Former Google Exec Reveals Why He Jumped Ship
April 4, 2013
Ex-Googler James Whittaker takes us behind the scenes at his former company in “Why I Left Google” on his blog, JW on Tech. The prominent tech executive, who has moved on to Microsoft, was so often asked why he transitioned that he was compelled to write up this account for the masses. Whittaker is quick to point out that his story is no tabloid-worthy dirt fest, but rather the tale of a changing corporate culture.
The article describes Google under Eric Schmidt as a place where innovation was heartily encouraged, while the advertisements that powered it lurked in the background for all but those in the ad department. This was the culture that produced such wildly successful gems as Gmail and Chrome. Whittaker compares the approach to that of good television shows, which earn their ad revenue by supplying quality content.
The creative heyday was not to last, and Whittaker hangs the shift squarely on competition with rival Facebook. After seeing how enticing that site’s cache of user data was proving to be to advertisers, and how far ahead Facebook was pulling in the marketing game, Google quickly changed its focus. The story relates:
“Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.
“Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the ‘old Google’ and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a ‘new Google’ that promised ‘more wood behind fewer arrows.’
“The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.”
Whittaker hung in for a while, serving as the development director for Google+. Eventually, though, as Google+ failed to attract converts from Facebook, he lost all faith in the company’s new direction. He came to believe that the old, innovative Google was lost, and that it was time to move on.
Will Google ever regain that intrepid spirit, or is that heady time gone forever?
Cynthia Murrell, April 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Has the Web Become a Dead End?
April 3, 2013
I have been less and less enchanted with the Web as a mechanism for years. Good luck with some of the cloud computing services. Good luck with some of the hosted big data processing services. Good luck with hosted search.
Latency is often my companion.
I read “Our Regressive Web” and learned:
An entrepreneur friend of mine remarked to me recently that if someone invented the nightly news today—or a show like Brian Williams’ “Rock Center”—we’d all think it was a great idea. Think about it: Instead of having to follow all these different news sources, you could just tune in, get a digest of all the important stuff that happened, and you could trust that it had been verified, that it was balanced and high-quality, and would all be well-produced. It struck me, as I tried to wrap my head around the demise of Google Reader and Google’s inexplicable de-emphasis of Google Alerts, how both those ideas—Reader and Alerts—fit the same criteria.
The end of a push service is no big deal. I survived the death of PointCast and Backweb. I even worked through the shift from Desktop Data’s push to an alert type service which was free and less hostile to my in box.
But finding information is getting harder in my opinion. This passage resonated with me:
Yet here we sit, both of those awesome services essentially shuttered in the last year, primed for the scrap heap of Internet history. Then there’s Delicious—a similar idea that allows you to organize your links by categories and see what other people thought were valuable—which has not been shut down, per se, just slowly maimed beyond recognition, its loyal users driven away. And for what reason? Nothing better has risen up to replace them. The underlying needs of a fairly large user base (that these services meet) still exist. We’re just regressing. It’s the one thing I find most disheartening and perhaps most frustrating about this trend. It’s something that needs to be heard, particularly by the people who wrote off these services as Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 relics—the type who said, “Well, nobody used RSS, so good riddance.” The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.
Regressing? I don’t think the word is strong enough. The Web for many applications is almost unusable. Disagree? Use the comments section of the blog and feel free to insert links to unusable search and content processing services. Azure chip consultants need not participate.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
GIF Images Get Easy Button Thanks to Google
April 3, 2013
Is there anything Google isn’t affiliated with these days? I didn’t think so. Wired reports in its article on “Google Image Search: Now With More GIF Action” that information powerhouse is now turning its sights on graphics interchange format(GIF).
“On Tuesday, Google announced via Google+ that Image Search now has an “Animated” filter. That means that if you’re only searching for animated magic, you need never be bothered with a still image again. Finally that search for Jennifer Lawrence GIFs from the Academy Awards just got a whole lot easier.”
GIF’s have been around since 1987 and have become the go to for short animations on the Web . The feature is still being worked out but for now when you search an image in Google Images, you can select the drop down menu in the Search Tools category and simply click on animations.
It doesn’t seem like a significant change to the Google lineup but it does have a consumer first approach to the addition. If Google is the only place you can filter your content to find the exact information you want, well, Google then becomes the go-to.
Leslie Radcliff, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
YouTube Reaches Massive Milestone in Entertainment
April 3, 2013
It’s official; YouTube is one of the world’s most prolific Internet web sites to date. What started out as a small test case by Google has blossomed into a platform for budding musicians, artists, filmmakers, comedians, cats and much more.
On March 20, the company announced that YouTube is now a billion strong. According to “YouTube Hits a Billion Monthly Users” the site now boasts a billion unique users each month. So what’s next for the growing platform?
“In the last eight years you’ve come to YouTube to watch, share and fall in love with videos from all over the world. Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice: all of the Ad Age Top 100 brands are now running campaigns on YouTube. And today, we’re announcing a new milestone: YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month”
Advertisers were right to stand up and pay attention. Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visit YouTube and monthly viewership is equal to around 10 Super Bowl audiences. One really ridiculous fact is, if YouTube were a country, it would be the third largest in the world behind India and China.
That is a lot of viewers. It seems like Google and YouTube may be giving television a run for its money soon. How big can Google’s rich media operation big? Answer: Really big.
Leslie Radcliff, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
BA Insight: More Funding in a Tough Market
April 3, 2013
Some of the search and content processing companies are feeling the economic squeeze. BA Insight, based in New York, does not have this problem. I learned this morning that BA Insight closed a $4.5 million round of funding. The news release sent to me by Big Swing said:
BA Insight’s advanced search technology redefines how people access siloed information and collaborate. Organizations are increasingly dealing with rapidly growing volumes of structured and unstructured data, the inability to integrate information from legacy systems, and the move of many organizational systems to the cloud. As a result they often lack insight into critical business information. BA Insight enables enterprises to bring this information together for users, giving them actionable insights into customers, products, projects, expertise and more.
The key point that jumped out at me was this statement:
“Enterprise search is broken,” said Philip Eliot, Principal at Paladin Capital Group, “and BA Insight is unique in its ability to deliver useful information to the enterprise regardless of where, when and how they need it. Their solutions revolutionize information access.” “Our continued investment in BA Insight reflects our confidence in the ability of BA Insight’s platform to transform search into a powerful weapon for the enterprise,” said Todd Pietri, co-founder and General Partner of Milestone Venture Partners. “BA Insight delivers tools that enable organizations to leverage their investments in existing solutions and expose data in an actionable, relevant way.”
Wroth monitoring.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Update: Apology to Ventana Research
April 3, 2013
An update on Ventana. We have no reservations about recommending Ventana and its team for research projects.
The draft story “Big Claims of Analytics Progress” written by Cynthia Murrell was inadvertently published. The write up took the angle that Ventana’s research raised some questions. The wrongly published draft ran on March 29, 2013, was inadvertently posted by me. After doing some checking into this unfortunate matter, I learned that indeed I hit the incorrect button in the WordPress interface.
As a result, a draft story ran as a “ready for publication” story. I certainly do not and did not want to question the professionalism of Ventana and its consulting team.
The article in question was deleted in a routine check of posted write ups, but the links to the story are in various indexes. You may have seen a reference to the story at this link: http://news.silobreaker.com/big-claims-of-analytics-progress-5_2266711671936385024
When I checked a few moments (8 30 am Eastern) ago, the Silobreaker story was reported “not found.” There was another link to the story at http://www.i4u.com/2013/03/facebook/progress-analytics-big-claims and the story points to another 404 page.
My experience is that when a Beyond Search link goes dark, some indexes drop the link to the source.
So, I am sorry I hit the wrong button, sending a story to the publication queue and not to the “draft” queue for further revision. I apologized yesterday in this story http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2013/04/02/ventana-benchmark-research-a-mistake-and-a-correction/ and I have been asked to make clear that I made the error myself.
To be crystal clear, I am sorry that I made the mistake.
If anyone reading Beyond Search wishes to comment or offer additional inputs, please, use the Comments section of the blog.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext.com
Medical Search Engine Identifies Rare Diseases
April 3, 2013
Specialized search engines are often used to located subject-specific professional or academic information in databases. Certain professions are used to shying away from the open web for fear of retrieving poor quality information. However, a new project is proving that quality medical information can be retrieved from the open web. Read more about FindZebra.com in the article, “New Medical Search Engine Quickly IDs Rare Diseases.”
The article states:
“In medical school, students are taught to concentrate on more common diseases, not ‘zebras’–slang for a surprising diagnosis. Now, the zebras have taken to the web at FindZebra.com, a new search engine for medical professionals which navigates the web quickly to identify rare and genetic diseases. Researchers . . . sought out to assess how well web search engines, such as Google, work for diagnostic queries, and what contributes to web research success or failure. The results determined that FindZebra outperformed Google Search. The authors concluded that a specialized search engine can improve online diagnostic quality without a loss of ease of use that popular search engines possess.”
It seems that quality results can be retrieved easily. This is the ultimate aim of search, quick, effective, and easy. LucidWorks aims to achieve the same goal in the much more difficult environment of enterprise search. Their expertise combines solid open source infrastructure, built on Lucene/Solr, with award winning customer support.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Simon Cowell Debuts Latest Competition on YouTube
April 3, 2013
As the lines between “television” shows and Internet content continue to blur, we see evidence of rapid consumerization of Google through its property, YouTube. Perhaps mogul Simon Cowell’s involvement was inevitable; SlashGear announces, “Simon Cowell to Launch Next Competition on YouTube.”
The new competition, called unsurprisingly “The You Generation,” will be judged by executives from Cowell’s production house, Syco, accompanied by a rotation of featured celebrities. Hopefuls enter by uploading their audition videos, and a new finalist will be announced every two weeks. Interesting.
Writer Brian Sin notes a few more new initiatives from YouTube:
“Alongside the launch of Cowell’s new competition program, YouTube will be launching a series of other new series. Ricky Gervais will be launching a series of ‘brand new personalities, sketches and comedy creations’ through his YouTube Channel. Reddit has started a new series called ‘Explain Like I’m Five‘ which breaks down complicated topics into an explanation that is understandable by even (and literally) five year olds. These are important steps that YouTube is taking in order to make itself a viable alternative to regular television.”
Yes, but will it work? We have seen from watching the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and HBO that the world of online entertainment is much more complicated than it should be, not because of technical limitations, but due to squabbles over rights and profits. Will original programming allow YouTube to sidestep that tumult?
Cynthia Murrell, April 03, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Specialized Search Engine Helps Diagnose Rare Diseases
April 3, 2013
A recent piece from the MIT Technology Review that examines “The Rare Disease Search Engine That Outperforms Google” compares apples with oranges. The real takeaway is much bigger than a swipe at Google—that technical innovation is being used to help humanity.
Rare diseases are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and medical professionals have been using an Internet search engine, usually Google, to help with the process for years. Of course, Google was not designed for that use, so researchers have created a tailor-made engine to streamline this difficult but essential task. The article informs us:
“Radu Dragusin at the Technical University of Denmark and a few pals unveil an alternative. These guys have set up a bespoke search engine dedicated to the diagnosis of rare diseases called FindZebra, a name based on the common medical slang [“zebra”]for a rare disease. After comparing the results from this engine against the same searches on Google, they show that it is significantly better at returning relevant results.”
Is this supposed to be a surprise? Google does ads, not rare diseases. Ah well, the important thing is that doctors have a powerful new tool to help folks with diseases that stoutly defy accurate identification. How did the team from the Technical University of Denmark do it? The write-up goes on to say:
“The magic sauce in FindZebra is the index it uses to hunt for results. These guys have created this index by crawling a specially selected set of curated databases on rare diseases. . . . They then use the open source information retrieval tool Indri to search this index via a website with a conventional search engine interface. The result is FindZebra.”
Though the zebra engine is still an in-progress research project, the team has made it publically available at www.findzebra.com. Medical professionals can already use the innovation to help patients who might otherwise be doomed to years of painful frustration. Hooray, progress!
Cynthia Murrell, April 03, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Predictive Analysis Research in the UK
April 3, 2013
The field of predictive analysis is proceeding apace, we learn from Science Daily‘s “Predictive Analysis: New Generation of Computational Intelligence Systems.” Predictive analysis, as the name suggests, is the art/science of making predictions (about the past, present, or future) from heaps of data. This article looks at progress being made at the Smart Technology Research Centre, a part of Bournemouth University in Dorset, U.K. The article explains that the researchers:
“. . . are developing computer programs capable of learning. With this intelligent software, computers can make judgments about the quality and reliability of the data they gather. They look for patterns and adapt according to what the information will be used for.”
That would be the work of an “adaptive algorithm” that effectively learns as it encounters data. The Centre has already put some of its findings to work helping companies in tourism and communications, but are looking to build a more general-use system. The write-up relates:
“Building a learning computer system capable of adapting according to the information that is fed into it is no easy task. Most prediction software until recently has been tailor made to solve specific problems. This can make them expensive to maintain and hard to adapt.
“For this, Professor Gabrys and his team have turned to one of the most successful problem solvers on the planet for inspiration — Mother Nature herself. They are building systems which process information in a similar way to the human brain, with its networks of neurons that constantly rewire themselves as we learn.”
Other natural inspirations include genetics and certain animal behaviors, like those of social insects (think ants and bees) or of flocking and swarming creatures (birds and fish.) However, Professor Bogdan Gabrys, the research center’s chair of computational intelligence, emphasizes the limits of the technology—once the system you are studying becomes as complex as, say, financial markets, accurate predictions become unrealistic. The key, he says, is knowing where to draw that line.
Cynthia Murrell, April 03, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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