Quote to Note: Search and Its Infancy
April 19, 2015
Navigate to “Moving Search Forward.” Here’s the Marissa Mayer quote which I highlighted:
We firmly believe that search is still in its infancy – and this partnership marks the next chapter in our exploration of how to make search truly great.
Like Penelope’s suitors, vendors are pretty convincing until Ulysses turns up. By the way, search has been a thing for more than 50 years, and I am getting tired of the “baby” metaphor. Search has plateaued, and it will take more than a former Googler’s rah rahs to make a difference.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2015
France Cooks Boeuf Google Be Gone
April 19, 2015
I read “French Senate Backs Bid to Force Google to Disclose Search Algorithm Workings.” The Google is going to be Googley. My hunch is that the GOOG will take the approach of a trois etoile chef and keep some of the ingredients in a classic French dish under wraps. The French Senate, on the other hand, may concoct a dish, like revenge, best served cold, Boeuf Google Be Gone. Will French online users kick their Google habit? Perhaps France will embrace Dassault Exalead or Qwant? Will the groups which annoyed Caesar prevail?
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2015
ttwick Deal Search
April 18, 2015
At lunch on Friday, one of the 20 somethings who gnaw at me like locusts in an Illinois corn field, I learned about a “revolutionary”, “Google killing,” super search system. I listened to the champion’s explanation of semantic search, next generation architectures, yadda yadda.
I navigated to the Web site www.ttwick.com and learned that there is a demo and an application of the search technology to deals. I allowed the service to “know” my location, which is of modest assistance because we are testing virtual private network vendors, but ttwick seemed happy enough to know I was someplace.
I ran a query for but when I clicked on the “search box” which displayed my location, this is what the system displaced to me:
The dark vertical panel on the left was difficult for me to read. I am 70 years old, wear trifocals, and have some difficulty discerning pale blue text against a black background. One of the sharp eyed 20 somethings pointed out that the black vertical panel allowed me to click and narrow the results list to entertainment, food, health, and baby along with the catchall Miscellaneous.
I saw a service called Deal Chicken. This strikes me as somewhat similar with the addition of hotlinks to winnow results. I will add the ttwick engine to my list. I do want my abdomen to look just like the one in the Body Allure ad.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2015
New Age Fortune Teller Reveals the Secret Google in 2015
April 18, 2015
I enjoy pundits, poobahs, self appointed experts. I had a heck of a good time reading about what one wizards foretells as Google’s search results trajectory in 2015. Time to get in gear. It is almost May 2015.
To peer into the crystal ball with this youthful specialist, navigate to “How Google Search Results Will Evolve throughout 2015.” I assume the author will be the big winner at the Kentucky Derby in a few weeks. I know that picking horses is trivial compared to presaging what the wonderfully organized, completely consistent, and highly focused Googlers are going to do. A single horse is a piece of cake, right?
I learned:
One of the biggest defining changes to the traditional SERP in recent memory has been the emergence of the Knowledge Graph. A Google product, the Knowledge Graph is a system of information that’s been scoured and collected from all over the web to present immediate, direct answers to user queries. Since Google uses a process of semantic search to actively understand the intent behind user queries, Google is working to theoretically answer any simple question a user could input, bypassing the process of presenting links for exploration entirely.
Fascinating. I did not know that Google was working on a knowledge graph. I thought that Google was focused on what I naively perceived as semantic processes and dataspaces. Oh, well, live and learn the real story.
Google will “do” other things in the next eight months; for example:
Do more than display links
- Show different things to different users
- Add little boxes and areas with facts, maps, etc.
- Do different things for users with mobile devices.
I think I have it. Now just for kicks I opened the PDF files of my three Google monographs written for the now defunct but ever musical Infonortics Ltd. in the UK. Here’s what I found with the date of the monograph in which the information appeared:
- 2003, The Google Legacy, results that move beyond a laundry list
- 2006, Google Version 2.0, the knowledgebase and dataspace informed via semantics to provide oomph to personalization, new constructs like profiles of entities, etc.
- 2008, Google: The Digital Gutenberg, the slicing and dicing of information for different use cases; for example, video, mobile, etc.
The way I figure it is that Google has been chugging along for over a decade to move beyond search. The write up makes it clear that Google is going to kick into high gear in 2015.
My view is that some of the informed observers have not done their homework. Old stuff looks new when one is operating from a cursory survey of Google’s most recent public relations and marketing hoo hah.
Why don’t you let folks who know what Google is going to do bet your retirement savings on the Kentucky Derby. How can you lose?
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2015
The Law of Moore: Is Information Retrieval an Exception?
April 17, 2015
I read “Moore’s Law Is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law.” The “law” cooked up by a chip company suggests that in technology stuff gets better, faster, and cheaper.” With electronic brains getting, better, faster, cheaper, it follows that phones are more wonderful every few weeks. The logic applies to laptops, intelligence in automobiles, and airline related functions.
The article focuses on the Intel-like world of computer parts. The write up makes this point which I highlighted:
From 2005 through 2014, Moore’s Law continued — but the emphasis was on improving cost by driving down the expense of each additional transistor. Those transistors might not run more quickly than their predecessors, but they were often more power-efficient and less expensive to build.
Yep, the cheaper point is significant. The article then tracks to a point that warranted a yellow highlight:
After 50 years, Moore’s Law has become cultural shorthand for innovation itself. When Intel, or Nvidia, or Samsung refer to Moore’s Law in this context, they’re referring to the continuous application of decades of knowledge and ingenuity across hundreds of products. It’s a way of acknowledging the tremendous collaboration that continues to occur from the fab line to the living room, the result of painstaking research aimed to bring a platform’s capabilities a little more in line with what users want. Is that marketing? You bet. But it’s not just marketing.
These two points sparked my thinking about the discipline of enterprise information access. Enterprise search relies on a wide range of computing operations. If these operations are indeed getting better, faster, and cheaper, does it make sense to assume that information retrieval is also getting better, faster, and cheaper?
What is happening from my point of view is that the basic design of enterprise information access systems has not changed significantly in the last decade, maybe longer. There is the content acquisition module, the normalization or transformation module, the indexing module, the query processing module, the administrative module, and other bits and pieces.
The outputs from today’s information access systems do not vary much from the outputs available from systems on offer a decade ago. Endeca generated visual reports by 2003. Relationship maps were available from Inxight and Semio (remember that outfit) even earlier. Smart software like the long forgotten Inference system winnowed results on what the user sought in his or her query. Linguistic functions were the heart and soul of Delphes. Statistical procedures were the backbone of PLS, based on Cornell wizardry.
Search and retrieval has benefited from faster hardware. But the computational burdens piled on available resources have made it possible to layer on function after function. The ability to make layers of content processing and filtering work has done little to ameliorate the grousing about many enterprise search systems.
The fix has not been to deliver a solution significantly different from what Autonomy and Fast Search offered in 2001. The fix has been to shift from what users’ need to deal with business questions to:
- Business intelligence
- Semantics
- Natural language processing
- Cognitive computing
- Metadata
- Visualization
- Text analytics.
I know I am missing some of the chestnuts. The point is that information access may be lagging behind certain other sectors; for example, voice search via a mobile device. When I review a “new” search solution, I often find myself with the same sense of wonder I had when I first walked through the Smithsonian Museum: Interesting but mostly old stuff.
Just a thought that enterprise search is delivering less, not “Moore.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2015
Gartner VP Claims Researching “Ethical Programming” Necessary for Future of Smart Machines
April 17, 2015
The article on TweakTown titled Gartner: Smart Machines Must Include Ethical Programming Protocols briefly delves into the necessity of developing ethical programming in order to avoid some sort of Terminator/ I,Robot situation that culminates in the rise of the machines and the end of humanity. Gartner is one of the world’s leading technology research and advisory companies, but it hardly sounds like the company stance. The article quotes Frank Buytendijk, a Gartner research VP,
“Clearly, people must trust smart machines if they are to accept and use them…The ability to earn trust must be part of any plan to implement artificial intelligence (AI) or smart machines, and will be an important selling point when marketing this technology.”
If you’re thinking, sounds like another mid-tier consultant is divining the future, you aren’t wrong. Researching ethical programming for the hypothetical self-aware machines that haven’t been built yet might just be someone’s idea of a good time. The article concludes with the statement that “experts are split on the topic, arguing whether or not humans truly have something to worry about.” While the experts figure out how we humans will cause the end of the human reign over earth, some of us are just waiting for the end of another in a line of increasingly violent winters.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 17, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Improving the Preservica Preservation Process
April 17, 2015
Preservica is a leading program for use in digital preservation, consulting, and research, and now it is compatible with Microsoft SharePoint. ECM Connection has the scoop on the “New Version Of Preservica Aligns Records Management And Digital Preservation.” The upgrade to Preservica will allow SharePoint managers to preserve content from SharePoint as well as Microsoft Outlook, a necessary task as most companies these days rely on the Internet for business and need to archive transactions.
Preservica wants to become a bigger part of enterprise system strategies such as enterprise content management and information governance. One of their big selling points is that Preservica will archive information and keep it in a usable format, as obsoleteness becomes a bigger problem as technology advances.
“Jon Tilbury, CEO Preservica adds: ‘The growing volume and diversity of digital content and records along with rapid technology and IT refresh rates is fuelling the need for Records and Compliance managers to properly safe-guard their long-term and permanent digital records by incorporating Digital Preservation into their overall information governance lifecycle. The developing consensus is that organizations should consider digital preservation from the outset – especially if they hold important digital records for more than 10 years or already have records that are older than 10 years. Our vision is to make this a pluggable technology so it can be quickly and seamlessly integrated into the corporate information landscape.’ ”
Digital preservation with a compliant format is one of the most overlooked problems companies deal with. They may have stored their records on a storage device, but if they do not retain the technology to access them, then the records are useless. Keeping files in a readable format not only keeps them useful, but it also makes the employee’s life who has to recall them all the easier.
Whitney Grace, April 17, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Quote to Note: Putting LA Sports News in the NY Times
April 16, 2015
Here’s a keeper for my quotes to note folder. The source is the New York Times, April 16, 2015, page 8 in the business section (where else?). The article has the Google index friendly title: “Challenge to Google. Innovation May Undercut Case. As in Microsoft v. Europe, Innovation May Undercut Case.” Beefy. [If the headline disappears along with the story, speak to someone other than me. You may be able to purchase a dead tree version of the newspaper if you live in an area where distribution makes it available.]
Here’s the quote attributed to the astute Warren Buffer of search engine optimization expert, Daniel (Danny) Sullivan:
You don’t expect the New York Times to carry a rival sports section. But you do expect it to have a sports section. When people go to a search engine, they’re looking to search across everything.”
An interesting generalization. I am not sure most people “go to Google.” Most people use what ever system is baked into their “user experience.” But that’s less important than the suggestion that the “you” is what I do. Nope. I also noted the “everything.” I find that suggestion of comprehensiveness amusing. Not as chuckle worthy as IBM Watson’s smart software writing recipes, but it is right up there in the search Top 100 silly generalizations.
The quote also brushes against a larger question, a question ignored by the New York Times; to wit:
Why is ripping off the LA Times’ sports section egregious and taking other outfits’ digital facts sort of okay?
I think the answer resides in the little appreciated patents issued to Ramanathan Guha and Alon Halevy, both smart people and both Googlers when each did quite prescient work. If you are not familiar with the notion of building a comprehensive global knowledge base populated by nifty Georgia Tech T shirt wearing software agents, you are missing some useful color on Google’s assumptions, systems, and methods.
But, hey, who really cares about the global knowledge base thing, the notion of dataspaces, and Guha’s vision of applied semantic technologies in his quick slick architecture of smart software?
The Guha Halevy work is important in my opinion. More than generalizations will be needed for experts and legal eagles to figure out that the Google processes have been humming away for many, many years. Still few outside of Google understand what’s up?
Roll out the generalizations. Google will have a barrel of fun. Ignore penetrating questions. Google will rake in the dough.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2015
Digital Reasoning Goes Cognitive
April 16, 2015
A new coat of paint is capturing some tire kickers’ attention.
IBM’s Watson is one of the dray horses pulling the cart containing old school indexing functions toward the airplane hanger.
There are assorted experts praising the digital equivalent of a West Coast Custom’s auto redo. A recent example is Digital Reasoning’s embrace of the concept of cognitive computing.
Digital Reasoning is about 15 years old and has provided utility services to the US government and some commercial clients. “Digital Reasoning Goes cognitive: CEO Tim Estes on Text, Knowledge, and Technology” explains the new marketing angle. The write up reported:
Cognitive is a next computing paradigm, responding to demand for always-on, hyper-aware data technologies that scale from device form to the enterprise. Cognitive computing is an approach rather than a specific capability. Cognitive mimics human perception, synthesis, and reasoning capabilities by applying human-like machine-learning methods to discern, assess, and exploit patterns in everyday data. It’s a natural for automating text, speech, and image processing and dynamic human-machine interactions.
If you want to keep track of the new positioning text processing companies are exploring, check out the write up. Will cognitive computing become the next big thing? For vendors struggling to meet stakeholder expectations, cognitive computing sounds more zippy that customer support services or even the hyperventilating sentiment analysis positioning.
Lego blocks are pieces that must be assembled.
Indexing never looked so good. Now the challenge is to take the new positioning and package it in a commercial product which can generate sustainable, organic revenues. Enterprise search positioning has not been able to achieve this goal with consistency. The processes and procedures for cognitive computing remind me of Legos. One can assemble the blocks in many ways. The challenge will be to put the pieces together so that a hardened, saleable product can be sold or licensed.
Is there a market for Lego airplane assembled by hand? Vendors of components may have to create “kits” in order to deliver a solution a customer can get his or her hands around.
An unfamiliar function with a buzzword can be easy to sell to those organizations with money and curiosity. Jargon is often not enough to keep stakeholders and in the case of IBM shareholders smiling. A single or a handful of Lego blocks may not satisfy those who want to assemble a solution that is more than a distraction. Is cognitive computing a supersonic biplane or a historical anomaly?
This is worth watching because many companies are thrashing for a hook which will lead to significant revenues, profits, and sustainable growth, not just a fresh paint job.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2015
Exorbyte Pivots and Slows Twitter Stream
April 16, 2015
I was doing a routine check of search vendor Web sites. I noticed that Exorbyte, a search vendor recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 company in 2o10, has pivoted from eCommerce to identify resolution. What I find interesting is that there are some similarities with WCC Group’s strategy. That company focuses on the human resource and government approach to human information.
Here’s the new look for the Exorbyte Web site:
Exorbyte, like other search vendors, is responding to market signals for security related functions. Coincident with this shift, Exorbyte slowed its stream of Twitter posts. There is considerable chatter about smart software like IBM Watson (Thomas or Sherlock version?). Exorbyte is another example of a vendor with search as a core function and with a positioning that does not evoke the associations of European enterprise search vendors which have been a source of some consternation.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2015
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