Google Pirate Bay Parallel
April 29, 2009
Silicon.com here published “Does Pirate Bay verdict spell trouble for Google?” Simon Levine, the author, reviews the basics of the Pirate Bay file sharing matter. One of the comments that caught my attention was:
One interesting feature of the case is that the founders of the site were found guilty of helping to make copyright-protected content available, a secondary act of infringement which is different to actual copyright infringement in the traditional or primary sense. Similar to Napster, The Pirate Bay site did not host audio and video files, but instead included links to material hosted elsewhere on the internet. In other words, the site was found to be guilty of facilitating illegal file-sharing.
In my opinion, the Pirate Bay matter is likely to cast a shadow across other indexing services. Whether the shadow presages dawn or sunset is unknown to me. I don’t think the matter will go away quietly into that good night.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Google Education
April 29, 2009
In my Google: The Digital Gutenberg here, I comment about Google’s increasing utility in education. The Google Channel, available on YouTube.com, can serve as a basic course in computer science or it can be a resource for a PhD student. The Google services, when carefully filtered by a professor, can provide a full educational resource. With educational publishers under increasing financial pressure, an online alternative will emerge. Will Google emerge as the dominant player? Who knows?
If you are interested in this aspect of Google, you will find Google Apps Education: The Rise of Cloud Computing on Campus” here a useful Educom session to attend. The angle taken in the article reflects from Google Apps. For me the most interesting comment in the write up was the identification of Jeff Keltner as one of the Googlers playing a role in Google’s educational initiative. His title is Google Applications for Education.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Yahoo: Gone Wrong
April 29, 2009
TechRadar published an interesting article with the magnetic question, “Where Did It All Go Wrong for Yahoo?” The writer was (I surmised) was Gary Marshall. If you track Yahoo, you will want to read this article and add it to your collection. For me the most interesting comment in the write up came from one of TechRadar’s sources:
There was a culture a couple of years ago of highly competitive bidding, and nobody really knew what services were going to be necessary or strategic. These companies were essentially trying to outmaneuver their competitors and grab the asset, the hot new company or the feature or tool that might turn into something meaningful for users or advertisers. “I do think Yahoo and some of its competitors were being short-sighted and irrational, and weren’t doing acquisitions with a coherent strategy. It was very like real estate speculation, with people bidding irrationally because there was so much competition.”
The conclusion of the write up offers some light at the end of the tunnel. I am not confident that the light will be sufficiently bright to allow Yahoo to lead Yahoo to financial security and its former technical prominence. Yahoo no longer has the breathing room it enjoyed from 1998 to 2004 when Google was organizing its phalanges. True, the market is bigger and Yahoo has a solid brand and solid traffic. But there are new competitors with more focused services. Yahoo has to act and act fast, then show bottom-line results. Time may be running out.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Jigsaw Assembles Contact Pieces
April 29, 2009
VentureBeat reported that Jigsaw, the sales contact service, has allegedly solved the up-to-date problem. Contacts get stale. The Jigsaw Data Fusion service taps its database and updates them. You can read the full story “Jigsaw Launches Data Fusion to Clean Up Sales Contact Lists” here. For me the most interesting comment in the item was:
What Jigsaw tries to fix is an age-old problem: most contacts in sales databases are out of date. It does so by keeping its own accurate and updated business contact list from a community of over 800,000 business users. The Jigsaw records are updated in real time and come with name, title, company, work email, business phone, and address. Data Fusion is now available on Salesforce.com’s Force.com AppExchange application platform.
Similar functions are available from specialist vendors, but I quite liked the combination of fixing up, the real time angle, and the availability of the service on Salesforce.com. Good idea.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Alpha Google: When Mathematicians Collide
April 28, 2009
Google has quite a few folks who are good at math. Dr. Stephen Wolfram is good at math, and he wrote a program that some of the Googlers used when they were but wee lads learning Algebraic Combinatorics. On April 28, 2009, Wolfram Alpha was previewed before a crowd of math lovers at Harvard. Almost at the moment the Wolfram Alpha crowd was gasping at a system that provided answers, not results lists, the Google showed that it was not turning into a bunny hiding from the Wolfram.
What did the Google do?
The company rolled out a nifty search, public data, visualization, analyst cookie jar. You can read about Google Public Data in the breathless prose of the Washington Post, whose editors may be thinking about using the system to generate graphs without the graphics department. The Post’s article was “Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data” here. Google’s own description is typical Google prose – understated and entitlement tinged. You can read that official statement here.
Wolfram Alpha, according to TechCrunch, released a digital salvo after the Google disrupted the Wolfram dog and pony show. You can read about that counter attack here.
What does the addled goose think of these computational confrontations? Three things:
- You can take the kids out of the math club but you can’t get the math club behavior out of the kids. Snark, snark.
- Google made it clear that the Wolfram crowd required more direct action than any other search challenger in recent memory. As an addled goose, my memory is not too good, but I saw the counter offensive as an indication that Google sniffed napalm in the morning.
- Search is complicated. When you wheel out the math guns and they fire at one another, those azure chip consultants who played youth soccer and ate sushi after have a tough time explaining the systems and methods used by both companies to deliver ready to recycle data analysis for free. Yep, search is easy.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Vine: Google Lost in the Undergrowth
April 28, 2009
Update: A reader wanted me to point to this Fortune item by Henry Blodget who did not take my gentle approach to the Vine service. Maybe I was too subtle?
The week is young and I am tangled in social and local search announcements. Facebook is almost a little semi open. This morning I learned that Microsoft has rolled out Vine. You can read the Seattle Times write up here or Search Engine Land description here. Microsoft is probably quite happy with the local newspaper’s view; for instance:
It’s been awhile since Microsoft introduced a game-changing social Web application, but Vine — a service that’s debuting today with a beta test in Seattle — could be a contender.
A contender. I can hear Rocky’s coach now. “Kid, you’re gonna go all the way.”
What’s the title?
The idea is to show a map of a user’s locality and make “experience” a one click task. Unlike other local services, Microsoft has put a business spin on the service. Instead of positioning the new service as a way for teens to meet up at friend’s house when the parents are on vacation, Vine can be used for emergency and other serious types of geospatial communication services.
I think this is interesting for two reasons. First, the geospatial, social, local angle is of keen interest to users and entrepreneurs, to youth and those in organizations looking for ways to become more efficiency. Second, the service noses ahead of Google’s offerings in this sector.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that Vine is likely to suck millions of Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and other hot services dry in the next couple of weeks. The hardware requirements are hefty, well beyond my mobile device’s capabilities. Mary-Jo Foley wrote for ZDNet here:
For users accessing Vine via the Internet, the software component of the beta service requires a PC running XP SP2 or Vista; and 600 MB of hard disk space (100 MB for Vine and 500 MB for the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1).
I do think that Vine makes Google look like it missed an opportunity. Now Google can point to dozens of services that allow a user to map, communicate, and geolocate all day long. Google may argue that its services are building blocks which a Googley developer can assemble into a Twitter.com on steroids.
For today, Microsoft has an edge. Now can the Redmond giant expose the blade of a light saber to leave me with a one track plastic straight razor?
Yahooligans Losing Ground
April 28, 2009
Short honk: A small item in Barron’s caught my attention. The article “What’s Up with Yahoo?” here notices a softening of Yahoo’s already mushy shares. Eric Savitz points out the drop in values. The real action in the post appears in the comments here. One item in particular caught my attention; to wit:
Look at their traffic patterns 40% of traffic is derived from the sub-domain mail.yahoo.com, and Bartz is cutting all their other services. Yahoo is becoming nothing more than the largest free email provider in the world, and that reality is starting to come up over and over in analysts discussions of the company.
Not a peep about search. Think it’s marginalized?
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
The Pirate Bay Issue: Google Gets in Front
April 28, 2009
I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but I saw on one of Google’s blogs this morning a comment about why Google is not the Pirate Bay. You can read the post in Italian here. The translated version is here. I think I follow Google’s line of reasoning. I am no lawyer, and I sure don’t understand public relations. I wonder if this story will have legs.
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
Ask.com Is the No. 2 German Search Engine
April 28, 2009
SearchCowboys.com wrote “Ask.com Becomes Germany’s Search Engine No.2 by Arbitrage” here. Now I was not exactly sure what arbitrage has to do with a consumer’s decision to run a query on Ask.com as opposed to Google.com. Evert Veldhuijzen wrote:
Now what did Ask.com do to become Germany’s second largest search engine? They bought a lot of Adwords traffic! Showing up to 10 sponsored results above the organic results this model, also known as arbitrage, not only repays itself, but is also very profitable…
The trick is buying advertising on Google to drive traffic to Ask.com. Sounds like a plan to me.
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
Microsoft Search Center and Search Center Lite
April 28, 2009
I read a remarkable article by Robert Bogue of Thor Projects. The piece was “Search Center vs. Search Center Lite” here. I am quite tired after a day of meetings, and I thought “lite” was one of those marketing buzzwords reserved for beer and dietary foods. Wrong. In SharePoint there are two search centers: regular and light. I either did not know or did not remember there were two functions with almost the same name. Mr. Bogue set me straight:
One search center, Search Center Lite — which shows up in the user interface as Search Center, is created by default for you if create a Collaboration Portal. (It’s on /search.) The other search center, Search Center with Tabs, only shows up if you activate the Office SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection features.
I thought about this comment and the plunged deeper into the article. I arrived at the moment of truth:
Who cares? Well if you have a set of complex customizations and want people to be able to search in different ways — then you care. Search Center with Tabs uses the publishing features (WCM) in SharePoint to allow you to create your own pages with different search configurations on them.
I think I understand. Depending on choices, one sees different options with the distinction identified as Search Center or Search Center Light. I wonder if there were other user interface options considered? Nifty, eh?
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
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