patch for the problem but unfortunately, as evidenced by the number of infected, it is not being applied. Anytime an update is available, it is imperative that users download it immediately. If you are using open source, you may have to worry about more than legal hassles. Will this affect Lucene and other open source search solutions? Stay tuned.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: SharePoint Governance: Another Fresh Look
August 25, 2011
EasyAsk Enhances User Experience in Mobile Apps
August 24, 2011
EasyAsk is a company that leverages its incorporation of natural language processing in order to boost its information retrieval technology. EasyAsk offers an alternative to traditional enterprise search and is having a strong impact on eCommerce as it relates to “findability.” The company told us:
Founded in 1999 by Dr. Larry Harris, a computational linguistics professor and internationally recognized expert on database systems and computerized natural language. EasyAsk technology is used today by leading retailers, manufacturers, financial services institutions, government agencies and pharmaceutical and health care organizations around the globe.
Mobile commerce is the undeniable way of the future and EasyAsk is shaping how it will look. John Morell, VP of Product Marketing, wrote “Mobile Apps and User Experience” for the company blog, addressing how navigation and search must be treated differently in the mobile context. He spoke to some of the considerations made when developing EasyAsk eCommerce mobile. We learned:
The screen real estate on a mobile browser is vastly smaller than that on a PC or Mac. This says that excellent search is critical. You need to pinpoint search results because wading through pages of results in a mobile browser would frustrate a user and cause them to abandon. But excellent navigation is also important due to the screen real estate constraints. Using richer, dynamic search criteria in the navigation, such as product attributes . . . allows visitors to find products in 1 to 2 clicks, rather than plowing through pages of categories – increasing the chances of conversion.
Other vendors, such as X1, are pushing into this territory as well. However, EasyAsk has a definite edge in its tested usage of natural language processing. An “Interview with Craig Bassin,” EasyAsk CEO, is a good reference for how the company got its start and why it can currently stand toe-to-toe with others in the field like Endeca. Mr. Bassin said:
EasyAsk’s unique natural language technology helps people find information faster and easier by enabling them to perform e-commerce searches or enterprise data searches in plain English, making it easier for users to express what they want and delivering a more accurate answer. The technology is used in two products: EasyAsk eCommerce Edition, an e-commerce search and merchandising solution that has proven to drive the best buyer conversion rates in the industry, and EasyAsk Business Edition which offers the easiest, most intuitive manner to search and explore corporate data.
EasyAsk is proven in the market, but it is not stuck in the success of its past. Continuing to innovate, the company looks for new ways to improve not only user experience, but also client satisfaction. EasyAsk and its natural language processing looks good to me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Microsoft Tunnels into the Google Search Lead
August 24, 2011
We think Bing.com is getting better. Either that or Google’s focus on Oracle, mobile phones, and assimilating the aged Motorola Mobility are distracting the company from its core competency.
It would appear that Microsoft is systematically whittling away at Google’s dominance. It’s bad enough that the veteran tech giant gains royalties from Google’s OS, Android, but now their search engine, Bing, is slowly eating up popularity points that were previously monopolized by Google. According to the article, Microsoft’s Bing Leads Google in Delivering Users to Websites: Report, on eWeek, Bing is still not as popular a search engine as Google, but creaming the big G where it counts – user clicks.
Google has dominated the search engine scene for quite some time now, and while it is popular, other search engines have definite benefits that Google does not provide. A very important number to look at when comparing search engine competencies is the percentage of searches that end with the user visiting a website. As the article reports,
According to analytics firm Experian Hitwise, some 80.04 percent of searches executed on Bing resulted in the user visiting a Website. That’s in contrast to Google, which clocked a 67.56 percent success rate. Yahoo led both companies with 81.36 percent.
On top of Bing and Yahoo beating Google in website clicks, they also are slowly rising in use while Google is slowly losing percentage points. According to ComScore, Google’s share of the search market went down in June 2011 from 65.5 percent to 65.1 percent, a small decrease, but definitely not the direction Google likes or is used to.
Microsoft appears to have a great deal of patience. Their slow-growing gain on the search engine market isn’t going to topple Google today, tomorrow or anytime soon, but in cahoots with other anti-Google operations Microsoft is working, has its impact.
Microsoft led a consortium of tech companies in winning some 6,000 Nortel mobile industry patents in July 2011 – a patent portfolio over which Google was practically salivating.
Windows Phone 7 is not flying off the shelves, but Microsoft is making money via its Android “tax”. Thanks to Redmond’s hefty patent portfolio (around 17,000), Microsoft is apparently receiving royalties from licensing agreements from manufactures of mobile phones using Android. Not too shabby, Microsoft.
How Microsoft’s sly erosion of Google will turn out, no one knows. What is known is that Google’s God-complex needs to be checked at the door if they want a chance at keeping their strong-hold in the markets they saturate.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Market Share Suggests the Strength of the Google Grip
August 24, 2011
Grab your Community Chest Card and move over Park Place, it seems Google has decided to take up residency. Rumblings of antitrust violations by the search giant are getting louder and blogger Gabriel Weinberg wants to know “What is Google’s Real Market Share in the U.S.?”. He suspects that the numbers being reported may not be telling us the whole story.
Comscore and Hitwise, which are Internet marketing research organizations, report that Google’s share is around 65 percent in the United States. However, there are contradictory higher percentages out there that are hard to explain. Weinberg says that 65 percent:
seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to ‘in the wild’ who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%. There is some similar data on Quora and HN for reference. If you check those out, you’ll see some people (including myself) have seen some sites with less Google % and higher Bing or Yahoo, but these seem isolated cases on particular verticals (and overall smaller traffic sites).
The percentage discrepancy may have to do with counting internal links on Microsoft/Yahoo sites or that they are sending a lot of traffic to a small number of sites. However, there is no clear evidence that either scenario is affecting the numbers.
This leads me to ask – what percent makes Google a monopoly? Have they become the only company on the web? Though there will be many heated debates arguing both sides it looks to me that history is repeating itself. Google is starting to smell a whole lot like the Microsoft of the 1990’s. I expect the Department of Justice to take a long look at them especially with their most recent acquisition of Motorola (see: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility). I wouldn’t be surprised if the government makes them move out of that Park Place neighborhood!
Jennifer Wensink August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Internet Means Search and Email
August 24, 2011
We were a bit underwhelmed. Though social media is gaining ground, one survey found that it has a long way to go to overtake the number one use of the internet which is searching for information. As discussed in “Who Uses Search Engines? 92% of Adult U.S. Internet Users [Study]”, research center, Pew Internet, found that searching is the single most popular use of the internet with email coming in second.
The survey found that the amount of people searching on a regular basis has grown over the past 10 years in every demographic. Now 92 percent of internet users utilize search engines, with 59 percent of them doing it on a regular basis. Email has similar numbers. The younger, the wealthier, and the more educated are the most likely to search and use email on a daily basis.
This leaves people to wonder what is happening with social media?
It’s certainly true that social sites are growing rapidly. Since 2004, when Pew Internet started looking at social media usage among those surveyed, social sites have risen from 11 percent usage to 65 percent usage. The growth started slowing in 2009, but is continuing a gradual climb.
I think it is safe to say that social media popularity will continue to grow, but will never have the numbers associated with searching and email. The likes of Facebook and Twitter just are not alternatives to a search engine. People are always going to need and seek out information which will safely secure the top spot for companies like Google and Yahoo.
Jennifer Wensink August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Aggregation: A Brave New World?
August 24, 2011
As I’m typing this article on my computer, I must confess, I love pen and paper, the smell of a new book, the sound a newspaper makes when its pages are turned. Unfortunately, these physical things are slowly becoming extinct thanks to the internet. Though I stubbornly resist the allure of Kindle, I can see the writing on the wall, or the tablet.
The article How the Internet Has All But Destroyed the Market for Films, Music and Newspapers from the UK’s The Guardian, believes the impending death of physical newspapers, among other media outlets, is due to the lack of law governing and enforced on the internet. According to it, as long as information can be easily pirated and transmitted to others for free, those footing the bill for creating the movies, music and news will continue to see sharp declines in profits.
Image source: http://www.sreweb.com/weekend_emails/sept_10_2010/
To understand how the internet is killing the newspaper star, one must first understand why newspapers have worked so well for so long. It’s all about aggregation and curation. Aggregation is simply the gathering of ‘stuff’; in a newspaper’s case, that stuff is news stories, sports scores, horoscopes, classified ads, etc… Curation is the culling out of unnecessary ‘stuff’.
Newspapers have created brands for themselves because of their unique aggregating and curating. For hundreds of years if someone liked a column in a specific newspaper, they were forced to buy the entire paper to read the one column of interest. The newspaper hoped that the reader would also find the other articles interesting, but it didn’t really matter because the price of the newspaper was the same whether a reader liked one article or all of them.
Protected: PDFs and SharePoint
August 24, 2011
Is Microsoft Embracing Open Source?
August 23, 2011
We think many companies are playing kiss kiss with open source. The problem, of course, is the Oracle Google legal hassle over Java. The outcome of the legal dust up may throw some cold water on the flames of passion between a giant company and open source software.
With the tech world slowly moving more toward an open-source community, Microsoft, who has closely guarded its secrets, is feeling the pressure to open up a little. The article, Solving Microsoft’s Hard Problem, on The H Online, gives some insight into how Microsoft can make the transition to an open-source provider of software and hardware.
Glyn Moody, the author of the article, recommends that Microsoft take baby steps in becoming open-source, and .NET Gadgeteer is a good first move. The article quotes Microsoft for the description of .NET Gadgeteer:
Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express. Gadgeteer combines the advantages of object-oriented programming, solderless assembly of electronics with a kit of peripherals, and support for quick form-factor construction using computer-aided design. This powerful combination allows embedded and handheld devices to be iteratively designed, built and programmed in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.
Microsoft gets their idea for .NET Gadgeteer from Arduino, a huge success in the open-source hardware game.
As far as Microsoft taking the next step of staying involved and ‘nurturing a broader ecosystem’ surrounding the project, there is hope. Almost as soon as Microsoft introduced Kinect, hackers began trying to mod to hardware. A website devoted Kinect tweaking, OpenKinect, even went as far as offering a money-prize for the first person who could get Kinect to work with Windows or another PC system.
Microsoft initially threatened legal action against those hacking away at Kinect, but has since announced that they purposefully left certain elements of Kinect unprotected for such tweaking. Uh, huh.
Regardless of whether or not hackers successfully worked their way into Kinect, the take-away is that Microsoft is finally allowing and working with those desiring an open-source relationship. There is hope for Microsoft, yet.
We can envision Microsoft taking a hard look at the costs of certain enterprise software and weighing the cost savings versus the risk of open source software.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google and Its Algorithm: Persistence and Change
August 23, 2011
The pot of gold at the end of the internet’s rainbow is Google’s algorithm it uses for determining PageRank. Google, being the most used search engine on the planet, can make or break a website just by where the website falls in search results. The article, Google Algorithm Change History, on SEOmoz, provides major dates of Google algorithm changes.
The PageRank is a patented system of algorithms that is the core of Google’s search engine. Named after Google co-founder, Larry Page, Stanford University holds the patent as Page was a student there when he and Sergey Brin began creating Google. PageRank takes several things into consideration when ranking a webpage such as the number of links other sites have to it, language used within the page, and age of the page.
Because most people click on links found on the first or second page of search results, those 20-40 slots are prime real estate. An industry has popped up, search engine optimization (SEO), as a result promising clients that they can land websites in the top slots. SEOs manipulate search engines to get the results.
Keeping tabs on Google algorithm updates becomes vital to the survival of SEOs. As the article explains,
Each year, Google changes its search algorithm up to 500-600 times. While most of these changes are minor, every few months Google rolls out a “major” algorithmic update that affect search results in significant ways. For search marketers, knowing the dates of these Google updates can help explain changes in rankings and organic website traffic.
While these ‘major’ changes the article speaks of may have an impact on how SEOs conduct their business, the truth of the matter is that Google still relies primarily on the same system it has always used. The impact of Google’s method hits search engine optimization experts hard. The SEO pros, some of whom were former art history majors, must convince their clients that SEO magic can improve a Google result for a particular client. Wow. That is hard since Google is making changes frequently. SEO experts have some sort of answer, but is it the right one?
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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