Is Google Slowing Down?
September 19, 2014
Perish the thought. I am confident that Google is the lean, mean money making machine with the swiftness of Hermes (the Greek god, not the maker of the parfum Eau des Merveilles).
Amazon somehow ended up with a video service of people watching video games. I read that the profit free digital WalMart snagged the top level domain dot Buy.
“Wow: Amazon.com Buys .Buy for $4.6 Million, .Tech Sells for $6.8 Million” stated:
Amazon beat Google, Donuts and Famous Four Media in the auction. PVT Registry did not participate. Only two bidders bid above $1.5 million.
The likelihood of a Google-Zon emerging seems to have diminished a bit.
Who will win the next sprint? Mr. Bezos or the dynamic duo of Messrs. Brin and Page.
Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2014
AI Is Learning To Read
September 19, 2014
Machines know how to read, because they have been programmed to understand letters and numbers. They, however, do not comprehend what they are “reading” and cannot regurgitate it for users. The Research Blog that comments on Google’s latest news “Teaching Machines To Read Between The Lines (And A New Corpus With Entity Salience Annotations),” about how the search engine giant is using the New York Times Annotated Corpus to teach machines entity salience. Entity salience basically means machines can comprehend what they are “reading,” locate required information, and be able to use it. The New York Times Corpus is a large dataset with 1.8 million articles from twenty years. If a machine can learn salience from anything, it would be this collection.
Entity salience is determined by term ratios and complex search indexing done-brought to you by Knowledge Graph. The machine reading the article records the indicator for salience, byte offsets, entity index, mention count of entity determined by conference system, and other information to digest the document.
The system does work better with proper nouns:
“Since our entity resolver works better for named entities like WNBA than for nominals like “coach” (this is the notoriously difficult word sense disambiguation problem, which we’ve previously touched on), the annotations are limited to names.”
On a similar note on the Team Leada blog people can ask Google’s Director of Research Peter Norvig questions. He was asked:
“What is one of the most-often overlooked things in machine learning that you wished more people would know about or would study more? What are some of the most interesting data science projects Google is working on?”
Norvig responded that there are many problems depending on the project you are working on and Google is doing a lot of data science projects, but nothing specific.
Machine learning and reading is being worked on. In short, machines are going to school.
Whitney Grace, September 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Cross Books Off the Back To School List
September 19, 2014
No more pencils, no more books, no more…wait! No more books? According to an io9 article, “The First College In The US To Open Without Any Books In Its Library” dead tree items might be a thing of the past at least for one university. Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland recently opened with 550 students as part of its first class. The brand new campus has the usual campus buildings, including a library. The library, though, is different from your typical archive of knowledge: it is the nations first all digital library collection.
All of the books in the library are available via software that allows the students to download ebooks and what we can assume access to academic databases. An even bigger change is that librarians will not man the reference desk, because its name has been switched to the “success desk.” Librarians will instead be train students on information literacy and how to access electronic resources. Students will still be able to access books via interlibrary loan from other universities. They will also be able to decide how Florida Polytechnic spends its $60,000 library budget.
These are some good ideas in theory, but the technology is not up to being a free and browseable collection:
“Defenders of brick-and-mortar bookstores have argued the opposite, saying that the experience of wandering among bookshelves inspires serendipitous discoveries, while searching a database yields only the exact results you set out to find. While you can find related books in a database, it is unlikely you’ll stumble across an unrelated but helpful book while searching for another one by title.”
In most cases, students are also limited to how many times the can download and read an ebook. Digital licenses can track that kind of usage, so how long will some of these ideas last?
Whitney Grace, September 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Palantir and Its Funding
September 18, 2014
I read “Palantir May Have Raised More Than We Thought, Perhaps $165 million.” The article presented a revisionist view of how much money is in the Palantir piggy bank. Here’s the number I circled: $165 million since February 2014. I also marked this paragraph:
The Palo Alto company led by CEO Alex Karp disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday that it had raised more than $440 million in a funding round that began last November.
The numbers add up. The write up asserted:
The company co-founded by Karp, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale and others in 2004 has raised a total of about $1 billion, with some of that funding coming from In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of U.S. intelligence agencies.
This works out to a $9 billion valuation.
The question now becomes, “How long will it take Palantir to generate sufficient revenue to pay back the investors and turn a profit?” The reason I ask is that IBM is chasing this market along with a legion of other firms.
Terrorism, war fighting, and Fancy Dan analytics are growth buttons. Will there be enough customers to feed the appetites of the outfits chasing the available money?
My hunch is that some of the competitors in this segment will come up empty.
Also, the tonnage of money Palantir has had dropped in its bank account makes the separate injections of $30 million funding into three firms— Attivio, BA Insight, and Coveo—look modest indeed. Perhaps there is more to the Big Data pitch than just words?
Stephen E Arnold,
Hakia Down
September 18, 2014
We ran a check on the search and content processing vendors in our file. The Hakia.com site appears to be down.
Hakia was a developer of semantic search and offered several demonstrations of its technology. To learn about the company, the interview with Riza C. Berkan, navigate to this Search Wizards Speak issue.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2014
Googles Knowledge Vault Holds Hundreds of Millions of Facts, and Gathering Even More
September 18, 2014
The article titled Google’s Fact-Checking Bots Build Vast Knowledge Bank on New Scientist reports on the latest Google innovation. The Knowledge Vault is an entirely computerized system that is gathering information without human help. Sound like IBM’s Watson? It isn’t your imagination. The article states,
“Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as “confident facts”, to which Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being true. It does this by cross-referencing new facts with what it already knows…As well as the ability to analyse text on a webpage for facts to feed its knowledge base, Google can also peer under the surface of the web, hunting for hidden sources of data…”
Google is not the only company investing in this sort of system. Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are all working on similar projects, as well as IBM. The possibility of a virtual personal assistant is coming closer than ever (think Her, not Siri). Google may have a leg up in its ability to cull personal information from Gmail, Google Plus and Youtube as well as public knowledge. The article suggests that the Knowledge Vault’s accumulated data may change the way we understand history, and even help us predict the future.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Most App Users Stick to the Apps They Need
September 18, 2014
The article on Quartz titled Most Smartphone Users Download Zero Apps Per Month makes that revelation and considers the reasons why. In spite of the statistics that make it sound like everyone is constantly downloading apps, most people get the ones they want and leave the rest alone. The article reports,
“Apple boasted 75 billion all-time App Store downloads at its developers conference in June, and followed up by declaring July the best month ever for App Store revenue, with a record number of people downloading apps… Only about one-third of smartphone owners download any apps in an average month, with the bulk of those downloading one to three apps. The top 7% of smartphone owners account for “nearly half of all download activity in a given month,” comScore reports.”
The article rules out expense or uselessness as answers to why this is the case. Instead most people love their favorite app and spend 42% of all their “app-time” on that one alone. Another possibility is that while Apple’s App Store was a breakthrough in 2008, it is an imperfect search system, perhaps preventing users from finding the apps that they might download. For the app cheerleaders out there, how are those apps doing?
Chelsea Kerwin, September 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Video Training Course Offered
September 18, 2014
For most SharePoint administrators and users, a good deal of training is needed to navigate the massive and sometimes tricky platform. One-off webinars are plentiful, but sometimes a more in-depth training option is needed. Virtual Strategy Magazine highlights a new video training course in their article, “CBT Nuggets Announces Microsoft SharePoint Training Course.”
The article begins:
“CBT Nuggets announces the release of a new video training course, ‘Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Collaboration Expert.’ In this 13-video course, CBT Nuggets trainer Brian Alderman covers key operations that can be performed by users with editing permissions in SharePoint. Topics covered include list configuration settings, working with workflows, SharePoint social options, and more.”
Stephen E. Arnold has made a career out of following and reporting on all things search on his Web site ArnoldIT.com. His SharePoint work is highlighted on his SharePoint feed. For all levels of users, his tips and tricks can provide helpful assistance in navigating the difficulties of SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 18, 2014
BA Insight New Hire Likes His Job
September 17, 2014
Navigate to “My BA Insight Enterprise Search Adventure Begins.” The enthusiasm, confidence, and Super Bowl winning attitude rips off my screen. With new executive and venture funding, BA Insight seems to be a go to solution. But is the company too closely allied with Microsoft and the aging SharePoint product? Will the forthcoming Delve (a variation on the vision for Fast Search & Transfer revealed during a talk at CERN in 2007) put pressure on the SharePoint centric outfits? I just don’t know.
Here’s the passage I find interesting. I did not have one of the goslings “fix up” the capitalization errors or add links.
As I’ve been ramping up I’ve been learning a lot about their products and solutions. BA Insight use to be known as the connector company. The BA Insight Longitude Connectors can connect Microsoft SharePoint to more than 30 enterprise systems for information access and cross-platform search. They have so many connectors that allow SharePoint 2013, 2010, FAST and previous versions of SharePoint connect to a huge variety of backend systems. Here are a few examples: Documentum, eRooms, Websphere, Hummingbird, LiveLink, SAP, Siebel, Notes, Autonomy, FileNet, Connections, Opentext, SalesForce, Netdocs, SQL, Docushare, and a bunch of different legal systems… I heard they recently setup a connector for Jive and are open to building a connector for companies that need one to other systems not listed. Even with all of that, I find they don’t want to be known as simply a connector company since they really have a platform for enterprise search. The autoclassify stuff is brilliant. It helps set properties on your content based on your managed metadata and with a set of rules for both content already in SharePoint and for the content that will stay in these other systems. You really need to have good metadata so you can drill down and filter your search results quickly and easily and that’s where their rich search UI comes in providing search parts that give you the ability to drill in without needing to know boolean search. At that point it’s the smart previews that save you time. On top of the Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013, you get previews for PDF, ZIP, and a huge variety of other formats including the old office formats that you’d otherwise miss including to all of those systems I mentioned. There’s even more, but I think this is a good start for understanding a few of the top products. As an example they’ve been doing some really innovative work on hybrid search and real federation where the results are in one stream.
My question is, “Why would anyone use SharePoint when BA Insight can fill the bill as “enterprise search experts”? I think Fast Search had a good sense of what it had to do to address the limitations of its technology. The question is, “Will Microsoft want partners to siphon off revenue from the mother ship?”
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2014
Sir Thomas Bayes Does Art. Versatile Guy.
September 17, 2014
Navigate to FindMeLike. Click on “Try this demo.” You will have access to a Bayesian-centric visual search tool. The idea is that you click on an image you like. The system then locates similar images.
The click narrows the result set. Each poster is available for sale. But I could not figure out how to move to the shopping cart.
How well does a Bayesian-centric system work? Try and use the comments section of this blog to share you opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2014
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
