Dissing Facebook Search: The Cold Water Approach
March 1, 2013
I read “Facebook Gives Examples to Jumpstart Usage of Graph Search, Which It May Have Spent Too Long Building.” The main point is that Facebook fiddled and Rome burned. Now, Rome has to be rebuilt on property another empire owns.
Poor Facebook. The company muffed its IPO. Then Facebook cratered with Timeline. Now all those Xooglers have crafted a search which has to be “jumpstarted” like my first automobile, a 1955 Oldsmobile with no passenger side door.
Here’s the part of the analysis I found interesting:
Are any of those things you’d search for regularly, if ever? Maybe you’d take the occasional sweep through nostalgic content, look at recommendations for a vacation, or go hunting for new distractions. However, there’s little chance you’ll spend nearly as much time Graph Searching as browsing the daily refresh of status updates and photos from your close friends. That’s a little worrisome, especially since it follows a trend. In September 2011, Facebook’s big launch was Timeline. Beautiful, sure. But how often do you dive years back into your profile, or those of friends? Facebook poured tons of resources into the ability to call up historic content. For what? When I visit most people’s profiles, I look at their recent photos, last few posts, and About section. All of these were handled just fine by the old version of the profile. Adding cover images may have been sufficient.
Yep, worrisome for a free service in beta too. And who is pronouncing Facebook search a dead Oldsmobile?
My thoughts:
- Facebook cannot emulate Google’s brute force search. Google is eating some hefty costs, and Facebook wants to avoid a 1996 style financial black hole.
- Facebook knows ads and search are hooked. The Xooglers have explained why head to head ad fights with Google is not such a good idea. Therefore, the Facebook folks are looking for an angle. Notice I did not say, “Found.”
- Facebook has a thinner tightrope to walk than Google. Facebook can do many things with its content and metadata. Figuring out what combination will yield the most money and the fewest hassles will take time.
Skip the criticism. Track the deltas. Facebook may fail. So what? The journey is a free education for those not innovating.
Stephen E Arnold, February 28, 2013
Facebook Graph Search Has Enterprise Implications
February 28, 2013
Facebook Graph Search has been making headlines. However, most of these headlines are in response to the fact that this has been too long in coming. Facebook finally has search. Now that the shock is over, experts are turning to analysis of how the search function works and how it may benefit individuals and organizations. Jamie Yap does just that in her ZDNet article, “Graph Search Capabilities Offer Enterprise Benefits.”
After an introduction to the search service and how it works, the author continues:
“Commenting on the new feature, Jake Wengroff, social technologies analyst at Gleanster, an analyst firm, said Facebook is essentially injecting natural language processing functionality to its search algorithm so results can be delivered more intuitively and naturally. The underlying concept of graph search has potential in the enterprise setting. This functionality has a strong opportunity in the enterprise space and will ‘galvanize’ the social software industry to develop similar search capabilities for various purposes, Wengroff added.”
Some are even predicting that Graph Search could fill in the gaps left by customer relationship management solutions. Marketing is another definite application for this type of search solution. For those who are in the market for a more traditional enterprise search application, LucidWorks cannot be beat. Perfect for making sense of Big Data or making sense of internal documents, LucidWorks stands on its trusted name and the Lucene/Solr open source community.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook Imagines A Whole New Way To Search
February 19, 2013
According to “How Facebook Made Me Search In Strange New Ways” from Search Engine Land, Facebook Graph Search has changed the way people search or at least wants to. Before social networking, people used to actively search with search engines because an action influenced them. With social networking, people are passively discovering information that they never knew they wanted to know all due to network connections.
Graph Search will not replace Google, because it does not search the entire Web. It only contains social information, in other words a social search:
““Social search is a means of uncovering information, to fill a knowledge gap taking into account crowd sourced information from your network, which contains information from a reputable source within your network, giving more of a credible touch to the content.”
Graph Search does not have all of this, but with some improvements it can. It can get better by adding general searching, i.e. only search through Facebook while Bing picks up the regular Web and the social network. The image search can use tweaking by searching tags and captions. Also the Facebook auto complete feature is annoying and is down right wrong sometimes.
Graph Search is not grasping the basic search engine fundamentals and needs to add them to even think about being competitive. The “graph” will probably be the next wave in social networking, so it is necessary to get on it.
Whitney Grace, February 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook, Search, and the Real World
February 16, 2013
I think there is or was a television program about the “real world.” I am hazy on this, but I perceive “reality television” as a semi scripted, low cost way to fill the gaping maw of 24×7 programming at a bargain basement price. In fact, when anyone suggests that something is “real” I take a second look. This applies to “real stories”, “real life examples”, and “real consulting insights”. In today’s world, the notion of “real” is slippery. I think of Plato, Hollywood special effects, and marketing baloney.
I read “You’re Not Gonna Like It: Facebook’s New Search Struggles with the Real World.” The title caught my attention because of its use of the familiar “you,” the word “gonna”, the inclusion of “search”, and the phrase “real world.” In a horse race there is a big payday from picking win, place, and show. Here the headline snags the top four spots in the social media World Cup.
The article points out that some of the features of Facebook search need to be rethought. That’s a fair statement. The product is a beta and represents the first somewhat edible fruit of the marriage between the Facebook crowd, the injected Googlers, and the post IPO attention of the kind and loving stakeholders.
Facebook has to produce revenues, keep its costs under control, and cope with a number of darned exciting issues. These include the mandatory registration Google has slapped on Google Plus and the awareness by some Facebookers that there may be something else to do with the time invested in posting information about one’s comings and goings.
Here’s the passage I noted:
Facebook launched Graph Search at a big press event at its Menlo Park, CA headquarters almost exactly one month ago. CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a large part of the event keynote himself, highlighting the feature as one of three “pillars of Facebook” alongside the News Feed and Timeline. Graph Search is supposed to help you gather friends for a Twin Peaks marathon, find photos taken in London on your last trip, and see which sushi places are most popular among your friends. After a month of testing Graph Search, I’ve found that it’s fantastic at finding people and photos, but not so good at finding anything else.
Is any search system able to do more than one or two things well? Google does the ad thing. Lexis does the legal laundry list thing. Chemical Abstracts does the structure thing. Sure, these systems purport to provide more functions than a bucket of Swiss Army knives.
But the reality of search and information retrieval is that each system has a strength. Each system has gaps, blind spots, and stuff that just does not work as the users expect.
The write up identifies some of Facebook’s notable gaps; for example, dirty data. Don’t most Facebook users perceive content in Facebook is as accurate?
Net net: Facebook social search is a beta. What changes are coming? Wait and see.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2013
Google Plus Nips at Facebooks Heels
February 14, 2013
It looks like victory is approaching for Google. The International Business Times reports, “Google Plus Becomes No. 2 Social Network After Facebook, Knocking Off Twitter.” I guess that’s what mandatory registration will do for a social network.
The article cites a recent report from Global Web Index, which found that the number of Google+‘s active users grew by 27 percent in the last quarter of 2012. On top of that, Google’s property YouTube came in at number three. This was the first time that site was included in this social-network tracking study. Facebook maintains its healthy lead, though, with nearly 693 million active users to Google+’s 343 million and YouTube’s 300 million.
Writer Dave Smith points out that Google+ and YouTube both benefit from their close user-base integration. He notes some other smart moves on Google’s part:
“Not too long ago, Google Plus was against the ropes, struggling to maintain traffic and momentum after its public debut. The site, at the time, looked very plain and lacked any real key differentiator from Facebook, besides its video chat offering, Hangouts.
“In about a year and a half, Google has done many things to beef up its social offering, giving it a new design, new technology and a really sleek mobile application. But the best thing Google did in the last 16 months — something its competitors should learn from — is learning how to seamlessly integrate its services.”
Smith believes that capturing the second and third spots stands as a declaration of Google’s Internet dominance. He also praises Google+ as a (now) well-designed app. See the article for more of his observations on the resurgent social network.
Cynthia Murrell, February 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
DataStax Enterprise 3 0
February 7, 2013
DataStax hooked itself to the Facebook entity and now pitches its newest version, we learn from the Register’s “DataStax Cranks Up Facebook NoSQL to 3.0 with Enterprise Features.” The article explains what to expect from the latest release of its DataStax Enterprise Edition. It is worth noting that this company also offers a search system.
Writer Timothy Prickett Morgan informs us that DataStax’s raison d’être is to commercialize the open-source Cassandra NoSQL data store created by Facebook. The company does offer a stripped-down Community Edition for free, but the list of features available only in the Enterprise Edition is significant. Version 3.0 tackles perceived security flaws in Hadoop with new features, including some tweaks it is releasing to the open-source-community edition of Cassandra. Morgan writes:
“The open source tweaks include internal authentication and internal object permissions, with the same grant/revoke paradigm used by relational databases also being applied to the NoSQL data store – in this case, it is done at a table or column level. Databases also have row-level locking, but there is no analogy to this in a NoSQL data store. DataStax has also added client-to-node encryption based on the familiar SSL protocol to make sure that data being passed between Cassandra and an end user device is encrypted in flight.”
Enterprise users can also count on external authentication, encryption for at-rest data inside the stack, data auditing features, and a commercial version of Cassandra (aka the DataStax Enterprise Database Server). Round-the-clock tech-support coverage is thrown in as well. The product is not quite ready for general release, but “early adopter customers” can take it for a spin now. Check back around the end of February for general availability.
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, DataStax was founded in 2010. Their Cassandra-based software implementations are flexible and scalable, and are employed by businesses from young startups to Fortune 100 companies, including such notables as Adobe, eBay, and Netflix.
Cynthia Murrell, February 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Repercussions of Facebook Graph Search
February 6, 2013
As with the arrival of most new things, no one is quite sure what the results of Facebook’s venture into search will be. Forbes investigates the possibilities in, “Facebook Graph Search is a Disruptive Minefield of Unintended Consequences.” It is good to see we are not the only ones who think this development could shake up the search terrain.
Journalist Anthony Wing Kosner begins by noting that Graph Search is not something users have requested, but rather a marketing initiative. For the feature to work, users will have to help by continuing to populate Facebook with data in the form of likes, check-ins, photos, and profile info. Somehow, I don’t think that’s a big hurdle, even if some users do get spooked by the very real search-related privacy concerns. More tricky, perhaps, is convincing users they want to narrow their searches from the World Wide Web to their own Facebook network.
Kosner writes:
“I think Graph Search is indeed important, but the results of Facebook’s search for increased relevance may be both more and less than it intends. Its users may find the utility of searching their own social graph to be hit-or-miss, but they also may find themselves feeling much more exposed in the searches of others than they ever intended to be. Rather than phrase this negatively, however, I want to try to identify the potentially explosive issues, land mines if you will, that Facebook will encounter in its path to build out its third pillar and suggest what it needs to do to avoid or diffuse them.”
Not surprisingly, the main suggestion is to make it easier for users to protect their privacy. The current process can be cumbersome, and not even a Zuckerberg can be certain the results will be as expected. With Graph Search in particular, the inability of algorithms to understand irony or a love of randomness, both hallmarks of today’s youth culture, can result in acute misrepresentation of someone’s views. Sometimes this could simply be amusing, but other times, it could cause real damage. And you might never know.
If you are concerned about these issues (and if you or someone you love uses Facebook, you should be), check out this detailed article. I suppose we will just have to wait and see where the chips fall, while helping spread the word—be careful out there.
Cynthia Murrell, February 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Quote To Note About Search
February 5, 2013
Search is act of trying to find the answer to a question. Internet users browse the Web searching for answers to their questions. The main tool people user to search the Internet are search engines, but while reading Explore this quote came up:
“Forget search engines. The real revolution will come when we have research engines, intelligent Web helpers that can find out new things, not just what’s already been written. Facebook Graph Search isn’t anywhere near that good, but it’s a nice hint at greater things to come.”
Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist, said this quote about Facebook and how its new Graph search mean big changes for search in the coming years. Explore also mentioned that it echoes Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision for the future of knowledge. Bush was an engineer and well known for his work on analog computers and little project called the Manhattan. Reflecting on this quote, one can only agree that yes, Graph Search and other searches, are on the brink of something grand. From the science fiction and romantic writing angle, these will be the times that people will find nostalgic for our infant-like knowledge. All the information in the world can be discovered on a little device someone carries around in their pocket, but people are still clueless about how to use it.
Google is already trying to remedy this with Knowledge Graph, which is the start of a Star Trek like computer. People need to be taught how to use information and what it can do for them, rather than passively let it seep through their heads. The time to start is now.
Whitney Grace, February 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Microsoft Wants In On Social Search
February 4, 2013
Facebook’s Graph Search launched recently and quick as a hare Microsoft follows with its own social search. ZDNet reports that “Bing And Beyond: How Microsoft Is Attacking ‘Social Search.’” Microsoft is not a social networking company, but it does use Bing’s social sidebar to sync with Facebook. Microsoft now allows more Facebook content via the social sidebar. How much? An average of five times more information from links, status updates, photos, and all the usual Facebook content.
Microsoft and Facebook already have an ongoing deal and the PC-maker wanted to remind users of its existence:
“Microsoft officials played up the increased Facebook integration in a January 17 Bing Community blog post. Two days ago, when Facebook announced its Graph Search technology, the Bing team reminded users that Microsoft is still providing Web search for Facebook. Bing isn’t providing any of the back-end search for Graph Search, however.”
Microsoft and Facebook may be partners right now, but judging how Facebook is trying to compete with Google search by developing an in-house search tool. They might be closer to a dissolution than we think. Microsoft sounds like the gold star student, who is suddenly replaced by a new kid. Microsoft is standing in the back and waving its hand, “I can do that too! Don’t forget about me!”
Whitney Grace, February 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook Graph Search No Threat to Google Search
February 1, 2013
Contrary to some early predictions, it looks like Google has nothing to worry about from Facebook’s just-released “graph search” function. The Manila Times reports, “Facebook’s New Search Product Not Threat to Google – Analysts.” The brief write-up reports:
“After Facebook rolled out the friends-based search product on Tuesday, people began thinking about the question of how this new feature could affect Google, the king of search. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that ‘graph search’ is different from an all-purpose search engine. His view was agreed by experts, who said that compared with Facebook’s focus on the network of friends, the search function of Google takes a much more holistic approach. Analysts agreed that Facebook’s search tool is unlikely to challenge Google’s leading position in web search at least in the near future.”
The new feature allows users to tap into opinions and recommendations expressed by their “friends” when searching for information. Our own leader, Stephen E. Arnold, has observed that it functions better for some folks than for others, and that the less superficial the search, the less useful it is. Thanks, but no thanks.
If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu, it may be because of similar social-linked moves last year by Microsoft and, yes, Google itself. Microsoft tied recommendations from Foursquare into their Bing results, while Google connected Google+ data with its search (opting out is possible). All three implementations seem like either-love-it-or-hate-it propositions. But, hey, all is well as long as the advertisers are happy.
Cynthia Murrell, February 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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