Search Innovation: Do IR Thought Leaders Recycle Old Ideas?
August 17, 2011
We are fast approaching our 60th interview in the Search Wizards Speak series. In June 2011, we completed The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, which involved its own series of interviews with engineers, search system customers, chief executive officers, and pundits.
A Paucity of Insights or Fear?
For many years, I have been interviewing entrepreneurs, developers, and investors about information retrieval, content processing, and headache inducing technologies such as entity extraction and natural language processing.
My team of goslings here in Harrod’s Creek the industry leaders like Exalead and some of the more interesting newcomers such as SearchLion. Next week, we release an interview with a fast growing company with headquarters in Europe. Some vendors don’t want to talk; for example, Google and Microsoft. Microsoft was in but then the “expert” disappeared. With the churn at Microsoft, I am just sitting on the sidelines. Other vendors and experts want to talk but don’t want to commit their ideas to a digital interview in a context of scores of other experts’ commentary.
Here’s the trigger for this summary of my thoughts from August 15, 2011. I listened to a podcast this morning when I was walking my trusty technical advisor, Max the Boxer.
The on air personality was Adam Carolla. Program is available via iTunes or from the Adam Carolla Web site. The segment of the program which caught my attention was Mr. Carolla’s interview with author and columnist Ben Shapiro, a Harvard lawyer. Mr. Shapiro is the author of Primetime Propaganda: The Tue Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. The air was cool and Mr. Max was chasing squirrels, so I listened to Mr. Shapiro’s observations about how certain well placed individuals feel uncomfortable in their life roles. Mr. Carolla mentioned that he too had observed that some individuals wear their wealth and station in life awkwardly. (I remember reading in 2003 Why Smart Executives Fail, which advanced some similar arguments.)
What’s this have to do with Search Wizards Speak and the interviews I conducted for The New Landscape of Enterprise Search?
I realized that in the interviews I have conducted over the last 32 months, only a few individuals were completely confident in their answers to my now-standardized questions about “What are the major trends in search?” and “What product enhancements will you be introducing in the next release of your product?” In one go round, not only did the interview take nearly four months to complete, the interview subject deleted my standard introduction, deleted my general observations about the interview, and rearranged the content of the interview so that it suppressed any hint of a personal touch for the interview subject. That’s okay with me. The information was interesting and not available elsewhere, so I ran with it.
My Sharpiro’s and Mr. Carolla’s comments struck a nerve because in the search and content processing industry, I think the same type of uncertainty and discomfort exists. Because search is miles away from Wall Street or Hollywood, the experts like Mr. Shapiro ignore software, choosing to focus on high profile topics that cater to a broader audience.
Fuzzy Is Popular
Let’s assume for a moment that Mr. Shapiro’s podcast observation is accurate. What is causing experts in search to be fuzzy, waffling, and uncertain about search and retrieval? (Remember. I am talking about the sample of interviews I have conducted and published, not about forthcoming interviews.)
First, I think that most vendors of search and content processing systems are facing pressures that may be greater that press upon other technology companies. Search and content processing is one of those complex areas which most people dismiss as “been there, done that.” The preeminence of search as a core application has been losing the high ground over the last three or four years. In fact, based on the research we conducted for my new monograph The New Landscape of Search, the shift may be accelerating. Search appears to be more of a utility function. The most successful of the content processing vendors—Exalead, to take one example—embed search in broader, often higher value enterprise solutions. A company selling brute force indexing or a component to improve the indexing of entities is like to find its market becoming less top management level and more information technology staff level. I think this introduces uncertainty in how a search and content processing company can position and price its technology.
Thanks to the creative whiz at http://planetpov.com/2011/07/25/uncertainty-in-business-will-it-become-sustainable/
Second, the every day user of a free Web search system or a person doing customer support work in a big company expects a search box. The habit of banging two or three words into the search slot machine and getting out an information payoff is routine. Search and content processing vendors talk a great deal about improving productivity, but the reality is that most users don’t know if the information provided is right or wrong. Most just use what’s at the top of the results list. My hunch is that the increasing dissatisfaction with search is a warning signal that the brute force approach, although ubiquitous, is not working. The client, on the other hand, is okay with good enough. As a result, a vendor trying to explain how to improve a search box function has a long, expensive, and arduous sales process. The top dogs in search and content processing companies want results, but the folks selling the product are not sure what to say to close the deal and keep its options open with other prospects. Not surprisingly, when one reads the nearly 60 interviews, there is a note of sameness that threads through the write ups. The companies that say something different—Autonomy or Exalead, for example—stand out. Many of the others seem quite alike. I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.
Endeca Tackles Big Data, but Is the Concept Valid?
August 17, 2011
This week Endeca announced it would integrate Apache Hadoop in with their Endeca Latitude product, thus providing a better environment for processing big data. In, “Endeca Attacks Big data with Hadoop integration,” the enterprise search vendor continues to move away from traditional models and address specific business needs.
Hadoop is an open source data processing tool that according to the Endeca release works particularly well with unstructured data. One of the advantages of working with Hadoop is that it offers what is essentially a fail-safe approach because if one server shuts down or just slows down, Hadoop compensates across the remaining servers and keeps running . . . This all comes together to provide a better environment for processing big data, something that according to Donald Feinberg, VP distinguished analyst at Gartner, is a growing concern at many organizations.
But is big data a growing concern or a corporate myth? In “There’s no such thing as big data,” Alistair Croll contends that big data may exist in theory but not in practice. While they may accumulate virtual vaults of data, Croll contends, “It takes an employee, deciding that the loss of high-value customers is important, to run a query of all their data and find him, and then turn that into a business advantage. Without the right questions, there really is no such thing as big data — and today, it’s the upstarts that are asking all the good questions.”
Croll maintains that small start-ups are winning the marketing game because they are approaching from a more agile, more creative position. However, large companies have plenty of power to leverage in their holdings of big data, if only they knew how to ask the right questions. Why do we have Netflix instead of a reinvented Blockbuster? This is the heart of Croll’s question.
So while Endeca might have found a favorable selling point for Latitude, the business plan is still lacking for how to incorporate the big data concept into a profitable model. Maybe big business will learn from the start-ups, allowing big data to become a topic of relevance.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Protected: Creating Wire Frames for SharePoint
August 17, 2011
IBM Pulls Plug on New Super Computer Because of Cost?
August 16, 2011
Dazzling not only the tech world, but also the pop culture world, IBM made headlines earlier this year when its Watson supercomputer defeated Jeopardy’s best and brightest. Now IBM is admitting a version of defeat in, “IBM Yanks Chain on ‘Blue Waters’ Super: Power7 Petaflops Behemoth Gets Flushed.”
IBM has pulled the plug on the “Blue Waters” petaflops-class, Power7-based supercomputer that it was contracted to build for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. In a statement released today by IBM and NCSA, the two parties said that Big Blue terminated the Blue Waters contract because the Power7-based behemoth was more complex and expensive than they had both bargained for.
The question is, how can IBM control costs and still build high-speed systems that can compete in the market? The manufacturing costs for the anticipated Blue Waters was around $300 million. It was an investment neither IBM nor the NCSA could afford to make. If costs continue to be prohibitive, IBM and other American computer companies might lose the innovative edge for which they are internationally known.
Why didn’t IBM ask Watson, “How do we make this supercomputer cost effective?” Watson, we heard, is trying out for a gig on ER.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Google Enterprise Elevates Its Game with Security Certification
August 16, 2011
Google recently announced that both their Google Apps suite and their Google Apps engine have received SSAE-16 security certification. The certification could open a lot of new doors for Google in the world of enterprise. ZDNet provides coverage in, “Google App Engine Now Officially Secure.”
The certification process covers everything from physical security at the data center to making sure that only pre-cleared staff have access to customer data, to evaluating Google’s redundancy and incident reporting . . . And the bottom line to all this is that several enterprises require their cloud providers to be compliant with these standards – formerly SAS 70, and now SSAE-16. And this means that Google App Engine is open to a whole new customer base, with confidences bolstered by an authoritative second opinion.
While not a major deviation from their previous certification, the stamp of approval from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is good business. As data continues to grow exponentially on the web and on the cloud, security will continue to be the top priority. Continuing to redefine themselves in a way that gives them freedom to rely less on their famous search model, Google now has the security authority to venture into new realms.
Google does not seem particularly quick off the security launch pad in our opinion.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Exclusive Interview with Ana Athayde, Spotter SA
August 16, 2011
I have been monitoring Spotter SA, a European software development firm specializing in business intelligence for several years. A lengthy interview with the founder, Ana Athayde appears in the Search Wizards Speak section of the ArnoldIT.com Web site.
The company has offices throughout Europe, the Middle East, and in the United States. The firm offers solutions in market sentiment, reputation management, risk assessment, crisis management, and competitive intelligence.
In the wide ranging interview, Ms. Athayde mentioned that she had been recognized as an exceptional manager, but she was quick to give credit to her staff and her chief technical officer, who was involved in the forward looking Datops SA content analytics service, now absorbed into the LexisNexis organization.
I asked her what pulled her into the vortex of content processing and analytics. She told me:
My background is business and marketing management in the sports field. In my first professional experience, I had to face major challenges in communication and marketing working for the International Olympic Committee. The amount of information published on those subjects was so huge that the first challenge was to solve the infoglut: not only to search for relevant information and build a list, but to understand opinions and assess reputation at an international level….I decided to fund a company to deliver a solution that could make use of information in textual form, what most people call unstructured data. But I knew that the information had to be presented in a way that a decision maker could actually use. Data dumps and row after row of numbers usually mean no one can tell what’s important without spending minutes, maybe hours deciphering the outputs.
I asked her about the firm’s technical plumbing. She replied:
The architecture of our own crawling system is based on proprietary methods to define and tune search scenarios. The “plumbing” is a fully scalable architecture which distributes tasks to schedulers. The content is processed, and we syndicate results. We use what we call “a source monitoring approach” which makes use of standard Web scraping methods. However, we have developed our own methods to adjust the scraping technology to each source in order to search all available documents. We extract metadata and relevant content from each page or content object. Only documents which have been assessed as fresh are processed and provided to users. This assessment is done by a proprietary algorithm based on rules involving such factors as the publication date. This means that each document collected by Spotter’s tracking and monitoring system is stamped with a publication date. This date is extracted by the Web scraping technology, from the document content. The type of behavior of the source; that is, the source has a known update cycle. We analyze the text content of the document. And we use the date and time stamp on the document itself.
Anyone who has tried to use the dates provided in some commercial systems realizes that without accurate time context, much information is essentially useless without additional research and analysis.
To read the complete interview with Ms. Athayde, point your browser to the full text of our discussion. More information about Spotter SA is available at the firm’s Web site www.spotter.com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2011
Freebie but you may support our efforts by buying a copy of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Google Plus: Preening for Ads?
August 16, 2011
Google+ is still being developed, although officially launched earlier this summer. Google wanted the service to be available to enough users so that they could garner feedback and understand users’ expectations. So as feedback pours in, Google continues to react, comment, develop, and tweak. In, “5 Plus Google +1 SEO Tips from Googleplex in Mountain View,” the focus is on search engine optimization tips for using the +1 function.
The simplicity of the +1 button within mobile apps such as barcode scanners could have exciting implications on conversion behavior, potentially drives purchasing both in-store and offline by allowing users to “bookmark” real objects. Another use of the callback mechanism, is to tailor product recommendations “after the click” of the Google +1 button . . . Alternatively, the retailer could customize the user experience of the store, based on the +1 cookie data, and display more recommendations for that user’s next visit.
Advertising is Google’s cash cow, and there is no doubt they hope to protect their slice of the online advertising market from Facebook’s growing presence. We expect to see a growing ad presence on Google+ as the network expands and as retailers learn how to use the network’s functions to their advantage. Once Google+ proves its advertising merit, retailers will be eager to partner with the trusted search giant.
Publisher Stephen E Arnold’s research suggests that Google plays the “organic” search card as a palliative and red herring when Webmasters offer Web pages are not Adwords customers. When traffic or visibility flags, what’s the surest path to traffic? Mr. Arnold suggests, “Adwords. Google is in business to generate money, not undercut its core revenue stream.”
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Protected: Microsoft Access and SharePoint: Happy Together
August 16, 2011
Quote to Note: Google Motorola
August 16, 2011
Quote to note: I don’t have much light to shed on the purchase of Motorola by Google.
The Roman army’s testudo. Great strategy as long as the enemy did what Roman commanders expected. The unexpected? Well, the testudo still makes for interesting footage in movies like The Gladiator. Image source: A happy quack to http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=2975.1410
I have been flicking through the inputs and outputs from pundits of all persuasions. One write up—“The Truth about the Google Motorola Deal: it Could End Up Being a Disaster”—contained a statement I wanted to capture. Here it is:
… a big rationale for making this deal seems to be about buying mobile patents–and, thus, “defending” Android from Apple’s and Microsoft’s attacks. It seems safe to say that, six months ago, investors and partners did not realize that Google was going to have to shell out $13 billion to “defend” Android, let alone start competing with its hardware partners.
I have highlighted the two key words and phrases in this passage.
My focus is search. But as enticing as mobile search is, these two words do not suggest to me that Google is focusing on its core competency. Tactical moves, surprising investors and hardware partners, and moving into the digital equivalent of the testudo—fascinating. Do I have thoughts about fragmentation, Google’s management capabilities, or the litigation that Motorola brings along with its original SMS technology? Nope. Think the turtle and what happened when Rome’s allies got frisky.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2011
Sponsored by The New Landscape of Search
The Android Ecosystem: A Road with One Less Toll Booth?
August 15, 2011
I read “Motorola’s Sanjay Jha Openly Admits They Plan to Collect IP Royalties from Other Android Makers.” I am reasonably confident that the Googlers knew there would be various monetization plays coalescing around the “free” Android operating system. (I almost type “free and open”, but that would be a bit of a misstatement.) Microsoft is charging Android bounties and collecting. One of the goslings told me that Microsoft is making more from Android bounties than from Windows Phone 7, a fact which I doubt. Now Motorola wants to slap another booth on the Android super highway. Here’s a passage that strikes me as important:
If Google loses in this fight, Android vendors might have to pay $60 per device in patent fees eventually. It’s no wonder many people are worried about Android right now. Amidst this Android patent insecurity, Motorola recently started touting the strength of its IP portfolio. Nothing surprising here. Motorola is one of the oldest players, with one of the strongest patent portfolios in the industry.
Google lose? That’s a thought I had not entertained. If the fees become sufficiently burdensome, then maybe the iPhone and iOS start to look more attractive. Nah, Google has anticipated this and has a response.
What was the response? Google made headlines with its “we don’t have much choice” acquisition of Motorola Mobility. You can read about the deal in the Official Google Blog and then work through the punditry at your leisure.
I selected one write up as representative of the thinking in the Silicon Valley world of business analysis: “Google’s $12.5 Billion Motorola Mobility Bet: 6 Reasons Why It Makes Sense.” Of the six reasons, one resonated with me–patents. The other five sounded off key.
My take is pretty simple. Google missed on the Nortel patent deal. Tactical cuteness backfired and the price tag jumped to $12.5 billion which is Warren Buffet territory. I think the scale is interesting but lacks the type of Buffet genius for big deals.
So what?
Google’s quick and easy “open source” play is now changing direction. There are even more interesting implications for mobile outfits who may be thinking about how to create a mobile operating system with a unique fingerprint. The fragmentation which Google insists does not pose a challenge may also check its technology road map.
Motorola does not arrive fresh and sweet like an ear of spring corn in Illinois. Motorola brings some genetically modified stuff to the table along with partners, management challenges, litigation, and financial challenges. Google remake Libertyville, Illinois, or will Libertyville, Illinois, do what Illinois does best?
Think Motorola’s late entrance into digital phones. Think the Illinois debt. Think about Illinois politics. Oh, think about Illinois’ track record in generating winners in the digital economy. Think about buying a company like Motorola Mobility because of the options, this one was the best of the crop.
I am thinking and I hazard the guess that Google will be thinking as well. My final thought is that the final stage of the Microsoftization of Google is now underway.
Stephen E Arnold, August 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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