The Gilbane Lecture: Google Wave as One Environmental Factor
July 14, 2009
Author’s note: In early June 2009, I gave a talk to about 50 attendees of the Gilbane content management systems conference in San Francisco. When I tried to locate the room in which I was to speak, the sign in team could not find me on the program. After a bit of 30 something “we’re sure we’re right” outputs, the organizer of the session located me and got me to the room about five minutes late. No worries because the Microsoft speaker was revved and ready.
When my turn came, I fired through my briefing in 20 minutes and plopped down, expecting no response from the audience. Whenever I talk about the Google, I am greeted with either blank stares or gentle snores. I was surprised because I did get several questions. I may have to start arriving late and recycling more old content. Seems to be a winner formula.
This post is a summary of my comments. I will hit the highlights. If you want more information about this topic, you can get it by searching this Web log for the word “Wave”, buying the IDC report No. 213562 Sue Feldman and I did last September, or buying a copy of Google: The Digital Gutenberg. If you want to grouse about my lack of detail, spare me. This is a free Web log that serves a specific purpose for me. If you are not familiar with my editorial policy, take a moment to get up to speed. Keep in mind I am not a journalist, don’t pretend to be one, and don’t want to be included in the occupational category.
Here’s we go with my original manuscript written in UltraEdit from which I gave my talk on June 5, 2009, in San Francisco:
For the last two years, I have been concluding my Google briefings with a picture of a big wave. I showed the wave smashing a skin cancer victim, throwing surfer dude and surf board high into the air. I showed the surfer dude riding inside the “tube”. I showed pictures of waves smashing stuff. I quite like the pictures of tsunami waves crushing fancy resorts, sending people in sherbert colored shirts and beach wear running for their lives.
Yep, wave.
Now Google has made public why I use the wave images to explain one of the important capabilities Google is developing. Today, I want to review some features of what makes the wave possible. Keep in mind that the wave is a consequence of deeper geophysical forces. Google operates at this deeper level, and most people find themselves dealing with the visible manifestations of the company’s technical physics.
Source: http://www.toocharger.com/fiches/graphique/surf/38525.htm
This is important for enterprise search for three reasons. First, search is a commodity and no one, not even I, find key word queries useful. More sophisticated information retrieval methods are needed on the “surface” and in the deeper physics of the information factory. Second, Google is good at glacial movement. People see incremental actions that are separated in time and conceptual space. Then these coalesce and the competitors say, “Wow, where did that come from?” Google Wave, the present media darling, is a superficial development that combines a number of Google technologies. It is not the deep geophysical force, however. Third, Google has a Stalin-era type of planning horizon. Think in terms of five years, then you have the timeline on which to plot Google developments. Wave, in fact, is more than three years old if you start when Google bought a company called Transformics, older if you dig into the background of the Transformics technology and some other components Google snagged in the last five years. Keep that time thing in mind.
First, key word search is at a dead end. I have been one of the most vocal critics of key word search and variants of that approach. When someone says, “Key word search is what we need,” I reply, “Search is dead.” In my mind, I add, “So is your future in this organization.” I keep my parenthetical comment to myself.
Users need information access, not a puzzle to solve in order to open the information lock box. In fact, we have now entered the era of “data anticipation”, a phrase I borrowed from SAS, the statistics outfit. We have to view search in terms of social analytics because human interactions provide important metadata not otherwise obtainable by search, semantic, or linguistic technology. I will give you an example of this to make this type of metadata crystal clear.
You work at Enron. You get an email about creating a false transaction. You don’t take action but you forward the email to your boss and then ignore the issue. When Enron collapsed, the “fact” that you knew and did nothing when you first knew and subsequently is used to make a case that you abetted fraud. You say, “I sent the email to my boss.” From your prison cell, you keep telling your attorney the same thing. Doesn’t matter. The metadata about what you did to that piece of information through time put your tail feather in a cell with a biker convicted of third degree murder and a prior for aggravated assault.
Got it?
Convera, Hakia Added to Overflight
July 13, 2009
The Overflight search intelligence service allows a person interested in search and content processing to visit a page, select a vendor, and see a report. The report is free and draws information from the ArnoldIT.com database of information about more than 350 vendors in the information retrieval sector. Today, Convera (the challenged vertical search company) and Hakia (a vendor of semantic technology and systems) have been added to Overflight. The following links will get you to the Overflight information:
- The Overflight splash page is at http://arnoldit.com/overflight/
- Convera click here
- Hakia click here.
You can watch Google’s daily incremental thrusts from the Overflight splash page as well.
Stephen Arnold, July 13, 2009
Mysteries of Online Available as a Free Report
July 13, 2009
A student at a library school in Toronto sent me an email asking for permission to reuse two of the write ups in this Web log’s “Mysteries of Online” series. I wrote nine essays which are finable via the Blossom search box on any of this Web log’s pages. After that call, I decided to make life easy for students and any other person who wanted to review what I have learned in the last couple of decades about online information and deriving revenue from that type of information.
You can now click here and download a PDF that contains the nine essays. I have added a short disclaimer and a basic table of contents so you can locate the essay you wish to review. I did not prepare an index or insert the illustrations that I use in my formal lectures and presentations.
The only caveat attached to the document is that if you work for a commercial enterprise, write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com to let me know what you want to do. There is some legal boilerplate that must be inserted in you want to recycle my work.
Stephen Arnold, July 13, 2009
Exalead Snags Former Autonomy Sales Director
July 12, 2009
I learned from one of my readers that Mike Hobson, formerly the UK sales director, has joined Exalead in a similar capacity. Mr. Hobson has experience in search and content processing with Verity, Information Builders, and Interleaf. Mr. Hobson said:
“We are aiming to capitalise on the possibilities offered by CloudView and continue to place the emphasis on improving operational costs and ROI for our customers. Our aim it to promote more rapid and more economical development cycles with CloudView, while enabling our clients to benefit from architecture, ergonomics and technology inspired by the Web.
You may want to read the detail on TMCnet.com. Exalead offers a scalable, extensible content processing solution. More information is available at http://www.exalead.com. You can read an exclusive interview with the founder of Exalead on the Search Wizards Speak series here.
Stephen Arnold, July 12, 2009
Convera Firstlight Online Tie Up
July 12, 2009
Convera’s financial results for the period ending April 30, 2009, came across the goose pond on June 12, 2009. The news release said that:
- Revenues decreased
- The company reported a net los of $5.4 million.
Following in the path of Lexalytics, Convera (once one of the big five in enterprise search) has merged with a European company. Same path followed by Attensity. The new company will take another run at the market. The mash up combines Convera and Firstlight Online Ltd. This tie up was announced early in June, before the financial results hit my desk. Convera will be delisted from public trading. The current CEO of Convera will become chairman of the new entity. The Firstlight CEO Colin Jeavons will run the combined company.
A recent recent positioning statement about Convera suggested that Convera was a developer of Web tools to allow publishers to crate customized search engines. Those with some mileage under their belt in search will recall that:
- Convera was Excalibur Technologies, which had some scanning, OCR, and search functions
- Excalibur bought ConQuest, a vendor with a search system
- Excalibur became Convera and entered into a search deal with Intel and the NBA.
After both the Intel and the NBA deals went south, Convera focused on rebuilding and invested some of Allen & Co.’s money in hardware to build vertical search systems. Convera sold its enterprise and government search businesses to Autonomy and Fast Search. The “new” Convera was to be a vertical search specialist. As you may know, Google gives away the functionality via its “custom search engine” program. Google also offers a “syndicated search” option as well.
The future of these tie ups could be bright. InQuira was formed from two search and content processing companies. That firm seems to have found a niche in customer support. The jury is still out on the Lexalytics / Infonic deal’s success.
Convera’s new angle will be online advertising and search. The story “Convera Corporation and Firstlight ERA to Create a new Search and Advertising Company for Publishing Market.” Convera Will Also Distribute Cash to Stockholders” in the Examiner said:
The combined new company will bring together the vertical search technology of Convera and the advertising sales and marketing capabilities of Firstlight. It will have over 60 corporate customer accounts and 120 existing Web sites with approximately 1500 advertisers. The new company will provide technology and advertising to the publishing market and expects to generate revenue from advertising sales and subscriptions.
In my opinion the trajectory from enterprise search to the Firstlight tie up underscores the lengths to which developers of search and content processing are willing to go to generate revenues. I remain skeptical of no cash tie ups or blending two organizations with different technical orientations. Search, gentle reader, is a tough business.
Stephen Arnold, July 12, 2009
Overflight Coverage Expanded
July 11, 2009
Short honk: The Beyond Search goslings have added three companies to the ArnoldIT.com Overflight service. These are Mark Logic Corp. (a next generation content processing company), Recommind (eDiscovery. Teragram (a unit of SAS) and enterprise search). Additional vendors will be added to service in the weeks ahead. Overflight allows you to get a bird’s eye view of what’s new in Web logs, YouTube videos, and Tweets. The service is free.
Stephen Arnold, July 11, 2009
Surviving Universal Search: What?
July 10, 2009
Pippa Nutt, director, online strategy, Northern Lights Direct Response, wrote “How You and Your Company Can Survive Universal Search”. I read the story in DM News and was tangled in my sneaker laces. The term “universal search” has been a baffler to me when I saw it recycled as part of Google’s PR push for putting information from its separate indexes on one result page. In the way of search, not much was new with this announcement because metasearch, federated search, and mash ups were last year’s T shirt when Google’s marketing machine produced this phrase at the hastily organized Searchology Day a couple of years ago. Now, the term is used in the first paragraph of a direct marketing publication’s story without definition or context.
This is a signal that:
- Google controls the search agenda, rendering other companies’ efforts about as important as my neighbor’s new lawn mower. He cares but I don’t.
- A buzzword is assumed to be understood by professionals in the marketing world when few can agree on what “search” itself means. “Universal search” is even more anchor free.
- The article invokes other types of search, again without context or explanation.
Little wonder that when I talk with senior managers, search is essentially a black hole of knowledge. Everyone thinks he or she knows what it is. Upon questioning, I find that defining terms is the * essential first step * when talking about search. Skip this and the conversation is for me almost meaningless.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2009
Lingospot: Technology for Publishers
July 10, 2009
I have been thinking about the problem facing traditional publishing companies. Some pundits suggest that publishers need to solve their problems with technology. My view is that publishers think about technology in a way that makes sense for their company’s business and work processes. I have come across two companies who have been providing publishers with quite sophisticated technology. The management of these two firms’ clients gets the credit. The technology vendors are enablers.
I provided some recent information about Mark Logic Corporation in my summary of my presentation to the Mark Logic user’s group a few weeks ago. You can refresh your memory about Mark Logic’s technology by scanning the company’s Web site.
The other company is Lingospot. Among its customers are Forbes Magazine and the National Newspaper Association. The company offers hosted software solutions. Publishing companies comprise some of Lingospot’s customers, but the firm has deals with marketing firms as well.
The company describes its technology in this way:
Lingospot’s patented topic recognition and ranking technology is the result of more than eight years of development and four years of machine learning. To date, our algorithm has identified over 30 million unique topics drawn from more than two billion pages that we have crawled and analyzed. During the last four years, we have collected over five billion data points on such topics, including the context in which readers have chosen to interact with each topic. What does all this mean for our clients? By partnering with Lingospot you have access to the leading topic recognition, extraction and ranking technology, as well as the accumulated machine learning of our platform. This translates into a more engaging experience for your readers and substantially higher metrics and revenue for you.
My understanding of this technology is that Lingospot can automatically generate topic pages from a client’s content and then handle syndication of the content. The Lingospot works with text, images, and video.
The company is based in Los Angeles. Founded by Nikos Iatropoulos, Mr. Iatropoulos was involved with several other marketing-centric companies. He worked for Credit Suisse and, like the addled goose, did a stint with Booz, Allen & Hamilton. His co founder is Gerald Chao, who is the company’s chief technical officer. Prior to founding Lingospot, Gerald served as a Senior. Programmer at WebSciences International and as a programmer at IBM. Gerald holds a MS in Computer Science and a PhD in statistical natural language processing, both from UCLA.
Publishers are embracing technology. My hunch is that the business models need adjustment.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2009
Overflight for Attensity
July 8, 2009
Short honk: ArnoldIT.com has added Attensity to its Overflight profile service. You can see the auto generated page here. We will be adding additional search and content processing companies to the service. No charge, and this is a version of the service I use when those who hire the addled goose to prepare competitive profiles. I have a list of about 350 search and content processing vendors. I will peck away at this list until my enthusiasm wanes. If you want a for fee analysis of one of these companies, read the About section of this Web log before contacting me. Yep, I charge money for “real” analysis. Some folks expect me to survive on my good looks and charming personality. LOL.
Stephen Arnold, June 8, 2009
Profit in Data Theft
July 8, 2009
I read Dancho Danchev’s “Microsoft Study Debunks Profitability of the Underground Economy” here. I have not read the Microsoft study, but I want to recommend both documents to my addled geese and you, gentle reader. The arguments strike me as germane to online information and data. Mr. Danchev’s view is that there is money is underground endeavors. Check out the article. My question is, “If there weren’t money in underground plays, why are there so many efforts?”
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2009
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