Does Google Have an Edge in B2B?
September 3, 2018
Amazon is the undisputed king of eCommerce, but that doesn’t mean they have a corner on every market. When it comes to business-to-business transactions the waters are a little more murky. We learned just how competitive this arena has become from a recent Search Engine Watch story, “B2B Audiences Find Business Content Most Often Through Search.”
According to the story:
“Clutch’s survey of 384 consumers of online business content found that 87% of respondents frequently encounter business content using search engines, slightly more than the 85% who find business content through social media and 75% who encounter content most frequently on company websites.”
The story alludes to the fact that most of this work is done via Google or other B2B engines. This leaves Amazon high and dry, so they have tried to do something about it recently by behaving more like a B2B platform, offering customers invoicing options that allow them to wait 30 days for payment. However, sellers are furious. This, obviously, means people who were normally paid immediately will now have to wait a month and that’s a big change for many. We suspect that Amazon will iron out this wrinkle, but if not, they could get further behind in this realm.
But Amazon does offer search for what many people seek: Products.
Patrick Roland, September 3, 2018
Semantic Video Search Engine
September 2, 2018
I saw a link to a Semantic Video Search Engine” with the logo of MediaMill attached. Curious I did a bit of exploring and noted a video at this link. I learned that MediaMill is the name of the multimedia search engine. The system “watches” or “processes” a video and then assigns an index term or category to the subject of the video scene; for example a scene with a boat is tagged “boat.”
The function is to identify specific video fragments. The system provides automatic content detection. The goal is to make huge amounts of video data accessible. The video i watched was dated 2009. I located the MediaMill Web site and learned:
MediaMill has its roots in the ICES-KIS Multimedia Information Analysis project (in conjunction with TNO) and the Innovative Research Program for Image processing (IOP). It blossomed in the BSIK program MultimediaN the EU FP-6 program VIDI-Video, the Dutch/Flemish IM-Pact BeeldCanon project, and the Dutch VENISEARCHER project. The MediaMill team is currently funded by the Dutch VIDI STORYproject, the Dutch FES COMMIT program, and the US IARPA SESAME project.
The project’s news ended in 2015. Bing and Google searches turn up a significant amount of academic-oriented information. TREC data, technical papers, and links to the MediaMill Web site abound.
The question becomes:
Why has video search remained a non starter?
Since we started our DarkCyber video series, available on YouTube and Vimeo, we have had an opportunity to monitor how these two services index videos. YouTube, for example, makes the video available in the YouTube index in about a day, sometimes more. Vimeo does not index DarkCyber on a regular schedule. We provide an explicit link to the Vimeo video in our Beyond Search announcement of each week’s video.
It is possible to get a listing of DarkCyber videos on the not-well-known Google Video search service. You can find this index at www.googlevideo.com. Run the query “arnold darkcyber” and you will see a list of DarkCyber videos. Note that these are not in chronological order. In fact, running the “arnold darkcyber” query at different times generates results lists with different items and a similarly jumbled or non chronological order. Why? Google search does not handle time in its public facing services. For high accuracy time based queries, you will have to use the commercial Google technology. Check out Recorded Future for some additional details.
Searching for video is a difficult task. YouTube search is quirky. For example, search for “hawaii volcano live shipley” and one does not get a link to the current live stream. YouTube provides links to old videos. To find the live stream, one has to click on the picture of Mr. Shipley and then select the live stream. Vimeo has its oddities as well. When I post a DarkCyber to Vimeo, I cannot search for it. The new video just sort of shows up on my Vimeo dashboard but I cannot locate the most recent video with a query. So much for real time.
Exalead tried its hand at video search, enlisting a partner for the effort. The test was interesting, but I heard chatter that the computational demand (think expense) made the project less than attractive.
My hunch is that video search is lousy because of the costs associated with processing video. Even basic rendering is a slog. Imagine the expense of grinding through a day’s worth of YouTube or Vimeo output?
To sum up, nifty video search ideas abound. Academics have a treasure trove of opportunity. But despite the talk about the cloud and the magic of modern technology. Video search remains difficult and mostly unsatisfying.
Maybe that’s why social media sites rely on those posting the video to tell friends where the content resides? Searching for a snippet of video is almost as difficult as wrestling with a Modern Talking Pictures catalog.
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2018
Online with Smart Software, Robots, and Obesity
September 1, 2018
I recall a short article called “A Starfish-Killing, Artificially Intelligent Robot Is Set to Patrol the Great Barrier Reef.”The story appeared in 2016. I clipped this item a few days ago: “Centre for Robotic Vision Uses Bots to Cull Starfish.” The idea is that environmental protection becomes easier with killer robots.
Now combine that technology application with “Artificial Intelligence Spots Obesity from Space.” The main idea is that smart software can piece together items of data to figure out who is fat and where fat people live.
What happens if a clever tinkerer hooks together robots which can take action to ensure termination with smart software able to identify a target.
I mention this technology confection because the employees who object to an employer’s technology may be behind the curve. The way technology works is that innovations work a bit like putting Lego blocks together. Separate capabilities can be combined in interesting ways.
Will US employees’ refusal to work on certain projects act like a stuck brake on a rental car?
Worth thinking about before a killer satellite identifies a target and makes an autonomous decision about starfish or other entities. Getting online has interesting applications.
Why search when one can target via algorithms?
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2018
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