FAST Marketing: Will It Work?
May 1, 2015
Navigate to http://hits1k.com/fast-enterprise-search/. Here’s the Web page I see:
The spelling of the word “fast” with caps and the reference to artificial intelligence are interesting. Is this company surfing on the “reputation” of the late, much loved, and not forgotten Fast Search & Transfer? Believe it or not the company is integrating
Yes, it is a reseller of EMC and Microsoft explaining search using Microsoft Surface. The video and the marketing suggest that enterprise search is a most interesting discipline. I watched the video, and I would give the solution a whirl if I had a Surface and some interest in standing up and looking down as I dragged stuff from place to place.
Don’t try this app on your mobile phone.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2015
Hadoop de Loop: Slower and Tougher Than Expected
May 1, 2015
Well, well, well. I read “What’s Holding Back Hadoop?”
If the article is on the beam, Hadoop may not be what the consultants, former middle school teachers, and assorted cheerleaders assert. I learned:
a recent survey of IT, business intelligence and data warehousing leaders found that 60 percent will Hadoop in production by 2016, deployment remains a daunting task.
Several years ago I gave a talk at a Big Data Summit. Two of my colleagues and I were regaled with slices of baloney which looked like the mystery meat served in my high school’s cafeteria. The audience gobbled up the juicy bits. My talk, which took place, about 2 pm pointed out that Hadoop was not really a solution. One used Hadoop to achieve specific outputs and then other “things” were required. The audience listened politely and then gobbled more stale baloney.
The problem is one that is all too common in digital information. Experts find it easier to talk about a chunk of functions than do something with them on time, on budget, so that those paying the bill can see some concrete result.
The survey, always a slippery fish, points out that 42 percent of the unknown respondents in a statistically murky study found that staff and expertise were the number one problem. Also interesting was the finding that 32 percent of those responding had a tough time explaining to a bean counter what the investment in Hadoop would deliver.
No surprises.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2015
A Binging Double Take
May 1, 2015
After you read this headline from Venture Beat, you will definitely be doing a double take: “ComScore: Bing Passes 20% Share In The US For The First Time.” Bing has been the punch line for search experts and IT professionals ever since it was deployed a few years ago. Anyone can contest that Bing is not the most accurate search engine, mostly due to it being a Microsoft product. Bing developers have been working to improve the search engine’s accuracy and for the first time ever ComScore showed that both Google and Yahoo fell a 0.1 percentage and Bing gained 0.3 percent, most likely stealing it from DuckDuckGo and other smaller search engines. Microsoft can proudly state that one in five searches are conducted on Bing.
The change comes after months of stagnation:
“For many months, ComScore’s reports showed next to no movement for each search service (a difference of 0.1 points or 0.2 points one way or the other, if that). A 0.3 point change is not much larger, but it does come just a few months after big gains from Yahoo. So far, 2015 is already a lot more exciting, and it looks like the search market is going to be worth paying close attention to.”
The article says that most of search engine usage is generated by what Internet browsers people use. Yahoo keep telling people to move to Firefox and Google wants people to download Chrome. The browser and search engine rivalries continue, but Google still remains on top. How long will Bing be able to keep this bragging point?
Whitney Grace, May 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hoping to End Enterprise Search Inaccuracies
May 1, 2015
Enterprise search is limited to how well users tag their content and the preloaded taxonomies. According Tech Target’s Search Content Management blog, text analytics might be the key to turning around poor enterprise search performance: “How Analytics Engines Could Finally-Relieve Enterprise Pain.” Text analytics turns out to only be part of the solution. Someone had the brilliant idea to use text analytics to classification issues in enterprise search, making search reactive to user input to proactive to search queries.
In general, analytics search engines work like this:
“The first is that analytics engines don’t create two buckets of content, where the goal is to identify documents that are deemed responsive. Instead, analytics engines identify documents that fall into each category and apply the respective metadata tags to the documents. Second, people don’t use these engines to search for content. The engines apply metadata to documents to allow search engines to find the correct information when people search for it. Text analytics provides the correct metadata to finally make search work within the enterprise.”
Supposedly, they are fixing the tagging issue by removing the biggest cause for error: humans. Microsoft caught onto how much this could generate profit, so they purchased Equivio in 2014 and integrated the FAST Search platform into SharePoint. Since Microsoft is doing it, every other tech company will copy and paste their actions in time. Enterprise search is gull of faults, but it has improved greatly. Big data trends have improved search quality, but tagging continues to be an issue. Text analytics search engines will probably be the newest big data field for development. Hint for developers: work on an analytics search product, launch it, and then it might be bought out.
Whitney Grace, May 1 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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