Google and Enterprise Search: The Eichner Vision
June 7, 2012
Google has a new head of enterprise search, Matt Eichner, Yale, Harvard, and Endeca. Computerworld UK ran an interesting article on on June 5, 2012 by Derek du Preez. “Matt Eichner: Bringing Google.com to the Enterprise” walks through what appears to be the game plan for the enterprise search unit for the next three or four months, maybe longer if Google generates more traction than it has in the previous year or two.
The article reports that Google “commands over 90 percent of the UK’s online search market.” Mr. Eichner allegedly said:
If you look at Google in the search space, we are taking that consumer expectation that we developed on Google.com and packaged both the user interface and the algorithms behind it into an enterprise appliance.
The GSA as the Google Search Appliance is presented has been available for about a decade. Based on chatter at conferences and opinions floated by assorted search experts, Google has placed upwards of 55,000 GSAs in organizations worldwide. Autonomy, by contrast, is alleged to have about 20,000 licensees of its search and content processing systems. Microsoft SharePoint, which includes a search system, is rumored to have more than 100 million licenses. It is difficult to know which enterprise search vendor has the most customers. The numbers are not audited, and each vendor in the enterprise search market tiptoes around how customers many customers are signed up, how many customers are paying their bills, how many customers are dropping licenses, and how much revenue flows to the vendor from enterprise search service and support. In short, it may be difficult to know how big any one vendor’s share of the enterprise search market is or if there is even a market for enterprise search in today’s mash up and fluid business environment.
A block diagram showing a GSA in an enterprise installation. Note the presence of “OneBox” units. Authorized Google partners may be needed to get this type of implementation up and running. If this is accurate, then Mr. Eichner’s assertion about an “out of the box” solution may require some fine tuning. Image source: DevX at http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/33372/1954
Google believes there is a market, however.
The pointy end of the spear for Google is its search appliance. The idea is that a customer can order an appliance and get it up and running quickly. The GSA can scale by plugging in more GSAs. The GSA understands “enterprise context”.
According to Computerworld’s write up, Mr. Eichner asserted:
At Google we have billions of queries from Google.com coming in every day that we are able to analyze and deliver an enterprise tool that balances human behavior and search relevance.
Google’s enterprise services are cognizant of big data, which most vendors suggest can be managed by their search system. Google is no exception. Mr. Eichner, according to Computerworld, observed:
Big data is in the eye of the beholder. If I gave you 500,000 documents, which doesn’t sound like a lot, and I said to you find something in there – you would look at me and say, ‘can I use a search engine?’ From your perspective, 500,000 would be big data. We often lose sight of that. Insight needs to be delivered when you have more data than you can process. This can come in the form of 500,000 documents or hundreds of millions of documents. The real mandate in the world today is to get up the competitive stack by being more knowledgeable about what you are doing more quickly – that’s the nature of the information economy. The imperative is to get better at assimilating the knowledge you have and acting on it. The inverse of this is if you have big data and you don’t have insight. That’s the equivalent of saying ‘I’ll take a guess, I won’t use the information and I’ll take a guess.”’
Facebook and Search: A New Google Rival
June 7, 2012
Facebook is making plans to improve its search engine so users can more easily find shared or liked content. The current flawed search system needs a revamp, but a new survey reveals that almost half of respondents disliked the idea of Facebook launching its own search engine.
The article, “A Facebook Search Engine to Rival Google? Users Dislike That Idea,” tells us that even though Facebook could potentially capture 22 percent of the global search market, but the public isn’t exactly receptive at the moment. Forty-eight percent of respondents to the recent survey by Greenlight spoke up and said they would not, or probably would not, be interested in a Facebook search engine.
“Still, Greenlight says if Facebook launches its own search engine, it could potentially grab 22 percent of the global search market share and become the second most used search engine in every major market except for China, Japan, and Russia, where it would rank third.
‘It wouldn’t need to be a spectacular engine either, just well integrated into the Facebook experience and generally competent,’ said Greenlight Chief Operating Officer Andreas Pouros.”
However, Facebook isn’t currently interested in crawling and indexing the entire web. The company just wants content on the site that is shared by users to be more easily accessible. Regardless, Google’s 66.5 percent market share in the U.S. is quite intimidating and possibly the reason behind Facebook’s reluctance to join in the search engine war.
Andrea Hayden, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Final Considerations During a SharePoint Deployment Project
June 7, 2012
Robert Schifreen spent around eight months deploying and chronicling a SharePoint implementation project. In the twelfth and final installment of his SharePoint 2010 series, “SharePoint Deployment: The Final Chapter,” Schifreen highlights final configurations and the unavoidable prospect of going live. Schifreen summarizes the experience:
So where are we now? My two-server test farm is long since gone, and is now a proper six-server, three-tier farm that’s almost working the way we want. After that, and some user testing, duplicating my efforts on the production farm should be relatively straightforward. Then it’s a case of migrating users’ data from our existing network shares, at which point we can begin to roll out a working SharePoint environment for all our staff.
Longer term, we have great plans for what we hope will become a core strategic service for all staff and students. We’ll be looking for SharePoint development skills within the next year or two, as we begin to create a true intranet and portal that means our users have just a single point of entry into all our systems. Our intranet will evolve from a document collection into a proper intranet/portal.
Schifreen adds this comment about user challenges:
We’re conscious that the biggest complaint from users about our existing intranet and document repositories is that people can’t find what they’re looking for, so conversations these days include “taxonomy” or “managed metadata” in every sentence. Frequently both.
Schifreen’s series may be a valuable one to follow if you’ve been involved with a SharePoint implementation and deployment project. We also know that user complaints about search in SharePoint are not isolated to the deployment stage. Gaps in the out-of-the-box SharePoint search feature have many users turning to a third party solution. We like the feedback we’ve seen about Fabasoft Mindbreeze. With clear navigation and a self-explanatory interface, Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise facilitates findability.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related. The software solution finds all required information, regardless of source, for its users. Get a comprehensive overview of corporate knowledge in seconds without redundancy or loss of data.
While discussion about SharePoint user-adoption seems to be a constant among the community, Mindbreeze can save employees time by connecting them to the right information now via a user-friendly interface. Navigate to http://www.mindbreeze.com/ to read more.
Philip West, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
How are Videos Findable in the Sea of Scenes?
June 7, 2012
With increasing downloads on YouTube, it seems the emphasis should be on find ability instead of prescreening objectionable material. The article YouTube Uploads Hit 72 Hours A Minute: How Can That Ever Be Pre-Screened For ‘Objectionable’ Material?, discusses the increased difficulty of prescreening the videos; however an efficient search engine could resolve both issues.
Proper use of analytics or intuitive prediction, YouTube estimated their 72 hours of downloads per minute earlier this year stating:
“We average 60 hours of video being downloaded every minute, with an increase of more than 25 percent in the last eight months.
“This year, a 25% increase will probably take around around six months. In other words, the rate at which uploads occur is accelerating. Presumably at some point things will level off, but there’s no sign of that yet, and it’s not hard to see YouTube video uploads hitting 120 hours a minute or more.”
Locating these videos once they start swimming in the sea of scenes will depend widely on search optimization. YouTube utilizes search engine spiders, which locate by text, not images. Thus it falls into the hands of the films owner to amplify the ease of access using key words or phrases like a website or user name. The more descriptive providers are, the more easily accessible their videos. Proper research and use of SEO content can increase video find ability.
Jennifer Shockley, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Siemens Keeps Up with Innovation
June 7, 2012
Many industries rely on product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to streamline processes, save unnecessary waste, and connect departments as items begin in research and development and make their way through the manufacturing process. Since PLM solutions are not easy nor are they inexpensive many within the PLM community are realizing that add-ons must be created to introduce the latest technological advancements. Siemens has done so with their Active Workspace, designed to work cooperatively with their PLM platform according to the article, “Siemens Steps Up Search & 3D Data Sharing”, on Design News.
The article explains the decision to create the program as:
“The idea for Active Workspace was spawned from the fact that there is increasing complexity surrounding product development across the board and across industry segments. The other reality is that no one PLM system holds all product-related data, meaning that development teams are often moving between siloed systems and data sources, with no real guidelines or roadmap to where the data they need to effectively make decisions resides.”
There is no PLM solution that can anticipate all of the problems a company may encounter during the next decade (the average lifespan of a PLM solution). There is also not a platform that can anticipate innovations in technology. These realities combined make it necessary for all PLM solutions adopted across industries to be flexible and able to easily incorporate new features such as Active Workspace.
Catherine Lamsfuss, June 7, 2012
Is the Google Search Appliance Making a Comeback?
June 7, 2012
Lately, we haven’t been hearing much about Googles Search Appliance. The recent headline, Marval O’Farrell & Mairal Selects Persistent Systems for Enterprise Google Search Appliance Solution announced a bit of news regarding GSA.
Emilio Feliu, CIO of Marval O’Farrell & Mairal stated:
“We’ve been using the OpenText eDocs DMS to manage all our business information documents and records. As a leading law firm, security of data and timely access to information is critical to our business. It’s our company policy to invest in leading-edge information technology and selecting Persistent Systems for its expertise in providing GSA connectors was definitely the right choice in helping us with deploying GSA as our enterprise search platform. The eDocs Connector works great and provides us with timely access to information without us having to worry about information security.”
Persistent Systems is a global company that specializes in software products and technology innovation. They have been a Google enterprise partner since around 2005. Google’s Search Appliance Solution’s (GSA) offer tools that help companies to overcome the challenge of accessing information within its enterprise in order to save time and money. Google offers users easy-to-deploy solutions which will provide their companies with a customizable high search relevancy, performance scaling and third-party content integration.
We were starting to wonder when we’d hear some good news for Google. Now GSA is getting some positive business reviews via their partnership with Persistent. Though we don’t hear much about Google’s Search Appliance, maybe that is about to change. Is it possible that Persistant is helping Google is make a comeback?
Jennifer Shockley, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Google to Change Android Tactics
June 7, 2012
We thought Google had its Android carnival under tight management, but we guess changes are needed since, according to ZDNet, “Google to Centralize Android Development and Sales.” There are several reasons the move is a good idea, but fragmentation and a loss of control to vendors are probably foremost; the hardware vendors Google partners with tend to impose non-removable skins on top of Android that can hamper or, worse, change functionality. Now is that any way for partners to treat each other? Furthermore, these altered versions are often based on an outdated Android version, which further confuses and frustrates customers.
So, just how is the company planning to reign in its wayward offspring? Not all details are in, but the article informs us:
“Wall Street Journal reporter, Amir Efrati reports that ‘Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter.’ In the past, Google would pick a single vendor to introduce major Android updates in lead devices, and then all the other vendors would follow. These devices were then, as now, sold to end-users through wireless carriers or retail outlets.
“By the holiday season though, there were be as many as five manufacturers creating a portfolio of ‘Nexus’ lead devices that include smartphones and tablets. While the old sales channels will still be there, Google will sell the gadgets directly to consumers in the U.S., Europe and Asia via its website. These will run on be running Google’s next version of Android, Jelly Bean.”
As a consumer, I’m in favor of this plan. We don’t yet know just who these “multiple” manufacturers are, though writer Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols suspects Motorola (of course), ASUS, HTC, Samsung, and Sony will make the list. He also posits that the consolidation may be, in part, an effort to present a united front against Apple’s intellectual property hullabaloo.
Cynthia Murrell, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Did Google Rat on Microsoft?
June 7, 2012
The class clown gets lots of attention but will occasionally ‘shift the blame’ to someone else, much like Google recently did with Microsoft. There’s trouble on the playground according to New Google data shows Microsoft’s piracy problems, and Google just became the science class rat.
There is a software fair with Google’s experiment themed Microsoft copyright woes, added visual effect being the release of a snapshot. Their purpose, to help others understand intellectual property abuses on the Internet. Google may even be considered a field expert due to repeated violations and loop-hole theory research.
Apparently Google’s been avoiding the crowd of Microsoft complaints because:
“The report provides a breakdown on all requests Google has received since July 2011 to remove copyright-infringing content from its search index. There were more than 2.5 million requests to remove links believed to be violating Microsoft’s copyrights.”
“Google’s Internet search engine receives more complaints about websites believed to be infringing on Microsoft’s copyrights than it does about material produced by entertainment companies pushing for tougher laws against online piracy.”
The details are being kept hush hush, but tattle tells aren’t usually good at keeping secrets… unless it’s their own. Seriously though… Google rats on Microsoft? Real nice guys, maybe more like grade school antics? Let’s hope for the sake of IP owners everywhere that all kids eventually grow up.
Jennifer Shockley, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
SearchBlox 7.0 Available
June 7, 2012
SearchBlox’s blog invites us to “Compare SearchBlox7.0 vs. Solr.” Okay, so I am to compare. I wonder how? There is no side-by-side comparison set up here nor is there any link to one. Hmm. . . I guess I am expected to do the legwork.
Misleading headline aside, the write up does thoroughly describe SearchBlox new version 7.0 in relation to rival Solr. It reads:
“SearchBlox 7 is a (free) enterprise solution for website, ecommerce, intranet and portal search. The new 7.0 version makes it easy to add faceted search without the hassles of managing a schema and scales horizontally without any manual configuration or external software/scripts. SearchBlox enables you to achieve term, range and date based faceted search without manually maintaining a schema file as in Solr. SearchBlox enables to have distributed indexing and searching abilities without using any separate scripts/programs as in SolrCloud. SearchBlox provides on demand dynamic faceting of fields without specifying them through a config or script.”
The software also sports a Web-based administrator’s console. Unlike Solr, SearchBlox indexes custom meta fields without the need to specify custom fields or setup within the schema.xml file. It also supports: multiple indexes out of the box; indexing of custom content and multiple content types; and the specification of facets at runtime (as opposed to requiring a prior definition). Another nifty feature lets you add or remove SearchBlox servers from a cluster without the need to restart or stop the servers.
Perhaps SearchBlox 7.0 outpaces Solr in these metrics because it is built on top of that Apache product. SearchBlox Software was founded in 2003 and is based in Richmond, VA.
Cynthia Murrell, June 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
New Exclusive Interview: Bjorn Laukli, Comperio US
June 6, 2012
At a recent conference devoted to enterprise search, I spoke with Bjørn Laukli, now the president of Comperio US. Mr. Laukli was the Fast Search & Transfer chief technical officer. Prior to Fast Search’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2008, Mr. Laukli joined Comperio AS, a search solutions company. For more information about Comperio, navigate to the company’s Web site, www.comperiosearch.com. If you mistype the url as comperio.com, Google displays a malware warning, which does not apply to Comperio AS.
I asked Mr. Laukli about Comperio’s business focus. He told me:
We founded Comperio AS in 2004 with a vision of utilizing search technology to improve the way people interact with information, ensuring that the solutions understand people and context, rather than the other way round. Early on, Scandinavia was Comperio’s focus area, however, since 2008, it has expanded into the US and UK. Initially, the business was building a practice around the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) with both products and services. Since Microsoft acquired FAST, Comperio’s business focus has expanded into SharePoint and FAST Search for SharePoint.
A company’s approach to client engagements is key to the success of an engineering services firm. In response to the question, “How do you lead a client through a solution?”, Mr. Laukli said:
After an engagement agreement has been established, we typically enter the discovery phase. Often we follow an agile methodology like Scrum, and in such a setting we refer this phase to Sprint 0. In Sprint 0, we gather requirements and talk with the stakeholders from the client. This includes business and IT resources, as well as end users of the system. Sprint 0 consists of many activities from analysis, to concept development, interaction and technology design. The output of this initial phase is normally a detailed project plan outlining key deliverables and dependencies. A system design is also outlined and communicated. After sign-off on the project plan, we start the implementation. After the solution is deployed, it enters the maintenance phase. Comperio offers application management service (AMS) which in many cases is a great option for the client. That way they can focus on their core business, while we can ensure that their system produce high-quality results all the time.
You can read the full text of the interview with Mr. Laukli on the ArnoldIT.com subsite Search Wizards Speak. For one click access to the 2009 interview with Mr. Laukli, click here. For the 2012 interview, click here.
The Search Wizards Speak collection of interviews contains more than 70 interviews with individuals who are involved in search and content processing. The index of the interviews is available at the subsite http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/.
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
