Yahoo Signals a Turn Inward
June 8, 2009
The Times of Oman reported here that Yahoo wants to build traffic and may not need a life saver from Redmond to thrive. “Yahoo! Doesn’t Need Microsoft Deal: CEO” reported:
“Yahoo! doesn’t have to do anything with Microsoft about anything,” Bartz said at a conference here of technology analysts. “Yahoo! actually has a bright, bright future, probably cleaner and simpler future without thinking there’s any Microsoft connection,” she said. “We’d be better off if we’d never heard the word Microsoft. “Forget about the Microsoft stuff, it’s honestly not that relevant,” she said.
With the release of Bing.com and the PR blitz, Microsoft may want to paddle up the search rapids without the Yahoo technical anchor snagging rocks and limbs. On the other hand, Yahoo is long in the tooth. Search is so-so, but until Bing.com what were the alternatives? My thought is that one should not spurn money when the costs of the present operation threaten to be tough to control.
Negotiating ploy or bold new vision? Clarity by the end of the year in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2009
Bing Bang Boing: The Sound of Early Clicks
June 7, 2009
I have been in the warm embrace of a wonderful airline and a Type A client. I relaxed when I read the flurry of articles about Microsoft’s spike in Web search share. Good news, I thought. After reading a number of posts I circled back to a write up in Search Engine Land called “Did Bing Leapfrog Yahoo? Not Exactly” here. There is a good round up of usage data from a number of azure chip outfits “generating” these data. That was useful. What I found lacking in this analysis and many others at which I looked was:
- A statement that new services get a spike in usage and at the GOOG a boost. The use of “new” in marketing has psychological and traffic benefits. The point is what will be the usage in three months?
- The data wander. The prudent approach is to crack that stats book and generate a normalized value. Bing gets a bounce but the outliers are corralled.
- The usage data themselves have margins of error. In some cases five, seven or more percent. This may mean Bing is performing better than the pundits opine or much worse.
My take on these data is simple: Let’s check out the data in 12 or 16 weeks.
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2009
Optimizing IIS for SEO
June 6, 2009
Short honk: If you are a Microsoft shop, you may want to check out the write up “IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit” by Scott Guthrie. You can find the article here. The toolkit is free and download links are provided. Worth a look. If you are not in the GOOG or other search engines, your site may not be findable.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009
Wave: Functionality Questioned
June 6, 2009
The Chicago Sun Times’s Andy Ihnatko asked a killer question: “Google’s Wave of the Future Is Genius, but Will It Work?”. You can read the article here. You will experience the Sun Times’s latency, but don’t despair. The page should render eventually.
Mr. Ihnatko wrote:
Google seems to be doing everything right. They’re defining Wave, but then they’re more or less letting go of it. The sole benefit that they seem to be retaining is their 18-month head start on the rest of the developer community.
Quite an endorsement for a demo. I was hoping that some doubt might surface. No pun intended. At least Bing.com is a service anyone can use. I remember the old jokes about demos. Might apply here.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009
Monetizing Online Content
June 5, 2009
Short honk: I read with interest “Soon, You’ll Have to Pay for Hulu” here. The story in Daily Finance alleged that the free video service will change its spots. My take on the story is that video may be more easily converted to cash than text. Demographic and user preferences take precedent over tradition.
Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009
Bing Pun
June 5, 2009
Short honk: The folks at ZDNet are showing their sense of humor. Garett Rogers’ “Google Is in Bing Trouble” is a wry comment about Microsoft’s most recent attempt to close the gap in Web search. Mr. Rogers wrote here:
It’s unlikely Microsoft’s new search engine, or “decision engine” as they would like you to think of it, has a chance to topple Google at a game they have been dominating for many years. Ballmer takes a realistic approach to the situation and confesses that it’s not going to become the search leader overnight — it’s going to take time.
In my opinion, I struggle with the notion of a “decision engine”. Most of the people I have interviewed and surveyed tell me that search systems should provide answers. I want a low airfare. I see the fares and I buy the lowest priced fare. I suppose that’s a decision, but I like the notion of an answer or actionable information. “Decision” is a more pompous word, unlike Bing. Bing is down-home.
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2009
Time Sees Tweetness in Twitter
June 5, 2009
Fresh from dumping the AOL-batross, Time Magazine’s editors have developed a Tweet tooth. Twitter is useful and it warrants a round up of buzzwords. How does “ambient awareness” grab you? Maybe “Twittersphere”? You can read the beatific write up “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” here. Steven Johnson finds utility in the service that is getting close to three year olds and having a revenue model… sort of. Never mind, the point that struck me was:
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
I am all for real time messaging, but I come from the intercept and analysis side of the coin. The flow is interesting, but I want to find the diamond amidst the pebbles. I am not too interested in “a suspension bridge made of pebbles”. My engine rev with the notion that for the first time, non governmental entities can monitor, analyze, and extract information from real time flows.
Twitter is important to me because it provides a “nowness” lacking in Web log indexes and traditional Web indexes. I love Bing, Google and Yahoo, but at this time, the notion of real time gains extra dimensions of usefulness for quite different reasons that juice Time’s editors and Mr. Johnson.
With Twitter now quite obvious, why didn’t the managers of Time Magazine snag Twitter or create a Twitter like service? It is easier to write about three year old services than recognize their potential I opine. So much for Time’s ambient awareness of online.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2009
Exalead’s Vision for Enterprise Search
June 4, 2009
I had a long conversation with Exalead’s director of marketing, Eric Rogge. We covered a number of topics, but one of his comments seemed particularly prescient. Let me summarize my understanding of his view of the evolution of search and offer several comments.
First, Exalead is a company that provides a high performance content processing system. I profiled the company in the Enterprise Search Report, Beyond Search, and Successful Enterprise Search Management. Furthermore, I use the company’s search system for my intelligence service Overflight, which you can explore on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. Although I am no expert, I do know quite a bit about Exalead and how it enables my competitive intelligence work.
Second, let me summarize my understanding of Mr. Rogge’s view of what search and content processing may be in the next six to 12 months. The phrase that resonated with me was, “Search Based Applications.” The idea, as I understand it, is to put search and content processing into a work process. The “finding” function meshes with specific tasks, enables them, and reduces the “friction” that makes information such an expensive, frustrating experience.
Mr. Rogge mentioned several examples of Exalead’s search base applications approach. The company has a call center implementation and an online advertising implementation. He also described a talent management solution that combines search with traditional booking agency operations. The system manipulates image portfolios and allows the agency to eliminate steps and the paper that once was required.
The company’s rich media system handles digital asset management, an area of increasing importance. Keeping track of rich media objects in digital form requires an high-speed, easy-to-use system. Staff using a digital asset management system have quite different needs and skill levels. Due to the fast pace of most media companies, training is not possible. A photographer and a copyright specialist have to be able to use the system out of the box.
But the most interesting implementation of the SBA architecture was the company’s integration of the Exalead methods into a global logistics company. The information required to tell a client where a shipment is and when it will arrive. The Exalead system handles 5GB of structured data to track up to 1M shipments daily. Those using the system have a search box, topics and clients a click away, and automated reports that contain the most recent information. Updating of the information occurs multiple times each hour.
Finally, my view of his vision is quite positive. I know from my research that most people are not interested in search. What matters is getting the information required to perform a task. The notion of a search box that provides a way for the user to key a word or two and get an answer is desirable. But in most organizations, users of systems want the information to be “there”. That’s the reason that lists of topics or client names are important. After all, if a person looks up a particular item or entity several times a day, the system should just display that hot link. The notion of Web pages or displays that contain the results of a standing query is powerful. Users understand clicking on a link and seeing a “report” that mashes up information from various sources.
Exalead is winning enterprise deals in the US and Europe. My hunch is that the notion of the SBA will be one that makes intuitive sense to commercial enterprises, government agencies, and not-for-profit organizations. More important, the Exalead system works.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2009
Microsoft Health: A New Thrust
June 4, 2009
Shift your attention from Bing.com to a sector that is a must-win for Microsoft. Ina Fried reported here that Microsoft acquired Rosetta Biosoftware from the struggling pharmaceutical company, Merck. Rosetta Biosoftware is a unit of of Rosetta Inpharmatics. Based in Seattle, the 300 person firm had been hit with cutbacks due to the financial climate. The software unit, which had about 60 employees, was expected to keep it lights on. According to Ms. Fried’s “Microsoft Buys Merck Unit in Life Sciences Push” here,
Microsoft, which has a separate Amalga product family for hospitals, announced in April that it would offer Microsoft Amalga Life Sciences as an effort to help in the drug research software arena. The tools are designed to help manage and analyze the large amounts of data gathered in the process of designing new drugs.
What’s Rosetta Biosoftware’s business? According to a profile here, the company
develops informatics solutions and provides services that enable research organizations to efficiently and effectively conduct life-saving discoveries and develop drugs.
Microsoft’s Amalga, according to Microsoft here, the company
develops its own powerful health solutions, such as Amalga and HealthVault. Together, Microsoft and its industry partners are working to advance a vision of unifying health information and making it more readily available, ensuring the best quality of life and affordable care for everyone.
Looks to me as if the dust up between Microsoft and Google in the health sector is likely to become more intense.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2009
Mahalo: More Spin on Search and Money
June 3, 2009
Peter Kafka’s “Jason Calacanis Tries Turning Mahalo into a Wikipedia that Pays” here provides some insight into how an entrepreneur thinks about search and content. The Mahalo search engine was a notable social approach to building an information resource. The idea, like Wikipedia before it, was to rely on humans to provide links and content. For whatever reason, that model does not seem to have the traction needed to keep traffic soaring. Mr. Kafka summarizes the two changes Mahalo has made in its approach. One tweak is for young eyes only; that is, more info on each screen. The second is to implement a Mahalo “bucks” plan. I don’t grasp the notion because I am used to paying people for their services and then doing my thing with the content. As Mr. Kafka explains the Mahalo idea, I sighed. Mr. Kafka wrote:
But now he’s hoping to get Mahalo users to do the work, Wikipedia-style, with a twist–he’ll pay them. The pitch: Calacanis will offer users the chance to “own” a results page, and split any advertising revenue the page generates, primarily via Google (GOOG) AdSense. He’ll be paying users with “Mahalo bucks,” which cash out at 75 cents on the dollar, so users are really keeping 37.5 percent of each dollar their page generates. Calacanis says some of his pages are generating up to $10,000 a year, but most will make far less. Will that be enough to encourage people to build and maintain Web pages on a piecework basis?
I will be releasing a free compilation of my series “Mysteries of Online”, information that originally was developed for talks at various venues. I have a couple of sections about monetization of online information in that 34 page PDF, which becomes available on July 1, 2009. The bottom-line is that unless an information service generates what I call a “clean stream” of revenue, the costs of marketing and administering online services can suck the life out of a useful online service. Paying for content works if the information is “must have” stuff. Examples include certain chemical information, actionable intelligence for financial services firms, and “keep us out of jail” info for a legal matter. Once that high value info is captured, then the marketing and administrative costs kick in. The editorial costs never go away. Lower value info fall prey to the cost of keeping info fresh (hence long update times for certain info) and keeping pace with new info (hence the urgent need to monetize real time info).
I am not sure where Mahalo falls on the spectrum of “must have to nice to have to everyone has”. Perhaps the approach with create lots of eyeballs which can be monetized courtesy of ad outfits. In my opinion, the new improved Mahalo has quite a few moving parts. I like the “clean stream” approach. With the Bingster and the GOOG improving their ad supported results, Mahalo may face a long, hot summer without money for lemonade.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2009
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