Google+: How Does One Measure Success?

July 10, 2011

I keep trying to avoid the Google+ “thing.” I focus on a different slice of the online world, but my newsreader and Overflight system overfloweth with baloney about a service that is in trial, less than two weeks old, and pretty much a knock off of Facebook. This “me too” stuff is becoming the focus on innovation, and I am not too interested in learning how to use a wheel or light a fire, thank you.

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How does one measure success? Tweets, revenue, number of products and services offered customers? Source: http://goo.gl/9yBS9

I did notice two items this morning. The first was a report about the number of short messages mentioning Google+. Yep, let’s get on the Tweeter thing. I find the data illustrative of the spike nature of information. Where’s that Fukushima thing? Long gone for today news consumers, but the aftermath of the event is good for a couple thousand years.

The second item was my favorite techno-management guru, Eric Schimdt. The view that caught my eye appeared in “Eric Schmidt on Gauging Google+’s Success.” There is a great deal of information in the write up and the embedded video. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:

When asked by reporters whether Google planned eventually to fill out Google+ with other products, Schmidt answered, “Yeah, and there’s a lot coming,” saying that business accounts and ads are expected, assuming Google+ continues to grow. ”We test stuff and when it works we put a lot more emphasis on it,” he said.

Okay, “a lot” and “test stuff”. Let’s reflect.

Google is juggling a large number of balls, just like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. What’s interesting to me is that the company’s principal—dare I say, “only”—revenue stream is advertising. The purpose of Google+, Android, and the other major initiatives is generating advertising revenue.

I urge Google to move forward and generate ad revenue from these services. The reason is that once again I talked with a number of companies and heard one message, “We need traffic. Something’s changed at Google, and we don’t know what to do.”

My response was, “Adapt.”

Google has shifted its attention from the brute force AltaVista.com approach to information to a new, compound model. The focus of that model is not delivering better results. The focus is producing revenue. And the company needs the new sources. With Web traffic shifting from desktop access to mobile access, Google has to find a way to sustain revenue and then grow significant new streams. Generating new revenue streams is not easy. The case example? Google itself. After 11 or 12 years in business, Google has a giant footprint but it is now good at one thing: selling ads.

I think there are companies with better products in search. Example: Yandex.com. I think there are companies with better social network services: Facebook.com. I think there are companies with better mobile devices: Apple. I think there are companies with better online shopping: Amazon.com. In short, unlike the early days, Google has competition in packaging, technology, and innovation.

So, the buzz about Google+ tells me three things:

  1. Google excites significant interest, particularly among a certain sector of the online community. That indeed is a marketing advantage. Marketing now has to turn into revenue. Where’s that $100 billion a year company now? About $70 billion to go.
  2. Google faces significant competition across a wide range of business facets. I suppose Alexander the Great could handle a multi front war, but he died at an early age, and his empire fizzled. I won’t press the metaphor, however.
  3. The legal opponents Google faces are likely to see the sprawl of Google as an indication of the company’s ambitions. At a time when issues of monopoly and certain business practices is increasing, Google demonstrates that it can pretty much do what it wants, dismissing questions with remarks like “a lot” and “test stuff”.

The upcoming hearings in Washington, DC, will be interesting. I wonder if there will be a Google+ service for those involved? I hope so. That might be a way to measure success just not in terms of revenue.

Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2011

You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.

MarkLogic, FAST, Categorical Affirmatives, and a Direction Change

July 5, 2011

I weakened this morning (July 4, 2011) with a marketing Fourth of July boom. I received one of those ever present LinkedIn updates putting a comment from the Enterprise Search Engine Professionals Group in front of me.

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The MarkLogic positioning exploded on my awareness like a Fourth of July skyrocket’s burst.

Most of the comments on the LinkedIn group are ho hum. One hot topic has been Microsoft’s failure to put much effort in its blogs about Fast Search & Transfer’s technology. Snore. Microsoft put down $1.2 billion for Fast, made some marketing noises, and had a fellow named Mr. Treo-something talk to me about the “new” Fast Search system. Then search turned out to be more like a snap in but without the simplicity of a Web part. Microsoft moved on and search is there, but like Google’s shift to Android, search is not where the action is. I am not sure who “runs” the enterprise search unit at Microsoft. Lots of revolving door action is my impression of Microsoft’s management approach in the last year.

The noise died down and Fast has become another component in the sprawling Shanghai of code known as SharePoint 2010. Making Fast “fast” and tuning it to return results that don’t vary with each update has created a significant amount of business for Microsoft partners “certified” to work on Fast Search. Licensees of the Linux/Unix version of ESP are now like birds pushed from the next by an impatient mother.

New MarkLogic Market Positioning?

Set Microsoft aside for a moment and look at this post from a MarkLogic professional who once worked at Fast Search and subsequently at Microsoft. I am not sure how to hyperlink to LinkedIn posts without generating a flood of blue and white screens begging for log in, sign up, and money. I will include a link, but you are on your own.

Here’s the alleged MarkLogic professional’s comment:

Many organizations are replacing FAST with MarkLogic. MarkLogic offers a scalable enterprise search engine with all the features of FAST plus more…

Wow.

An XML engine with wrappers is now capable of “all” the Fast features. In my new monograph “The New Landscape of Enterprise Search”, I took some care to review information presented by Fast at CERN, the wizard lair in Europe, about Fast Search’s effort to rewrite Fast ESP, which was originally a Web search engine. The core was wrapped to convert Web search into enterprise search. This was neither quick nor particularly successful. Fast Search & Transfer ran into some tough financial waters, ended up the focus of a government investigation, and was quickly sold for a price that surprised me and the goslings in Harrod’s Creek.

You can get the details of the focus of the planned reinvention of the Fast system and the link to the source document at CERN which I reference in my Landscape study. A rewrite indicates that some functions were not in 2007 and 2008 performing in  a manner that was acceptable to someone in Fast Search’s management. Then the acquisition took place. The Linux/Unix support was nuked. Fast under Microsoft’s wing has become a utility in the incredible assemblage of components that comprises SharePoint 2010. I track the SharePoint ecosystem in my information service SharePointSemantics.com. If you haven’t seen the content, you might want to check it out.

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Who Has Read 6,000 Nortel Patent Documents?

July 4, 2011

I know I haven’t, and my hunch is that not too many people in Harrod’s Creek have either.

I would, if I were a risk taker, wager that the purchasers of the Nortel intellectual property are taking the “pony in there” approach to these intellectual Augean stables. The idea is that if there are certain indications of a four hooved equine in a barn, there is probably one or more ponies around. The “certain indications” are the output of the pony. Nortel was a heck of a pony in the telecommunications sector, so the $4.5 billion bet of finding something of value in the Nortel output is hoped to be high.

You will want to read “Nortel Patents Go to Group that Includes Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and More.” The write up suggested to me that Google is the target of the consortium which now “owns” the Nortel intellectual property.

But the task is to understand the scope of the claims within this corpus of patent documents. The “pony in there” is going to have to be found, and that will take time, money, and considerable effort.

The problem on this sultry day in Kentucky is that most people are not reading the Nortel patent documents. At some point, legal eagles with many “interns” and others who can sit for hours to demonstrate the value of their training will work through the documents. Even with the plump payrolls of Microsoft, Apple, and the other members of the consortium now owning the Nortel intellectual property, grinding through 6,000 patent documents is a tough business. Nortel’s engineers and scientists rambled across high speed wireless, networking, mobile devices, semiconductors, and related fields. More than in house lawyers and the consortium’s attorneys are going to be needed to:

  1. Ingest the patents
  2. Analyze the claims
  3. Match the claims against possible infringements
  4. Determine which alleged infringements warrant legal action.

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Augean stables’ dwellers. A big job indeed. Source: http://marksadams.blogspot.com/2007/09/use-your-allusion-4-cleaning-augean.html

Big job. Google has about 650 patents. The candidates for alleged infringement must be reanalyzed in light of Google’s patent documents. Work and more work.

Let’s assume that one wants to read these 6,000 documents, figure out the technical issues, and perform the ranking of the Nortel patents most likely to be an issue for Google. The consortium can just be 1,000 patent attorneys and give each attorney six Nortel patents to read. Then each attorney can write a short opinion document and forward them to the legal team which can sift through the 6,000 pages of opinions.

An old fashioned approach to use traditional online commercial patent document service such as LexisDerwent or Questel, or poke around for a service such as Patents Online. The fact is that patent information is quite abundant. There is the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the USPTO. There are also abundant free sources as well; for example, Pat2PDF.org. Online research can help trim the document set down to size.

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Adobe, Customer Support, and Malarkey

July 1, 2011

Malarkey is, according to the Free Dictionary, “empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk; “that’s a lot of wind”; “don’t give me any of that jazz”. I learned the word from one of my grandparents who squeezed pennies until they screamed. Close watchers were they. Those folks knew rubbish. So do I.

I read an absolutely amazing write up  “The New Art and Science of Great Customer Experience.” I am breathless. No, I am stunned. The author is, according to the post by Eric Savitz (not the author) is written by Rob Tarkoff, a senior manager at Adobe. Now, when I hear Adobe, I don’t think, “customer service.” I think about a Web site that is tough to navigate, my numerous official Adobe user names, and the incredibly awful support for the product I use to write my mindless, vapid monographs—Framemaker.

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Come on, Adobe. Tell me how to set a custom color in Framemaker 9 and avoid generating every possible RGB value when I place a JPEG. Please, please, oh, Athena, please. Image source: Morguefile.

I do not think of Adobe and customer service, customer support, or customer anything. I think of annoying updates, ponderous PDF code, and an interface to Framemaker’s custom color controls that make me and my programmers weep in frustration.

Here’s the passage that got me thinking about customer support and search:

Some companies are taking the lead to provide true customer experience innovation. Smart brands are figuring out ways to extend the conversation beyond the purchase experience, creating new customer touch points by encouraging shoppers to share ideas and stories post sales on social sites such as My Starbucks Idea and Nike+. These brands are embracing new channels and new enterprise systems are being built to support them by discarding the constraints of past practices, architectures, and business models that inhibit true CEM.

Yikes, CEM or customer experience management. Wow. Oh, wow.

Today I think that word is just another bunch of baloney. Yep, ground mystery meat in a plastic tube is a good metaphor for “customer service” and its twin “customer experience”. I get the print version of Consumer Reports. One of the write ups in the July 2011 issue is “What’s Wrong with Customer Service?” I suppose this article is online, but for our purpose the article is a report based on what Consumer Reports’ readers perceived. The survey, like any whizzy 21st century mathercise can be distorted like a fun house mirror. Even though I am skeptical of surveys, the Consumer Reports’ data struck me as interesting for three reasons:

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The Portal Is Back: What Do You Love? Answer: 1998

June 28, 2011

I labor in the goose pond in the hollow in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. Time stands still in Harrod’s Creek. No joke. One can see walkers, bicyclists, and even horse riders in these parts. What did I see yesterday? A blast from the past: The “new” What Do You Love” service from the Google. If you have not heard about the site from the savvy folks in Silicon Valley—”Google Quietly Rolls Out WDYL.com: A Range of Google Product Results on One Page”—you definitely want to catch up with the Google. My goodness, there are so many informed sources available from prolific experts on other information centric Web sites, WDYL is going viral.

You can check out the service yourself, by navigating to http://www.wdyl.com. You will see a Yandex-style basic search box, sort of a reminder of the way things were at Google and now are at Yandex.

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Now run a query for Riemann Hypothesis, which is similar to the type of query that most people run when testing services in my experience. What does WDYL.com display? A mash up of frames that is a portal dressed up in a meat dress. These “containers” present “relevant” results for the user’s query. Here’s what I saw:

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A couple of points:

  • There were two empty containers. Yikes. I thought that Google would expand the semantic cloud in order to show close matches. Guess not in the case of “Riemann hypothesis.” So two null sets.
  • I did not find the offer to “translate” Riemann Hypothesis into 57 languages particularly helpful. Most people who care about the hypothesis recognize the string as it is presented in most of the math books I have examined, including the ones in Hong Kong in March. Yep, English worked, so another null set.
  • The photo album is interesting but not germane to my test query. The reason is that this “love” service is more of a demo than a useful and intelligent enhancement for my queries. I did like the mini version of an equation which when I clicked it did nothing. No link I suppose for those who like equations.
  • The maps container was a zero as well.

Here’s what I wanted to see in a Google container but did not:

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Note that the Yandex display provides a link to the Wikipedia write up which is okay with me. The main hit for me was this one:

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For me Yandex delivers on point search results quickly without the “controlled chaos” thing with the null sets, offers to show maps, and other ephemera. No wonder content free content is having such a Six Flags day at the Googleplex.

My initial take is, therefore, pretty much what I noted in the title to this post. Yep, it is 1998. As you may recall, Google rose to fame and fortune because search vendors were chasing the notion of a one stop shop or portal. Google perceives itself as sufficiently big to warrant its own portal.

I think the demo is interesting, but what strikes me is that as Google struggles to make coherent the outputs of controlled chaos, Yandex is chugging along poised to grow as Google loops back to the presentation idea that distracted Excite, Inktomi, Lycos, Yahoo and other search vendors in 1998.

Google exploited that distraction. Will Yandex do the same? Will Google react as did Yahoo in 1998? Exciting times in the world of content free content and empty containers.

Stephen E Arnold, June 28, 2011

From the leader in next-generation analysis of search and content processing, Beyond Search.

ROI, Google, and the Revenue Imperative

June 27, 2011

I had another conversation with the owner of a Web site which has been slammed by Google’s Panda updates. Google’s cash machine is based on an idea that originated at Idea Labs’ GoTo.com years ago. When GoTo.com made its début, I was interested in the impact of paying for traffic. It struck me in 1998 that relevance as defined by the university information retrieval PhDs was a gone goose. Forget precision and recall. Sell an advertiser a click which would be displayed on the screen of an “average Internet user.” Close enough for horse shoes. Most Web searchers in 2001 when GoTo.com was floating its secondary offering would not know how to figure out the provenance of a Web site. A search for “car rental” was good enough if it displayed links or ads to Avis or Hertz. Easy quick and, as I said, “Good enough.”

Flash forward to the world since Google. In the US, most consumers of digital information continue to struggle with figuring out if a hit is a straight arrow or bent like a bonsai tree.

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It sure looks natural, but the entire tree is artifice. The same applies to “free” Web search results and content.

You will be surprised to learn that I am not writing about Panda. I am writing about why Panda is important. Panda is designed to clean up the Google index so that ads [a] become more useful because lost in a Mississippi flood of clutter, advertisers grouse. And [b] Google is not having much success generating significant revenue from its other products and services. You don’t need me to point out that Android is predicated on Google having a bobsled run to display search results – actually ads – to the millions of mobile users. If you think determining provenance of an alleged “news story” or “white paper” is tough on a desktop device, the mobile device makes the exercise even more difficult. In fact, our work on The New Landscape of Search makes it clear that even for purpose built search systems, users are pretty inept when it comes to finding and knowing how to separate the knowledge goose feathers from the giblets. (I don’t remember who coined that memorable phrase.)

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Google and the Monetization Imperative

June 18, 2011

I found “Google Testing Yet Another Redesign, Kills I’m Feeling Lucky” another instance of “Wow, how can Google do that.” The write up reports a Google watcher spotting a page with no one click access to the top hit in a Google results list. The article told me:

Google Operating System has uncovered the image of Google’s Finnish site below and notes that the new redesign also kills the I’m Feeling Lucky button. Be honest – when was the last time you used it? Still – that button was one feature that helped make Google stand out from other late-90s search engines when it first launched.

I don’t think it is a matter of who used the “I’m feeling lucky” feature. The top hit displayed may no longer be the most relevant hit if it ever was. In the good old days of 1999, it was often a heck of a lot better than what I saw on the Lycos.com results list as I recall.

feeling lucky

Source: http://sirkfnv3.narod.ru/im-feeling-lucky.html

What the write up did not focus on was money. I look at moves like Google’s as a trigger to think about money, revenue, monetization, and related concepts.

And my working notion is that after slogging through usage reports from a number of vendors, traffic seems to be quite soft across many Web sites. Seasonality is expected in usage. Human behavior is wonderfully predictable in some interesting ways; for example, daily usage logs reflect similar patterns for each day of the week. The patterning is important, so if one knows what the patterns at each level are, one can maximize resources and figure out ways to monetize those behaviors. But the SEO poobahs are going to have to work overtime to pump up traffic, and I think that quite a few of these gurus and guruettes will be looking for their future elsewhere when the CFO blows the whistle on the financial impact of doing SEO when online ROI is cratering across a large number of Web sites.

The “I’m feeling lucky” button is one more artifact of the AltaVista.com style search that made Google the giant it is. However, Google is beavering away or Godzilla-ing away at the 1998 Cirripedia. The reasons, which I have in my List of Google Hypotheses for the Amappface Era (Amazon, Apple, and Facebook challenges) include:

  1. Google wants to maximize ad opportunities. Why send someone to another site when you can slap up an intermediate step and monetize that? As I noted in one of my really old Google studies, Google has methods to display another page whilst the user is still “on Google”, but those are most patent application confections, not the stuff of too much real world activity.
  2. The amount of time people spend on Facebook as compared to the amount of time people sp9end on Google favors Facebook. Why not choke off that one click thing which despite lower usage from users does erode “sticky time”?
  3. Google wants a new world now with mobile search as its key driver. There is a brave new world coming in which key word search is going to be moving from first class to the chicken-carting class on a railroad in some interesting area like the DC to NY run on Amtrak. Never seen a chicken on a train? Well, you will get the digital version in search pretty soon so you can make up for lost time. The new stuff positions Google for next generation search which is not the desktop, key word AltaVista stuff from 1996 and earlier. Voice, images, rich media—that’s a different kettle of monetizing opportunities. Who will pay for phone real time translation services? Answer: Lots of people.

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Java: The Bitter Brew for Google and Oracle

June 17, 2011

It is column time. I look forward to my write up about open source for Online Magazine. Open source is an interesting disruptor in the enterprise software sector. When my column appears the Oracle Java Google dust up will be over. Here are some thoughts on the matter.

The legal battle between Oracle and Google is heating up as Oracle brings in an economics expert to elevate their platform against Google. We first learned of the lawsuit late last summer when Computer World released the facts in their article, “Update: Oracle Sues Google over Java use in Android.” In short, Oracle charged Google with copyright infringements on their Java-related intellectual property.

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Does Oracle want to put a toll road on the information highway?

A little background: Oracle bought Sun Microsystems Java technology when it acquired the company early in 2010. If a software application is written in Java, it can be used on any computer that has a Java virtual machine installed. Google developed Android and its software was also Java compatible — called Dalvik . Google claims:

“Dalvik was developed as a “clean room” version of Java, meaning Google built it from the ground up without using any Sun technology or intellectual property.”

Oracle begs to differ; it’s been downhill for Google ever since — especially since Android has been so successful.

Ten months later and the plot thickens. Oracle’s demands in this lawsuit, despite the hush-hush nature of the negotiations, are clearly huge. Specific details aren’t known but it makes sense that if Oracle were going to go away quietly it would all have been settled months ago.

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ProQuest: A Typo or Marketing?

June 10, 2011

I was poking around with the bound phrase “deep indexing.” I had a briefing from a start up called Correlation Concepts. The conversation focused on the firm’s method of figuring out relationships among concepts within text documents. If you want to know more about Correlation Concepts, you can get more information from the firm’s Web site at http://goo.gl/gnBz6.

I mentioned to Correlation Concepts Dr. Zbigniew Michalewicz’s work in mereology and genetic algorithms and also referenced the deep extraction methods developed by Dr. David Bean at Attensity. I also commented on some of the methods disclosed in Google’s open source content. But Google has become less interesting to me as new approaches have become known to me. Deep extraction requires focus, and I find it difficult to reconcile focus with the paint gun approach Google is now taking in disciplines far removed from my narrow area of interest.

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A typo is a typo. An intentional mistake may be a joke or maybe disinformation. Source: http://thiiran-muru-arul.blogspot.com/2010/11/dealing-with-mistakes.html

After the interesting demo given to me by Correlation Concepts, I did some patent surfing. I use a number of tools to find, crunch, and figure out which crazily worded filing relates to other, equally crazily worded documents. I don’t think the patent system is much more than an exotic work of fiction and fancy similar to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Deep indexing is important. Key word indexing does not capture in some cases the “aboutness” of a document. As metadata becomes more important, indexing outfits have to cut costs. Human indexers are like tall grass in an upscale subdivision. Someone is going to trim that surplus. In indexing, humans get pushed out for fancy automated systems. Initially more expensive than humans, the automated systems don’t require retirement, health care, or much management. The problem is that humans still index certain content better than automated systems. Toss out high quality indexing and insert algorithmic methods, and you get search results which can vary from indexing update to indexing update.

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Varieties of Open Source Search: Just Like Soup?

June 6, 2011

Search is a commodity. Vendors are rushing to become the Wal-Mart and Costco of information retrieval. Free, discounts, bundles, and more!

Paul Anthony, at www.WebDistortion.com’s published “Open Source Search Engines Every Developer Should Know About”. In the write up he describes four open source search systems:

The list is useful but it is not complete. Open source search “products” are available from a number of vendors. One of our favorites is the Tesuji Anacleto system from Budapest. Tesuji powers Project Gutenberg.

In the WebDistortion essay, we learned:

…Typically search is one of the most poorly implemented pieces of technology on a site, with developers opting for the standard the out of the box solution which comes with most modern content management systems – and in many cases doesn’t do justice to your content. I thought I’d take a look at what other enterprise level and open source search engines out there to find and index the information on your site faster, and provide users with a deeper, more relevant result set.

Our view at Beyond Search is that open source software is disruptive but in quite specific ways. Open source search is disruptive is ways that fit into the broader open source software activity but quite particularized in its impact.

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Is open source search like a food commodity? Image source: http://goo.gl/H4TMy

It seems that a number of companies are embracing open source search in order to sidestep licensing costs from certain commercial vendors, get a marketing angle, and focus scarce development resources on “wrappers” or “enhancements” to the open source core.

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