Visual View of Search History
September 21, 2009
A happy quack to the team of readers who sent me a link to the Firefox add in, History Tree 1.1. Now these are sharp readers who know that my honks about visualization make clear that gratuitous interface elements ruffle my feathers. I loaded the History Tree and found that it provided a quick and easy way to locate specific Web pages I had visited.
The Firefox add in is available from the Firefox splash page for the software. You can get more information and a one click install button from Normansolomon.org. Useful, not gratuitous, and evidence that there is a better way to deal with history files. I also like it when two bright people tag team what I cover in this Web log. I bet both are pretty good at finding information and keeping addled geese like me in formation.
Stephen Arnold, September 21, 2009
Former Intel Operative Tackles Real Time Search
September 21, 2009
I had a long talk with Robert Steele, OSS.net, the other day. He is going to deliver a hard hitting talk at the upcoming ‘Change 2010 Responding to Real Time Information, Open Systems and the Obama IT Vision’ seminar in Washington, DC, on September 23, 2009. As I understood his point of view, he wants to make clear the value of the flows of open source information that are now available. The challenge is to pipe some of this content into government agencies so that decision making is more informed. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but he wants to reference some important innovations from Europe that are not widely known in the US.
The venue for the program is the National Press Club. Other speakers on the program, sponsored by Somat Engineering (an 8A firm based in Detroit, Michigan) is the sponsor of the program. Somat’s Arpan Patel will talk about bridging the gap between government infrastructure and external information and services. He will showcase the Ripply software tool. The other speaker on the program is Jim Orris, one of the managing partners of Adhere Solutions. Adhere is a focal point for Google’s US government initiatives. Mr. Orris will talk about how the Google technology can be used as a mechanism to process real time content.
Representatives of the Executive Branch, Department of Defense, other government agencies, and consulting firms supporting government agencies will be in attendance. For more information, navigate to the registration page here. Members of the media may register by writing Pacific Dialogue.
Stephen Arnold, September 21, 2009
Open Source Costs: A Contrarian View
September 20, 2009
I am skeptical about broad generalizations about “costs” and even more doubtful about “cheap”. My radar lights up when I see these terms applied to software and systems. If you don’t know how to get into your child’s Facebook.com account, the cost of hacking into the system can be pretty high, especially if you have to hire a person with a particular technical capability to accomplish what seems to be a trivial objective. There is a non linearity in software costs that most people don’t want to know about. Unfortunately when these “costs” become visible, the ensuing excitement can lead to staff turnover or big problems for the organization who found “a certain blindness” more desirable that clear sightedness.
When I read “Open Source Is the Freedom of Choice, Not Necessarily the Cheaper Option,” my microwave detector beeped. For me, the key point in the write up seemed to be:
Admittedly Open Source can be cheaper if you think of the code itself not costing anything. However nothing is free, time and therefore money will have been spent creating and modifying that code. To have adequate technical support and installation businesses should be prepared to value the product and the support provided. With Open Source you have the freedom of choice. You can choose to look at the online documentation and the wealth of technical books out there to implement what you need, you can also choose to support the Open Source Product. Or you can choose to hire an experienced professional (or even pay for training in house) to implement and support the product for you. Saying a product is cheaper can be interpreted that the product is somehow lesser than the competition. I do not feel that this is always the case, superior products can develop from close contact between developers and their clients. This is the value add that Open Source can bring to the table.
The author is not a coder, so if he / she were involved in either a proprietary or open source project, the “cost” of getting the system to work depends on the time and the billing rate of the people involved, the cost of lost opportunity, and the expense of any infrastructure or gizmos required to make the system work in a way somewhat proximate to the system specification.
Open source eliminates a license fee. The problem is that license fees for some mainstream systems in search are declining. One big software company has included an industrial strength search system with other software products. In effect, the licensing fee for the search and content processing system is zero because it is buried in other elements on the invoice.
My view is that the folks with technical expertise can save some money on both open source and proprietary software. The clueless—regardless of whether the software is open source or proprietary—will pay almost the same to get their system running, customizing it, and optimizing it for the organization’s specific needs. Just my opinion. The key drivers in cost boils down the capabilities of the individuals involved in a project.
Stephen Arnold, September 20, 2009
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Connotate Tag Line
September 20, 2009
A reader sent me a link to a Web site because it contained the phrase “beyond search”. We checked. The Beyond Search’s goslings were delighted to find the Connotate logo and its tag line, which was new to us. the screenshot below presents the logo in context. The tag line is “Beyond Search”.
Here’s a larger snap of the logo and the tag line:
My recollection is that Connotate’s use of the phrase “beyond search” is nothing new. But at our Saturday morning meeting (yes, I know, Saturday morning, sigh), some lively honking took place about the “ownership” of this phrase. Since my use of the phrase is a marketing ploy, I can’t get too excited. One of the goslings did quack at me about this. Boring.
I know that I did not think up the phrase “beyond search”. My recollection is that someone reviewing the draft of the study I wrote for the Gilbane Group suggested the phrase to me. My hunch is that the idea came from Ulla de Stricker, my long time wonderful colleague and unrelenting critic in Toronto. Anyway, the title “Beyond Search” appeared on my January 2009 monograph. The full title of that study is “Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work”. Believe me, quite a few enterprise search systems do not work. Licensees have limited options to get out of the swamp. Buy the book to find a route to safety. You can get information about the analysis of a couple dozen vendors’ next-generation search systems on the Gilbane Group Web site.
Prior to the publication of the book in 2008, I decided to use the phrase “Beyond Search” for this Web log, diary, and digest of my opinions / thoughts about search, content processing, and related subjects. I am delighted with the persona of the addled goose, the feathered friend whose voice dominates the more than 3,000 Web log posts.
In fact, I wrote a profile Connotate in my Beyond Search study. I found the firm’s system potentially useful, but the company had a low profile and was, in my opinion, navigating in the rough waters of real time business intelligence, a Bermuda triangle for some firms. That particular segment is a tough one. Within the last month, two services I used—TechFuga.com and Doggdot.us—seem to have sunk. The quality of the hits in other systems I monitor has begun to be affected by the increasing noise in the real time streams.
If you run the query “beyond search” on Google as I did a moment ago, you will find that this Web log is the top hit. I canned the listings on the first two pages of results and did not see a link to Connotate. My hunch is that the Connotate Web site is going to have to beef up its SEO attractiveness. Their site does not appear high in the Google results listing for this particular query.
The goslings checked out the Connotate Web site and noticed a blog and a podcast. The most recent posting was interesting because it touched upon Twitter. The content, however, focused on using Twitter as a tool, not as a content or intelligence source. This puzzled me. Connotate is in the business of processing streams to extract information. My hope was to read a blog post about how Connotate could make the Tweet stream immediately and directly useful in business intelligence.
That’s how one moves beyond search in my opinion. A company’s technology needs to wrestle the streams of content to the ground and put them in a Rear Naked Choke.
One cannot win in the information processing wars by writing about uses of streams; one wins by converting the streams to actionable intelligence at a low cost, in near real time, across multiple languages. That’s how one moves “beyond search” in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, September 20, 2009
European Search Vendor Table Update 1
September 16, 2009
I received a number of emails this morning, and I want to update the European search vendor league table. Omissions obviously are my fault. I will try to make adjustments going forward, putting the updates into the base table in my Web log. I have added the following entries to the table that appears at this location in Beyond Search. This series is in reverse alphabetical order as a consequence of my cutting and pasting from the master table.
| Vendor | Function | Opinion |
| Lumur Consulting | Flax is a robust enterprise search system | I have written positively about this system. Continues to improve with each release of the open source engine. |
| Interse | SharePoint metatag plug in | Based in Copenhagen, the Interse system adds useful access functions to SharePoint |
| InfoFinder | Full featured enterprise search system | My contact in Europe reports that this is a European technology. Listed customers are mostly in Norway. |
Of this group, I want to point out that I was favorably impressed with the FLAX system. I arranged with Incisive, the owner of the December international online show, to get Lemur Consulting on the program of this year’s show. The talk will be an important one, and if you are attending the show in December 2009, be sure to catch the Lemur Consulting session. The company is profitable and growing using an open source business model.
Interse is another player in the very crowded SharePoint metatagging sector. What’s interesting is that Copenhagen is home to two companies which offer products that, on the surface, share some similarities: Interse and the puzzling SurfRay. It will be interesting to see which Danish horse wins the Copenhagen SharePoint Derby. I met the management team of Interse several years ago, and that group struck me as quite adept and gifted with a laser focus. I have a contact now with InfoFinder, and I will endeavor to get more information.
One person who contacted me wanted me to include Google’s European research centers. Another wanted me to list Israeli companies. For my purposes, Hungary is about as far east as I want to go with this first list.
If a reader knows of any other systems I have inadvertently overlooked, please, write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com or use the comments section of this Web log. If a reader or readers want to work with me to build a more extensive list of European search and content processing vendors, please, contact me. I will post the master list in the Web log so we have a single place to see what is underway outside the myopic vision of the azure chip consulting crowd in the US.
Stephen Arnold, September 16, 2009
Forbes Taps Belief Networks for Semantics
September 15, 2009
Their are a number of what I would call publisher-centric information services. Examples range from Relegence.com (a unit of AOL, formerly Time Warner) to DayLife.com (funded in part by the New York Times Co.). Another outfit is Belief Networks. The Beyond Search team learned last week that Forbes.com will be using technology from Belief Networks, which specializes in semantic intelligence and predictive analytics, to power advanced search on its Web site. Belief Networks packages set up a semantic search that returns relevant advertising and content listings, including real-time social network entries and Twitter conversations. Forbes says it’s trying to “enrich” the web site experience and “engage” its readers. People go to Forbes.com looking for up-to-date or even before-the-date money- and business-focused topic matter. That’s why Forbes is looking to upgrade reader access to real time discovery and tracking of both structured and unstructured content. The Belief Networks’ method reminded us of the original Oingo service (which changed its name to Applied Semantics). Google acquired Oingo / Applied Semantics and made good use of the technology in a number of Google services. Perhaps Forbes will enjoy a similar Googley success?
Jessica Bratcher, September 15, 2009
Australian Publisher in Bid to Get His Own Chapter in Bartlett’s Quotations
September 13, 2009
What outstanding phraseology. Amazing quotes. You can read a summary in “Publisher: Time to pay up, Google”. Let me give you two examples, but, please, buy a hard copy of the Daily Telegraph Australia. I cannot do justice to this wonderful material.
Quote 1 allegedly crafted by APN News & Media chief executive Brendan Hopkins:
“We don’t need to be reborn, we just need to be paid properly for what we do,” Mr Hopkins told the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association (PANPA) conference.
And quote 2, same fellow:
To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes, itemizing the contents, walking out and listing everything for everyone to see. And they get money out of that process,” he said.
Great word smithing. I should have remained in publishing. I need to perfect my analytical skills and my writing. Maybe I can nab an internship.
Stephen Arnold, September 13, 2009
Google Fact Extraction Pokes Out Its Nose
September 13, 2009
The Google fact extraction patents have been ignored. One Microsoftie told me last year that Google patents did not mean anything. Okay, click here and scan the fact extraction patents. The go to the Internet Stats site and review the samples. Not only did the patent documents explain the invention, some of the documents include examples. I assume the Microsoftie does not see the connection between the patent documents and the demo site. That’s one reason why Microsoft’s Bing is trying to be what Google was, not what Google is. Sort of a problem in my opinion. Denial is a useful tool for mental health, but it does not do much to narrow the gap between Microsoft’s Web search market share and Google’s market share in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, September 13, 2009
Open Source Metadata Tool
September 12, 2009
I received an interesting question yesterday (September 11, 2009). The writer wanted to know if there was a repository of open source software which served the intelligence community. I have heard of an informal list maintained by some specialized outfits, but I could not locate my information about these sources. I suggested running a Google query. Then I received a link to a Network World story with the title “Powerful Tool to Scour Document Metadata Updated.” Although not exactly the type of software my correspondent was seeking, I found the tool interesting. The idea is that some word processing and desktop software embed user information in documents. The article asserted:
The application, called FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives), will download all documents that have been posted on a Web site and extract the metadata, or the information generated about the document itself. It often reveals who created the document, e-mail address, internal IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and much more….FOCA can also identify OS versions and application versions, making it possible to see if a particular computer or user has up-to-date patches. That information is of particular use to hackers, who could then do a spear phishing attack, where a specific user is targeted over e-mail with an attachment that contains malicious software.
Some of the information that is “code behind” what the document shows in the Word edit menu is exciting.
Stephen Arnold, September 12, 2009
Bing 2.0 Means Goodbye Google?
September 12, 2009
I read a post about how wonderful SharePoint 10 will be for * everyone *. Sounded like Tiny Tim because there were zero facts. Mary Jo Foley’s write up had some but I was not convinced. With Google and Facebook and Twitter snagging wizards, Microsoft has to pay a lot for semi-wizards. When semi-wizards tell me that Bing 2.0 means “goodbye Google”, I don’t assign that a high probability. You may, of course, and you may love SharePoint. Good for you. You can read Ms. Foley’s backhand praise volley in “Microsoft’s Bing 2.0: Coming this Fall (Maybe Even Next Week)” and judge for yourself. Don’t let the addled goose’s reality medicine dissuade you. The hopeful comment in my opinion was this statement with a Twitter source:
“BING 2.0 terrific !! watch out guys ! Bing + Silverlight in maps = amazing !! goodbye Google”.
As I documented in my CENDI talk about next generation data management, duplicating what Google has will not close the gap between Microsoft and Google. Just my opinion because doing what Google has done is not good enough. Just as recycling Fast ESP will not be good enough for the type of information access that users require in the aftermath of the financial bloodbath.
Stephen Arnold, September 12, 2009
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