Bing and Fail Over
July 4, 2009
Short honk: I had high hopes for Bing.com and its next generation, high availability data centers. The addled goose is inspecting goose ponds 4,000 miles from Harrods Creek and was not able to access Bing.com’s travel vertical. The goose thought he was at fault. I then read “Seattle Data Center Fire Knocks out Bing Travel, Other Web Sites” and learned that others were at fault. Whew. New acronym need: MGOL or Microsoft Goes Off Line.
Stephen Arnold, July 4, 2009
Performance Fireworks: Microsoft Fast Fizzles, Google Explodes
July 4, 2009
I was sitting in an airport, and I clicked on a link for Microsoft Fast ESP. A video ran and presented me with a couple of professional fellows talking about Microsoft Fast search. The video was interesting, but I went back and snagged one screen frame from the presentation because it struck me as a way to explain the distance between the performance of Microsoft Fast and the performance of Google’s system. Now performance data for search systems is a murky area. I don’t want to get into a squabble about something being five times faster. The difference here makes a point, and I will leave it to Googlers and Microsofties to post corrected performance data in the Comments section of this Web log, assuming those companies’ professionals have time to read the thoughts of the addled goose.
First, the Microsoft data. Here’s the screenshot, and I want you to notice that the performance that is presented is five to 20 queries per second. That is pretty modest for a performance threshold even for a Microsoft team in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I have heard the pace of life is on par with Harrod’s Creek.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kTbcCNby8xE
I ask you to click here to look at the performance data I calculated for Google. The key point is that if the Google data are reasonably accurate, the Google is cranking along about about 1,700 queries per second. Even Yahoo appears to perform better than Microsoft Fast. See my write up here.
That’s a big gap. Assume the Google data are off by a factor of four. The Google is handling 400 queries per second. If we boost the Microsoft Fast performance by a factor of four to 20 queries per second to 80 queries per second, the Google appears to be the speed demon.
If you want performance fireworks, my thought is that the Google is the fire cracker if the data are correct.
Stephen Arnold, July 4, 2009
Concept Searching Update
July 3, 2009
Founded in 2002, Concept Searching provides licensees with search, auto-classification, taxonomy management and metadata tagging solutions. You can download a fact sheet about the privately firm here. The software can be used on an individual user’s computer or mounted on servers to deliver enterprise solutions. The company’s secret sauce is its statistical metadata generation and classification method. The technology uses concept extraction and compound term processing to facilitate access to unstructured information. The company operates from Stevenage in Hertsfordshire. A list of the Concept Searching offices is here.
The company emphasizes the value of lateral thinking, and its approach to content analysis implements numerical recipes to find these insights and linkages within unstructured text.
When I updated my profile for this company earlier this year, I noted that the firm had signed Portal Solutions, a company that focuses on things Microsoft. The idea is to make it possible for a user to search for “insider dealing” and retrieve documents where that bound phrase does not appear but a related phrase such as “insider trading” does appear. This type of system appeals to intelligence officers and financial analysts. Concept Searching’s methods generated lists of related topics. You can see an example of the system in action by navigating to this page. I ran several test queries and the interface provided useful information and suggestions about other related content in the processed corpus. A screen shot of the output appears below:
Concept Searching is a Microsoft and Fast Search partner. The idea is that Concept Searching’s technology complements and in some cases extends the search and content processing services in Microsoft products. In May 2009, the company sponsored a best practices site for Microsoft SharePoint. The deal involves a number of companies, including ShemaLogic, KnowlegeLake, and K2 Technologies among others. The site is supposed to go live in the next couple of weeks, but I don’t have a url or a date at this time.
The company had a busy May, signing deals with Allianz Global Investors, Directory, and AT&T Government Solutions.
For me, the most interesting system that Concept Searching offers is its ability to generate and classify terms found in SharePoint documents into a taxonomy. The company has prepared a brief video that demonstrates this functionality. You can find the video here. The company’s approach does not require a separate index. Microsoft Enterprise Search can use the outputs of the Concept Searching system. I noted two “uniques” in the narrative to the video, and I remain skeptical about categorical affirmatives. I think the bound phrase extraction and the close integration with SharePoint are benefits. I just bristle when I hear “unique”, which means the one and only anywhere in the world. Broad assertion in my experience.
Concept Searching’s president, Martin Garland, said here:
Our intellectual property is still unique as we are the only statistical search technology able to indentify multi-word patterns within text and insert these patterns directly into the index at ingestion or creation time. We call this “Compound Term Processing”.
Last week I sat in a briefing given by one of Microsoft’s enterprise search team. I thought I heard descriptions of functions that struck me as quite similar to those performed by Concept Search and such companies as Interse in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I think it will be fruitful to watch what features and functions are baked into the upcoming Microsoft Fast ESP version of the old Fast Search & Transfer system. Remember: the roots of Fast Search stretch deep to 1997, a year before Google poked its nose from the Stanford baby crib.
Partners like Concept Searching have invested significant resources in Microsoft technologies. Will Microsoft respect these investments, or will Microsoft in an effort to recoup is $1.23 billion investment take a hard line toward such companies as Concept Searching.
I am on the fence regarding this issue.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
UFC 2010: HTML 5, Air, and Silverlight
July 3, 2009
Mary Jo Foley opened my eyes to a new unlimited online fighting battle in 2010. Her story with a lamentably cryptic headline appeared on June 11, 2009 as “Microsoft .Net RIA Services: Not until 2010.” You can find the article here. He story revealed that Microsoft will try to push its Rich Internet Application technology into the market in 2010. She wrote:
.Net RIA Services is designed to allow coders to bring together the .Net programming model with Microsoft’s Silverlight competitor to Adobe Flash. Microsoft made a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the technology available in March, but didn’t provide any final availability information.
The RIA acronym means stuff like Adobe Flash and Google’s HTML 5 methods. The idea is that a computing device with an Internet connection can look and feel like a traditional application, a DVD player, or an immersive game. The end of shrink-wrap software and the money machine that made Microsoft and Adobe the big dogs each is today is likely to whine and stumble to a limp along, not a footrace.
I want to capture my thoughts about the dust up:
- I think Adobe is the weakest of the three combatants in the UFC 2010 digital slugfest. Adobe’s pushing the envelope with its license fees now. The sudden spate of security problems coupled with the balky nature of some Adobe Air implementations means that whatever cash Adobe has will not be enough to cope with the GOOG and the Softies.
- The Google team has a quasi-open source angle. The Microsoft team wants everyone to get with the Windows agenda, memorize it, and live it. This is a toss up because Google has been stumbling of late with regard to security, government regulations, and that old annoyance copyright. Microsoft is Microsoft, so it is a force no matter how wacky the Silverlight code may be.
- The financial climate, despite the sunny news from TV commentators, looks bleak to me. As a result, each of these UFC 2010 fighters will be ready to rumble. I think fingers in the eyes, low blows, and blows to the back of the neck will be entertaining tactics to watch.
In short, Ms. Foley reminded me to make time in 2010 for this traveling road show.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
Selling Bing: Great Expectorations
July 2, 2009
I was not going to comment on the vomit and porn advertisement for Microsoft. Nasty stuff. I want to point you, gentle reader, to the Register’s “Microsoft Distances Self from IE 8 Puke Ads.” Gavin Clark wrote:
Microsoft told Cnet’s Chris Matyszczyk: “While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it.” The ad was one of four in Microsoft’s Better Browser campaign of spoof 1950s informercials, and the point was to promote IE 8’s private browsing feature.
Impressive creative and remarkable rationalization. However, keep in mind that this is a company that bought a search vendor involved in an ongoing police investigation that has now seeped to the accounting firm validating the Fast Search financials. Par for the course. I wonder if Microsoft Fast works as well as the actress’s faux expectoration? Probably not a question I wish to explore. I think I will run a query on Bing.com for “management judgment.” Isn’t this ad the Dickens?
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
Bing.com Tweets
July 2, 2009
Short honk: I noticed on July 1, 2009, that Bing.com has begun adding Twitter messages to its search results. The Google looks a bit flat footed in this area, although Google Wave was a good demo. Bing. Is it the real thing? You can find more information in IT Pro’s “Bing Integrates Twitter Data into Search”.
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
Great Google Quote
July 2, 2009
Short honk: The Christian Science Monitor snagged a great Google quote from the lips of Eric Schmidt. The quote appeared in “Bing Nothing to Worry about, Yet” here.
Mr. Schmidt allegedly said:
“Google is about getting all the information and organizing it,” he said. “Yahoo has a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well.
Let’s see. If Google gets “all” information, what’s left for the Redmond crowd and the Yahooligans. Logically, the addled goose thinks, nothing.
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2009
Bing.com Search Share
July 1, 2009
Short honk: I relished the write up in Digital Trends about Microsoft’s share of the Web search market. The title of the article was “Bing Boosts Microsoft Search Share One Percent.” The data were interesting, but the segment I liked was:
Globally, Microsoft also saw gains from Bing’s debut, seeing its share of global Internet search jump from 3.08 percent in April to 3.30 percent in June; however, most of that gain appears to have come at Yahoo’s expense, which saw its global share decline from 5.48 percent to 5.15 percent over the same period. Google almost completely dominates the global search market, with a share of 89.80 percent.
Progress but the “dominates” was amusing.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
Microsoft Plumbing: Big Online Facility in Big Shoulder Territory
June 30, 2009
The Microsoft data center news keeps on swirling in my Overflight intel system. Patrick Thibodeau’s “Microsoft to Open Two Mall Sized Data Centers” levered my interest. Computer World reported:
Microsoft Corp. on Monday said it is preparing to flip the switch on what will eventually be more than 1 million square feet of data center space in two facilities, one in Chicago, the other in Dublin, Ireland. These centers will house hundreds of thousands of servers to help support the company’s Bing search engine and other online services.
Google does not provide this type of detail about its plumbing. My hunch is that Google doesn’t want to help anyone figure out how much the company invests in infrastructure and Google may not want to get tangled in a “who has the bigger facility” argument with its competitors, azure chip consultants, and besmirched MBAs seeking a commission from stock churn.
The numbers reported in the Computer World article stunned this addled goose. For example:
The Chicago center, which opens July 20 and is now said to be 700,000 square feet in size, will use containers that can be the size of tractor-trailers, with 1,800 to 2,500 servers each. The first phase of the Chicago center to go live has more than 50 parking stalls for shipping containers, which Microsoft said can be wheeled in and installed in hours. The facility’s second floor will have server racks.
Now that is a lot of Windows servers. Imagine the configuration work required to set these up, verify that the ever wonderful SQL Server clusters are running like clockwork, ensure that the fail over does not fail, and test to make sure that back ups actually restore.
Chicago has nuclear power generation facilities. That’s a plus. This data center is likely to consume more electricity than Blue Island. “Just Bing it” has new meaning to the executives at Exelon Corp.
Stephen Arnold, June 30, 2009
SharePoint and Social Computing
June 29, 2009
You will want to read “Social Computing in the Enterprise. Microsoft Vision for Business Leaders”. You can download the Microsoft white paper from the SharePoint Web site. What makes this paper most intriguing is that it plops into the gap between the hyperbole about social computing and the information I saw this week that most business executives don’t do Web logs or other types of social computing. You can get a general sense of this somewhat surprising state of affairs in Computerworld’s “Top CEOs Still Shunning Twitter, Facebook”.
I don’t think Microsoft wrote its white paper in response to the news that CEOs “shun Twitter”. I think Microsoft wants to position SharePoint as a social operating system. The white paper employs routine rhetorical methods to create a need for a SharePoint solution. SharePoint, by the way, is not positioned as complex. Other approaches are complex. See page 10 for more along this line:
This complexity makes it difficult to apply traditional structured project management and collaboration solutions. Social computing can help optimize the performance of teams by adding a dimension of unstructured collaboration. This provides a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogs and authentic, spontaneous conversations between people in previously isolated areas of the company that can expose best practices—and call attention to inefficiencies and duplication—more rapidly.
So, SharePoint as a social operating system. Two references to the word “search”. I wonder what happened to the potent relationship mapping tools in Fast ESP. Any thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
