Google Told it Must Pay Media Groups Throughout Europe
February 22, 2013
Recently, Google made the noteworthy offer to pay French publishers a hefty sum. Before that, the search giant reluctantly agreed to do the same for publishers in Belgium. Now, as suspected, the rest of Europe calls for similar treatment, we learn from “Google Must Extend Payments Across Europe for Use of Content.” The Reuters article quotes Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council:
“Search engines get more than 90 percent of revenues from online advertising and a substantial part of these come directly or indirectly from the free access to professional news or entertainment content produced by the media. The situation is very bad for media groups (in Europe). This use is carried out without the authorization from copyright holders or without any payment in return. So, all aggregators, like Google, should pay. Google’s openness to negotiate and talk looks like a good step that must now be followed in other (European) countries.”
Google will not like this idea, but it may not have much choice. The company agreed to pay 60 million euros into a special fund for French media companies, but maintains an important caveat: This money is not direct payment for linking to media sites. Instead, the fund is devoted to helping those companies develop their Web presences. We are afraid that such a distinction may not provide much of a shield against the threat of legal precedence, as Balsemao’s comments demonstrate.
Cynthia Murrell, February 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Twitter Redesigns Search Feature
February 22, 2013
Twitter’s blog post, “Search and Discover Improvements: Get More Great Content Faster,” describes updates to the service’s Android and iOS apps and to its mobile-tailored Web address . The primary change, as revealed by product management director Esteban Kozak, is the implementation of separate tabs with their own content streams.
There four of these distinct streams— Discover, Search, Connect, and Links. It is the first two that we find most interesting. The write-up specifies:
“Discover: Now all the content in Discover — Tweets, Activity, Trends and suggestions of accounts to follow — appears in a single stream, on both iPhone and Android. You can also dive into Activity and Trends from new previews at the top of the Discover tab.
“Search: Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet.”
Making search and discovery easier to find and use is a worthy goal, and usually fairly straightforward to implement. The quality of search results, it should be remembered, is another matter entirely. The post mentions that information on new developments can always be found within Twitter’s entries at the App Store and Google Play.
Cynthia Murrell, February 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Oracle Text Workaround for Stop Words List
February 22, 2013
We’ve come across a discussion about Oracle Text at StackOverflow, “Oracle Text Search Doesn’t Work on Some Words.” Essentially, some words cannot initially be indexed, and the fix is to go in and remove those words from the stop words list. Interesting.
The question-and-answer site for programmers received this query:
“I am using Oracle’ Text Search for my project. I created a ctxsys.context index on my column and inserted one entry ‘Would you like some wine???’. I executed the query ‘select guid, text, score(10) from triplet where contains (text, ‘Would’, 10) > 0′; it gave me no results. Querying ‘you’ and ‘some’ also return zero results. Only ‘like’ and ‘wine’ matches the record. Does Oracle consider you, would, some as stop words?? How can I let Oracle match these words? Thank you.”
The top response reveals:
“I found that the query’s output is perfect according to the stop word lists that is in the oracle.
those words can be found in the ctxsys package, and you could query for the stoplist and the stop words using “SELECT * FROM CTX_STOPLISTS; SELECT * FROM ctx_stopwords;” and yes, the oracle consider ‘you’, ‘would’ in your query as stop words.”
The solution—remove the offending stop words with the command, “GRANT EXECUTE ON CTXSYS.CTX_DDL to you” followed by the desired procedure. See the link for an example.
Cynthia Murrell, February 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bad News for Old Style Web Traffic
February 21, 2013
Who knows how universal the information in “Why No One Is Talking about Yahoo’s – or Anyone Else’s – New Homepage.” I find the idea that traditional Web traffic is changing quite interesting. Here’s the snippet I tucked into my traditional 4×6 inch note card box which I kept since my high school debating days:
Like other titans of another tech age, Yahoo is facing an existential threat against which it may be defenseless: People just don’t surf the web the way they used to. It is now the rule, rather than the exception, to share links over Facebook, Twitter and “dark social“ (e.g., email or text messages), which means that most people are arriving on pages buried deep within websites, and may never go near the homepage.
There are some interesting implications for search and retrieval. How does one get found? Good question. Answer: Augmentext.
Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2013
Release and Connect Information Locked in Enterprise Applications with Polyspot
February 21, 2013
Competitive advantage looms large for those companies that have already explored the market of big data solutions and have started to deploy these technologies designed to produce a ROI. A recent post from the Harvard Business Review asks companies whether or not they are currently armed with the tools and knowledge for success with their big data solutions. Big Data: Can You Seize the Opportunity? offers a video with information for companies looking to execute a big data initiative.
The video’s purpose is summarized in the blog post:
But Donald Marchand and Joe Peppardhave found that when Big Data and analytics projects are implemented like other major IT initiatives, they often fail to produce the results desired by executives. Their conclusion: these projects should be implemented differently from other IT projects and should be based on understanding how people create and use information. Ultimately, businesses need to focus on the business problem and choose the technology that best addresses that problem.
Some technological tools do not provide the necessary infrastructure to connect multiple silos of information locked up in various applications across the enterprise. There are tools that have been devoted to amassing a library of these connectors to deliver information such as PolySpot. We recommend looking into these types of big data solutions.
Megan Feil, February 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
Attivio Active Intelligence Announces Upgrade
February 21, 2013
Attivio is a leader in self-professed active intelligence. The new version 3.5 is expanding and bettering their ontology. Ontologies are more familiar to librarians, as a set of formalized categories, terms, and relationships. A bit like a thesaurus. Attivo tries to maximize the business impact of users information assets. A better ontology is no doubt going to help. MarketWatch offers the full story in, “Attivio Active Intelligence Engine 3.5 Adds Advanced Ontology Module and Event-Driven Visualization.”
The article begins:
“Version 3.5 features a new Ontology Module and event-driven visualization capabilities that let analysts immediately understand what’s happening on large, multi-node systems. Additional enhancements include expanded SQL support and automatic generation of thumbnail and preview images to help customers more rapidly view and retrieve critical information.”
Attivio offers one solution to enterprise search. LucidWorks offers another. For those who are shopping around, LucidWorks is a tested and trusted solution, relying on the power of Apache Lucene and Solr. There are lots of good enterprise solutions that depend on open source technology. LucidWorks just happens to be the one that offers the most dependability and best support options. Check out their commercial support offerings as well.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
If Oracle RightNow Saved a Salesman
February 21, 2013
If only he had had access to Oracle’s RightNow, Willy Loman’s story might have ended differently. Is that what Greg Sirbu is trying to say when he evokes Arthur Miller’s 1949 opus Death of a Salesman? The literary allusion frames a fictional conversation in Perficient’s blog post, “When? Now? Yes! RightNow! You’ll Find it in the Cloud. . . .”
Sirbu recasts Miller’s scene between the ill-fated Loman and his employer, Howard Wagner, as a modern-day conversation. This time, though, the Salesman is able to suggest their company (Widget, Inc.) adopt RightNow, Oracle‘s cloud-based customer experience platform. His pitch sounds a lot like Oracle’s promotional material, explaining the software’s features. The blog’s creator, Perficient, is eventually brought into the hypothetical dialogue:
“That sounds very complex Loman,” Howard said. “Our information technology staff is busy with many other projects, they may not have the time right now to bring what sounds like a great solution up-to-speed in a timely fashion.’
“Howard, we don’t need to worry about that,” Loman said. “Oracle has a solution implementation partner, Perficient, that can bring all the necessary consulting resources to bear to ensure that RightNow is structured just the way we need it built for our business.”
“Sounds like we need to explore RightNow, right now!” Wagner said.
Of course he did. Such a turn of events would have ruined Miller’s play, but that’s beside the point, I suppose. It is an interesting tactic; will enough readers recognize the name “Willy Loman” to make this an effective device?
Formed in 1998, Perficient offers their clients a competitive edge with a variety of Internet-based business technologies. With offices around the world, the company maintains its headquarters in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Cynthia Murrell, February 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Oracle Endeca
February 21, 2013
It appears that Oracle is effectively marketing its search acquisition, Endeca. The company’s blog posts a piece on its business intelligence features in, “Transforming Workforce Management with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery.” Meanwhile, the Quest 4 ATG blog shares some migration tips for the commerce platform in its piece, “Stepping into Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.1.”
Oracle’s BI post asserts that Human Resources is where the action is for companies right now, but that the challenges of accessing unstructured data can stand in the way of making the best decisions in that area. Their Endeca Information Discovery, they say, can help by:
- Understanding the voice and sentiment of the workforce. By providing the ability to use natural-language queries to derive insights from information from all sources, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provides insight into the effectiveness of strategic and tactical HR decisions. . . .
- Identifying the root causes behind events and exceptions. . . . HR organizations are empowered to determine the reasons why things happen and respond to findings without direct IT involvement, saving time and cost.
- Supercharging existing business analytics investments. With the unscripted exploration of workforce data and full-featured search, navigation & interactive analytics, HR organizations can leverage, improve, and extend existing investments in workforce analytics and HCM applications.
The post at Quest 4 ATG is more of a practical matter. It documents that blogger’s migrations from Endeca Commerce version 3.1.0 to version 3.1.1. Clearly described in outline form, with illustrations, these instructions are good to note (and bookmark) if you, too, need to migrate.
Cynthia Murrell, February 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Acquires Channel Intelligence
February 21, 2013
We thought search was Google Plus. Now Google is morphing into a tracking outfit? Business Insider reveals that the search giant has snapped up a sales-tracking business in, “Google Spends $125 Million on Channel Intelligence to Improve Google Shopping.”
Writer Jay Yarrow reports that Channel Intelligence (CI) provides solutions that boost online traffic for retailers of products in many categories. The company’s blog speaks of working with Google’s shopping division. Yarrow believes he knows why Google made this move:
“One of the looming threats for Google is the continued strength of Amazon. When people want to buy stuff online, they will skip Google and head straight to Amazon. Inside Amazon they will search, and then buy stuff.
“Google’s business is built around people searching on Google for things to buy. That’s the most valuable search from a commercial perspective. Google is trying to improve its shopping services to combat users tendency to go straight to Amazon.
“We assume CI will be a part of improving shopping so that when people search on Google for products it will list better, more relevant results for users.”
Probably a good guess. But will it help, or is the Amazon habit already too entrenched?
Yarrow includes the press release from the tracking firm’s parent company, ICG, in his article. Channel Intelligence is headquartered in Orlando, Florida. Just a few of its many prominent clients include Target, Microsoft, and General Electric.
Cynthia Murrell, February 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Information At Work Collects Data But Delivers Insights
February 20, 2013
Industries from education to business to politics and even government are using big data to inform decisions and to achieve efficiency and transparency. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a news story on the OECD Observer from Martine Durand, Director, OECD Directorate of Statistics recently called, “Can Big Data Deliver On It’s Promise?”
Revealing statistics were shared in this article. For example, according to the UN Global Pulse, more data was created in 2011 than in the whole of human history.
The article states:
International organisations are getting involved too, the creation of UN Global Pulse being a case in point. The OECD has also been harnessing the potential of big data. Collecting statistics and understanding trends are the daily bread of our organisation, and we have built innovative, interactive tools to draw in more and better information from the public. This, in turn, feeds into improving the policy recommendations we give to governments.
The enterprise is an area where we see a huge potential for efficiency to be increased. Tools like Information at Work from PolySpot provide the cross function infrastructure that companies need to collect and deliver information in real time.
Megan Feil, February 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
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