Alleged Google Plus Search Bias, Illustrated
April 4, 2012
It seems that the SEO experts now realize that relevance is sort of an issue. Wow, great insight. Search Engine Land details “Real-Life Examples of How Google’s ‘Search Plus’ Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy.”
Writer Danny Sullivan uses a few Google searches, complete with screenshots, to illustrate how Google+ is unfairly favored over Facebook and other sites. He even Googled “Mark Zuckerman” with intriguing results. Sullivan’s explanation is detailed and well thought out, and is a good read for anyone following the Google+ Search affair.
The article asserts:
Those results are supposed to be showing what are the most relevant things for searchers out there. That’s how Google wins. That’s how Google sticks it to competitors, by not trying to play favorites in those results, nor by trying to punish people through them. The Google+ suggestions are indeed search results, to me. Right now, they’re search results on who to follow on Google+. I think they could be better search results if they were who to follow on any social network, anywhere.
Good point, but . . . it is kind of rich, considering the source. Is it now time for a conference session titled, “How SEO Killed Web Search Relevance”?
Cynthia Murrell, April 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
MapR Expands Hadoop Connectors
April 4, 2012
This MapR move signals more options for Hadoop users. Talkin’ Cloud reports, “MapR Announces Broad Data Connection Options for Hadoop.” Writer Brian Taylor specifies:
The data connections, according to the press release, enable a ‘wide range of data ingress and egress alternatives for customers,’ including direct file-based access using standard tools; direct database connectivity; Hadoop-specific connectors via Sqoop, Flume and Hive; and access to popular data warehouses and applications using custom connectors.
Sqoop, Flume, and Hive are all open source projects at Apache; the first two are still in incubation.
MapR is getting a hand on this project from tech providers Pentaho and Talend, who will supply direct integration with MapR Distribution. In addition, Tableau Software is helping to promote the new data connection options.
Co-founded by Xoogler M.C. Srivas, MapR has built on the work of developers behind the open source Hadoop, making it “more reliable, more affordable, more manageable and significantly easier to use.” MapR boasts that its innovations help its customers get the most out of the big data phenomenon.
Watch for our forthcoming open source analytics blog. Roll out is April 9, 2012.
Cynthia Murrell, March 29, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Vendors and Web Traffic
April 4, 2012
I was fiddling around with Compete.com, a Web analytics outfit. One of the company’s services is to provide usage statistics for urls. I have no idea if these data are in line with the vendors’ Web logs, but one can look at a number of sites’ traffic and do some rough comparisons. You can try the service at www.compete.com. The tables below present some of the data I examined. Vendors, don’t write to tell me Compete data are incorrect. We are looking at data generated by a method. I am not selecting data to make your Web site magnetism weak.
| Company | Traffic (2- 2012) | Comment |
| Attensity | 974 | Conferences and news releases |
| Attivio | 973 | White papers |
| Autonomy | 12597 | Full court press method |
| BA Insight | 0 | Microsoft and webinars |
| Brainware | 857 | News releases |
| Concept Searching | 0 | Webinars |
| Connotate | 5025 | News releases and analyst support |
| Content Analyst | 321 | Some conference participation |
| Coveo | 2034 | Traditional PR |
| Dieselpoint | 1880 | Web site |
| dtSearch | 5208 | Free downloads |
| Easy Ask | 472 | News releases |
| Endeca | 3900 | Analyst support |
| Exalead | 20494 | Full court press method |
| Exorbyte | 11486 | News releases |
| Funnelback | 2640 | News releases and conference partici- pation |
| Hakia | 7891 | News releases |
| Lexalytics | 710 | News releases |
| Linguamatics | 0 | Web site |
| MarkLogic | 1088 | Full court press method |
| Recommind | 3964 | News releases aimed at trade publications |
| SearchBlox | 0 | Web site |
| Sinequa | 0 | Web site |
| Vivisimo | 7324 | News releases |
| ZyLAB | 0 | Full court press method |
| X1 | 5589 | Web site |
| X1 Discovery | 2575 | Web site |
Here is this sample’s alleged traffic from most traffic to least traffic:
| Company | Traffic (Feb 2012) | Comment |
| Exalead | 20,494 | Full court press method |
| Autonomy | 12,597 | Full court press method |
| Exorbyte | 11,486 | News releases |
| Hakia | 7,891 | News releases |
| Vivisimo | 7,324 | News releases |
| X1 | 5,589 | Web site |
| dtSearch | 5,208 | Free downloads |
| Connotate | 5,025 | News releases and analyst support |
| Recommind | 3,964 | News releases aimed at trade publications |
| Endeca | 3,900 | Analyst support |
| Funnelback | 2,640 | News releases and conference partici-pation |
| X1 Discovery | 2,575 | Web site |
| Coveo | 2,034 | Traditional PR |
| Dieselpoint | 1,880 | Web site |
| MarkLogic | 1,088 | Full court press method |
| Attensity | 974 | Conferences and news releases |
| Attivio | 973 | White papers |
| Brainware | 857 | News releases |
| Lexalytics | 710 | News releases |
| Easy Ask | 472 | News releases |
| Content Analyst | 321 | Some conference participation |
| BA Insight | 0 | Microsoft and webinars |
| Concept Searching | 0 | Webinars |
| Linguamatics | 0 | Web site |
| SearchBlox | 0 | Web site |
| Sinequa | 0 | Web site |
| ZyLAB | 0 | Full court press method |
Several observations:
- There is little correlation between having a Web site and traffic. If you build it, no one may come. Search engine optimization experts are not able to deliver the chunky granola bar stuffed with sales leads I surmise.
- Traffic, even for the leaders Exalead (Dassault Systèmes) and Autonomy (Hewlett Packard) is modest when compared to the traffic to the main Dassault and the HP main Web sites. Dassault’s traffic is reported as 56,164 and HP’s, 13,856,775. My thought is that search and content processing is not the home run some folks assume it will be. I don’t think effective search is a commodity. I think search is not hot as other fields; e.g., analytics.
- The different marketing methods in use work in some cases and in others not at all. A good example are those companies with Web site traffic so low that Compete.com reports zero traffic. The little known Exorbyte generates an alleged 11,486 while the marketing calisthenics of Webinar centric marketing (BA Insight and Concept Searching) and the open source approach (SearchBlox) yield little traffic. What happens when one marketing method doesn’t perform? Most vendors just try something else. When something works, vendors just keep doing it until it no longer works. Rinse, repeat.
More work needs to be done to figure out what generates traffic to a group of companies which appear to have modest traction even with the backing of major companies (e.g., Endeca is owned by Oracle). Some of these companies have expensive public relations programs in place. I don’t know how much firms such as MarkLogic and Recommind spend on the flow of news releases, special events, and trade publication by lined articles, but the traffic seems to be an issue.
My thought is that most of the vendors in the search and content processing space face what I would characterize as a “crisis” in marketing. None of the activities produce blockbuster traffic. Obviously, if a Web site has a single unique visitor and that visitor places a $20 million order, the Web site worked. My hunch is that some of these companies are going to kick into what I call “desperation marketing” mode. I see this when I get mindless faux “news” announcements from PR firms stuffed with failed middle school teachers, unemployed socialogy graduate students, and “real” journalists whose magazine or newspaper nuked itself.
“Desperation marketing” is the outcome of watching costs for each sales contact go up without a comparable increase in the close rate. If sales come only when there is cost cutting to win the job, then the financial situation becomes increasingly charged. Desperation marketing leads to rich search engine optimization consultants and white paper work for the “pay to play” consultants. (Yes, this is the coloring agent for the azure chip consulting herd.) Have you heard of webinar fatigue? I have it. How many SharePoint webinars do I need to sit in on to know that SharePoint is a complex and often irritable beastie? Webinar fatigue is what causes a potential attendee to sign up, listen for five minutes, and then move on to checking a Facebook page. Some companies would do better to put the thing on video and go with a YouTube channel with a “register to win a bagel” inducement on a special landing page.
Search and content processing vendors need more than hit-and-miss marketing activities. If I were responsible for a search and content processing company, I would be looking for different ways to generate visibility and sales leads.
A Web site alone won’t do the job. Traditional PR seems to work in some cases and does not work in others. The variable, of course, is the talent of the PR professional and the value proposition the company sets forth. Get the PR wrong or the message wrong, and PR becomes a hit and miss investment. SEO appeared to me to be part of each of these companies’ Web presence. I also have a tally of which of these companies make use of blogs and social media like Twitter, which I may summarize in another blog post. But the data suggest to me that social media is no panacea either. Traditional marketing and PR are expensive, unreliable, and an okay reaction to competitors’ actions.
Is there another path? We think there are some new methods. One interesting one is the Augmentext service. It is worth a quick look.
In the meantime, if you are trying to close deals using a Web site and some old fashioned methods, you may find yourself under increasing pressure. Replacing company presidents, hiring a Mad Ave agency, or signing on with a slick self appointed expert—these are standard methods. The issue becomes making them work in a tough economic and competitive environment.
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Recommind Creates Collaborative Email Solution
April 3, 2012
Smart Planet’s Heather Clancy recently reported on a new add-on for Microsoft Outlook in the article “What’s the Status? Tech Brings Project Filing Mentality to Email.”
According to the article, Recommind’s Decisive Email manages messages from a more collaborative perspective. It tags and analyzes messages based on their content and then stores them in folders that can be seen by members of teams once they are assigned access.
Clancy writes:
That’s what makes Decisiv email different from the rules that you can add to your individual email system. Those rules are focused mainly on the individual, while Decisiv’s predictive abilities work across all the members of the group — so that you can see all the related correspondence (related for example to a specific customer) regardless of whether or not you were copied on the email.
The only downfall of this current system is that it is only available through Microsoft Outlook, although Recommind is also looking into a smartphone and tablet integration. In regards to privacy, if you were concerned about coworkers viewing your email content before, you might as well forget about discretion now.
Jasmine Ashton, April 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Apple iPad Capability
April 3, 2012
SharePoint Server 2010 allows users to begin using Apple iPad devices to retrieve business intelligence content. Certain restrictions apply, but the functionality is introduced. The details are provided in, “Extra! Extra! Apple iPad Users Can Now View SharePoint Business Intelligence Content.”
“For SharePoint business intelligence users, CU 2011-12 for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is particularly exciting because it opens the door for people to get business intelligence content on Apple iPad devices. People can now view PerformancePoint reports and scorecards and Excel Services reports on iPad devices running the iOS 5 Safari browser. We just published an article on TechNet that provides more details about which kinds of reports and scorecards will and won’t work on your iPad, how to configure business intelligence content to display with best results, and how to navigate content on your iPad.”
As technology changes, becoming increasingly more mobile, there is no doubt that large infrastructures will have to catch up. However, it seems that SharePoint is a bit late to the mobile game. Third party solutions, like those from Fabasoft Mindbreeze, have entire solutions and connectors devoted to streamlining mobile capability.
Read more about Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile:
“Smartphones and tablets allow you to act quickly in business matters – an invaluable competitive advantage. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile makes company knowledge available on all mobile devices. You can act freely, independently and yet always securely. Irrespective of what format the data is in. Full functionality: Search results are displayed homogenously to the web client with regards to clear design and intuitive navigation.”
If your organization is moving more and more toward mobility, and SharePoint is having a hard time keeping up, consider adding a smart third-party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Mindbreeze can compliment an existing infrastructure or stand on its own.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Attivio Advertising and False Matches
April 3, 2012
I was looking for a free animated traffic light for our new, free taxonomy Overflight service. I navigated without logging into Google to www.gifs-paradise.com. Here’s a screen shot of what I saw on April 1, 2012. I do not think this is an April Fool joke, but I could be mistaken. I did not click on any of the Attivio ads, and I don’t think many Gig Paradise visitors did either. Is this an example of a false match or an indication that some ad dispersion is under way in order to generate clicks from Web sites whose visitors are not likely to want “unified information access” for the enterprise. You decide.
I do not think this is an example of “desperation marketing.” I think it is one small piece of information about the challenge a company faces when relying on intermediaries to get a message in front of a qualified buyer. How does one buy on a site offering free animated gifs? Here’s the tracking url: http://goo.gl/8k73W
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Getting More Out of a Solr Solution
April 3, 2012
Carsabi, a used car search engine, recently posted a write-up that provides readers with useful tips on how to make Solr run faster in “Optimizing Solr (or How to 7x Your Search Speed).”
According to the article, after experiencing problems with their current system, Carsabi switched to WebSolr’s Solr solution which worked until the website reached 1 million listings. In order to make the process work better, Carsabi expanded its hardware storage capacity. While this improved the speed a great deal, they still weren’t satisfied.
When explaining the way that Carsabi got the most of their software, the article states:
282ms is pretty good, but I wanted better – Solr was still responsible for over 50% of our user latency. Google was consulted with surprising results: even if you have just one server, you should still shard your workload. This struck me as odd. Surely Solr is multi-threaded, so why the difference? A quick look at top told me this wasn’t the case: Solr’s CPU usage never went above 100% (on one core) even though our server had 16 physical cores.
In the end the writer saw gains of up to 8 shards after making these changes. If you’re having trouble with a sluggish Solr this blog post may help.
Jasmine Ashton, April 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lousy Traffic? Buy Adwords
April 3, 2012
From the obvious department:
SEO is one hot buzzword, but more and more people are starting to realize that, what they thought was a web traffic miracle, is really just a quick fix that fails to deliver lasting results. In the recent Search Engine Land article, “Google Research: Even With a #1 Organic Ranking, Paid Ads Provide 50% Incremental Clicks,” one of the poobahs of SEO points out that now that SEO does not work as advertised, if you have a Web site, you have to buy Adwords.
According to the report, Google’s research on paid versus organic found that cutting out paid ads would result in an 89 percent drop in clicks, regardless of whether or not your site is the number one search result.
The article states:
Surprisingly, even when advertisers show up in the number one organic search result position, 50% of clicks they get on ads are not replaced by clicks on organic search results when the ads don’t appear. The study found that 82% of ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic result is ranked between 2 and 4, and 96% of clicks are incremental when the brand’s organic result was 5 or below.
Gee, what a surprise that Google finds that paying them boosts search rankings. Is this the purpose of a Panda invasion? We think so.
Jasmine Ashton, April 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Valueless: Craziness from TechCrunch
April 3, 2012
I woke up this morning to an email from a colleague in Madrid, Spain. The goose has been chillin’ due to some excitement here in rural Kentucky. My colleague wanted to know if I had read “Why Google Might Be Going to $0.” Yep, zero, bupkes, zip, zilch.
The write up focuses on a patent matter involving Google and Here’s the paragraph I noted:
Guess what? Google’s patent lawyer is Quinn-Emmanuel. They are defending Google. Oh, and here’s something funny. Guess who Yahoo’s lawyer is? Yahoo is suing Facebook for patent infringement in the search domain. Quinn-Emanuel. So the same lawyer is both defending and accusing in the same domain. Someone’s going to settle. Everyone will settle. If anyone loses this case then the entire industry is going down in the same lawsuit and the exact same lawyer will be stuck on both sides of the fence. I’m not a lawyer but that smells. The trial is October 16 in the Eastern District Court of Virginia and will last 2 weeks. An appeal process can take, at most, a year. I’ve known Ken for 23 years. I’ve been in the trenches with him when he was writing what I thought was his useless software. I watched his company get bought and we’ve talked about these technologies through the decades. I’ve read the patent case. I watched Hal Varian’s video. Also look at this link on Google’s site where they describe their algorithm. Compare with the patent claim. I have a screenshot if they decide to take it down. $67 billion in revenues from this patent. Imagine: double that in the next ten years. Imagine: triple damages.
The idea is that Google is at risk for multiples of its revenue. I am no attorney. I assume that Google’s settlement with Yahoo with regard to the alleged infringement of ad-related systems and methods was made in an informed manner.
Can a court fine Google in such a way that the company has zero value? Sure, anything is possible. Is it reasonable to believe that Google gets a negative ruling? Yep, that’s the excitement of the legal system in the US. Is Google heading for a big zero? Not likely. But the write up is definitely something that warrants publishing on the day before April Fool’s moment in the venture capital sun.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PLM in the Chinese Apparel Industry
April 3, 2012
Les Enphants, a manufacturer and distributor of children’s apparel, sportswear, and accessories that has approximately 4,000 employees and 1,888 retail outlets in China, has adopted a product lifecyle management (PLM) solution to reinforce its design imperatives and streamline its development chain in the wake of its recent market growth.
By selecting a PLM-based solution to maximize the increased demand for its products Les Enphants intends to bolster its competitive advantage and cost savings, ensure continuous improvement in its product quality, avoid developmental redundancy, streamline communication, accelerate production, and consequently offer broad-based support for its continued expansion within China. The company’s technology decision is further explained in “Lectra: Les Enphants Adopts Lectra Fashion PLM,” an announcement that recently appeared in Marketwire:
“Rising development costs meant refining product development and supply chain operations were as crucial for Les Enphants as reinforcing design. Given the company’s potential for expansion in the Chinese market, they decided to equip themselves with a product life cycle management solution that would support their growth for the next three to five years. The goal is to reengineer the Les Enphants process with Les Enphants’ long term development in mind.”
With the growing adoption of PLM internationally as a cost savings maneuver in a variety of industries, small providers such as Inforbix that offer cloud-based PLM products are poised to partner with diverse clients to develop customized and cost-effective data management solutions.
Tonya Weikel, April 3, 2012
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