The Risks of Personalized Search
October 28, 2009
Most online users are lousy searchers. These individuals don’t agree. In my research, In a study at a major trade association in July 2009, my team learned that most of the individuals in our sample perceived their search skills as excellent or superior. The perception that search is a slam dunk is widespread. The reality, of course, is that most people rely on public Web search systems. When it comes to locating data for a business decision, the actual work processes observed reveal inefficient and largely manual work methods. I was thinking about this interesting situation when I read about Google’s new real time and social search system. If you are unfamiliar with this “to be” service, navigate to the Google blog and read “Introducing Google Social Search.”
I think that the service can be quite useful for some types of research. On the other hand, I see three risks associated with this type of service:
First, users who think they are great searchers will rely on “recipes” (systems and methods) to deliver information tailored to their needs as determined by software agents. In short, the clueless will have no clue what their query has been interpreted to mean. The clueless searcher will get results and assume that their search expertise has returned exactly what the user wanted. Wrong. The smart system returns what the algorithms determine the user wanted. Perception is one thing; reality is another.
Second, searchers with confidence in their search skills often overlook the reality that sources may or may not be correct. Not even Google’s smart software can deliver phone numbers that match an organization’s current phone number. Even more egregious errors exist within any result set. Users who lack basic search skills are likely to accept information in a results list at face value. Users lack a foundation in determining what is reliable and what is not.
Third, training wheels in smart systems—whether in Bing.com’s slick new product displays or Google’s semiautonomous agents—foster users’ confidence in their search skills. Users don’t know what they don’t know, and the false sense of confidence can get some people in hot water. I recall reading about a person following a Google Map into a pond. The information from the search system took precedence over the fact that the maps were wrong.
i don’t know how to fix this mismatch between a user’s search expertise and the user’s perception of his or her search expertise. Schools are not doing much to educate users about online. In the meantime, the trade press happily ignores these and other risks of personalized search systems that shift the burden of knowing how to find accurate information from the user to software. Risky in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2009
No pay, no way.
Online Pricing Twist
October 28, 2009
When I read something, I remember chunks of the information. I don’t think too much about how my memory works. I know that in high school, I would look at a test question, have zero idea of the answer, and then I would recall what I read. Weird. Even today I can dredge up chunks of information about Nero’s alleged murder of his mom and the bits of junk floating inside a paramecium. Saved my bacon lots of times. For me, the idea of “renting” information is peculiar. Once I read it or “see”, I have it.
What caused me to think of this mental quirk was the article “.” You can read about this information service at http://www.deepdyve.com. The idea, as I understand it, is:
DeepDyve’s new online rental service builds on our initial research platform. Using DeepDyve you can access a wide selection of more than 30 million articles from thousands of journals, all in one place. As of today you can read the full-text of many journal articles for as little as $0.99, or join a monthly plan and enjoy greater discounts and increased flexibility. Renting the articles is easy. All you need is a PayPal account. DeepDyve also has plenty of robust research tools and personalized recommendations that are there to foster your discovery of the science, technical and medical topics that interest you.
The business model is not dissimilar from that offered by Ebsco, one of the giants in the field of aggregated information, or Highbeam, among others. The twist is the notion of a “rental”. Renting in my mind applies to automobiles, apartments, and sidewalk edgers.
My concern with online business models is that most of them are not really new. Google emulated the third party payer model, which is different from the method of most commercial information companies. LexisNexis wants me to pay, and I won’t do that any more. Is DeepDyve breaking new ground or doing some clever marketing? The good news is that the company is making an effort to differentiate itself. When I read something – rental, fee, or just browsing in an airport newsstand – I capture the information which makes monetizing my behaviors more difficult.
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2009
i wish I had been paid. I would have settled for a donut.
Baidu: Gets the Yahoo Panama Flu
October 28, 2009
I don’t want to make too much of the Baidu goof. The company indicated that its new ad platform has caused the firm to stub its toe. You can read the explanation in “Baidu’s Rare Stumble Offers Google Opportunities” and get the scoop. Last week I was asked to provide a breakdown of Google’s technical investment in its ad platform. I turned to my patent document analysis and reported that Google has continued to invest in the plumbing and numerical recipes that fuel its third party payer system. No big surprise to me. Ad revenue makes up 98 percent of the firm’s revenue. Even Google knows that it has to baby this system or Googzilla will shrivel up and die. What struck me is that Baidu has Panama flu. As you may recall, Yahoo’s oh-so-confident technologists promised that Yahoo’s new ad platform would enable the company to compete better with Google. Panama finally wobbled out of the starting gate after years in gestation. Yahoo continued to fall behind the Google. Now Baidu shows similar symptoms. What these two examples communicate to me is that Google’s ad platform is in place and working. The Google upgrades that platform with regular injections of wizardry and so far has not caught the Panama flu. Maybe the online ad systems are more tricky than some engineers believe. Now Baidu’s misstep may give Google a pry bar to use in the China market?
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2009
Not even a dog treat for Tess for this write up.
Internet Laws Revisited
October 27, 2009
I am an old, addled goose. I read “Internet Rules and Laws: The Top 10, from Godwin to Poe”. I was puzzled. The laws struck me as an odd mix of CollegeHumor.com and an Onion article. The source was the Telegraph, a newspaper that is printed on very large sheets of paper. The Web site’s bread crumbs indicated that the story was News and tagged Technology. I understand the Internet is a buzzword used without definition. Technology makes the Internet chug along. The laws indicate that the Internet is a pretty miserable place. In fact, one law—Rule 34—converts information into pornography. Nice.
Here are three observations from the Beyond Search regulatory archive:
- The business processes of the Internet will erode the revenues of traditional publishing and information companies.
- The children of traditional publishing company executives use tools, software, services, and systems that undermine the efforts of their parents to prevent such erosion.
- The Internet has given birth to a “digital Gutenberg” that marginalizes traditional publishing and information companies.
Unlike the Telegraph’s story, I am not joking.
Stephen Arnold, October 27, 2009
Lawyers, Content and Business Savvy
October 26, 2009
I enjoyed “Lawyers Discussing Business Models.” You may find it interesting. TechDirt does a good job of deconstructing a podcast about business models in which no business people participated. Sure, some of these folks work in commercial organizations, but the lawyers are overhead, not the individuals who have to make sales and make the business work. One comment I noted was:
The last analysis I’ll talk about that is again faulty from an economics standpoint again comes from Scott Martin at Paramount, where he tries to defend the importance of DRM, noting that if he flies into JFK he has various price options on transportation: he can buy a car, rent a car, take a cab or take a train. So there are price differentials. He says that without DRM, content is like saying his only option is to buy a car. That is, if he had DRM, they could offer different “rental options” for content, with “one day pricing or one week pricing.” But that’s totally wrong again. There’s a reason for the differential pricing in the transportation options: it’s related to the marginal cost of each option and the competitiveness of the market. That’s what sets the prices. But with content, the marginal costs are zero, so what he’s doing is trying to set up an artificial barrier to pretend the markets are the same. While I like listening to these discussions, I just find the economic fallacies frustrating.
TechDirt and I are on the same page. Lawyers make money by finding angles within the legal system and charging for time. Pretty exciting stuff, just not the business model that works in an online environment or for most business organizations yet.
Stephen Arnold, October 26, 2009
No one paid me to write this. I am safe from the Railway Retirement Board’s oversight of bloggers. I think.
Charging Backward by Charging for Content
October 25, 2009
In my years in the commercial online business, I learned a few things the hard way. When I got rolling in the commercial database business, there were few examples of proven money making methods from digital content. As a result, one had to do some thinking, devise tests, and then go forward. Today there are some models to examine. For example, the idea of the third party payer is a useful one. Originated by GoTo.com (I think), Google looked at the model and used it as the lifeblood of its revenue approach. Another model is what’s called “must have” information. A lawyer engaged in patent litigation knows the USPTO system is less than perfect. Commercial services such as those available from Derwent and Questel provide an alternative but an expensive one. In fact, these services are sufficiently costly to keep most online users in the dark about what the services contain and how they work.
This is an image of Stephen E Arnold when he worked at a traditional publishing company. The environment and the business processes created a case study in the nature vs nurture debate.
One lesson I learned was that an online company has to find a mix of business methods that produce revenue. There is no one size that fits all. Even the Google is pursuing subscriptions, license fees, and partner upfront payments as ways to keep the money pumping.
This is a picture of Stephen E. Arnold when he focused exclusively on electronic publishing. His Neanderthal characteristics have become less evident.
It is, therefore, not surprising that publishing companies want to charge for content. What I find interesting is that some of the publishers are taking a somewhat war like stance to what is little more than a business problem. For example, read “WSJ Editor: Those Who Believe Content Should Be Free Are Neanderthals”. The idea that I took away from this article is that ad hominen arguments are in vogue. I am not sure that I am upset with the possibility that I am prehistoric.
The question I had when reading the article was, “Why are publishers so late to the pay for content party?”
I know that publishers have been trying to crack the online revenue code for a long time. I was a beta tester of the original Dow Jones desktop software. The idea was that I could use the software to search for content on the fledgling Dow Jones service in the 1990s. The Wall Street Journal is still trying. In fact, a person with whom I spoke last week told me, “Dow Jones is the only publisher making money from its online service.” That’s not true. One of the most successful online publishing companies is Thomson Reuters. Others include Reed Elsevier and Consumer Reports.
MySpace: Keep Moving or Fall Behind
October 24, 2009
I don’t pay much attention to MySpace.com. When I looked at the service years ago, I was amazed with the graphics and weird interface. The fact that some demographic segments found the service useful made me happy that I was old. I thought I should pay attention to “MySpace Stopped Innovating Says News Corp.’s Jonathan Miller”. The write up promised a flash of insight about the dog eat dog world of social network services. For me the most significant statement in the write up was:
Miller [a MySpace executive] said, “Everybody in the company is upset that we didn’t keep going when we had the real momentum. Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going.”
Has News Corp. learned a lesson after school was closed for summer vacation? The changes in any online service must be meaningful. In my experience the changes must increase a service’s magnetism. No change or the incorrect change repels users. My view is that MySpace.com may have its magnetic poles flipped.
Stephen Arnold, October 24, 2009
A New Page in Google Books
October 23, 2009
Short honk: How do I know Google Books is important to Google? One clue is available when I look at the inventors of Google’s scanning technology, systems, and methods. Take a gander at US7,605,844, “Imaging Opposing Bound Pages at High Speed Using Multiple Cameras”. granted on October 20, 2009 and filed in November 2003. The inventor? Larry Page. Here’s the abstract:
Systems and methods for capturing images of opposing pages in a bound document at high speed using multiple cameras are disclosed. The system generally includes a cradle preferably tilted toward an operator for holding a bound document having two opposing sides, and two cameras each positioned to capture an image of a corresponding side, each camera having an image capture size approximately the size of each side. The cameras may be high definition and store images via direct high speed data communication interfaces, e.g., firewire. A controller and/or foot pedal may provide control of the cameras. The controller may control flashes to selectively light each side simultaneous with each camera capturing the image of the corresponding side. A positioner may position a light-absorbing page between opposing sides.
My research suggests that the inventions of Google founders are significant, acting like beacons in a sea of innovations. In short, Google Books is an important project.
Stephen Arnold, October 22, 2009
No dough from the Google for this write up.
IBM Has Cloudy Day with Air New Zealand
October 17, 2009
With cloud computing getting attention, the SiliconValley.com story “Air New Zealand Boss Lands Hard on IBM” provides one view of what a customer perceives when service goes out. The quote below is attributed to Air New Zealand CEO Rob Fyfe:
In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologize to its client and its client’s customers… We were left high and dry and this is simply unacceptable. My expectations of IBM were far higher than the amateur results that were delivered yesterday, and I have been left with no option but to ask the IT team to review the full range of options available to us to ensure we have an IT supplier whom we have confidence in and one who understands and is fully committed to our business and the needs of our customers.
IBM is expanding its cloud services. Most recently it announced a low-cost alternative for email positioned to compete with such services from Google.
Stephen Arnold, October 17, 2009
Youth, the Web, and the Coming Work Process Upheaval
October 17, 2009
The BBC reported that 75 percent of young people in a survey sample cannot live without access to the Web. “Youth ‘Cannot Live’ without Web” included this comment, which I found interesting:
Probably the middle-aged are the most vulnerable,” said Open University psychologist Graham Jones. “I think children, teenagers and people under their mid-20s have grown up with technology and they understand it deeply,” he said.
As young people move into the work force, these individuals will bring different views, behaviors, and work methods. Established institutions face significant external pressures from financial, regulatory, competitive and technical externalities. Now virtually any organization adding young staff will find internal pressures increasing when new work methods collide with established work processes. This is not flattening or converging. This is a significant reshaping of the way certain types of work will be performed. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 17, 2009
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