Data Managers as Search Engine Experts
May 3, 2009
An unhappy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Information Management’s article “When Data Becomes [sic] Metadata” here. Right off the mark, the word “data” is a plural, so the headline contains a subject verb agreement editor. My thought is that the editors at Information Management were rushing to meet a deadline. Okay. The deeper issue in the story attributed to Steve Hoberman was this passage:
Data managers will be relied upon as experts in search engine technology. We will be asked how search engines work and will be held accountable for analyzing and modeling Web 2.0 components such as tags and ontologies. Users will expect similar results and response times as their search engines for all of their reports and queries. Therefore, there will be an increased focus for us on the physical data model to ensure rapid query response time to match search engine response time.
Yikes. I am not sure what a data manager is. I know for certain that there are not too many search “experts” running around who can deploy a system that works, conforms to the requirements, and remains on time and in budget. I can name five people, and I don’t think any one of those individuals would describe himself or herself as a “data manager”.
More troublesome is the leap from competence in data management to expertise in search. Hogwash. The reason organizations are struggling with information retrieval is often rooted in miserable data management methods. The write up means well but is, in my opinion, likely to set the stage for yet another search and content processing train wreck. This time the engineer is not a consultant from a second or third tier advisory firm in New York. The hands on the controls is a person who is a “data architect” or a “business intelligence professional”.
Who next will receive the title of “search expert”? Perhaps the person who sets up a trade show exhibit at a conference that includes vendors of photocopy equipment?
Stephen Arnold, May 3, 2009
Ray Ozzie of Microsoft on Newspapers
May 2, 2009
PaidContent.org ran a story based on Ray Ozzie statements. You can read Joseph Tartakoff’s “Microsoft’s Ozzie on His Company’s Web Strategy” here. What I found interesting was this statement attributed to Mr. Ozzie who was commenting about the future of newspapers:
There is a new business model with anything that can be delivered digitally,” Ozzie said. “Look what’s happening with news. I’m not certain what the new business model really is but certainly the old business model is impacted … It’s not clear that as these new models come into play whether revenue or profit pool in a given industry is equivalent in the new world as in the old world. Could very well be that the business model is sound in that there is a business but not the size of the business. If journalism is something we care about we’re going to have to find new ways to subsidize that.”
Is Microsoft advocating the newspapers, like GM and Chrysler, be supported by the government via subsidies? Is he underscoring the hopelessness of the present newspaper companies?
The reference to business models interests me because Microsoft’s own business models seem to be sputtering. I wonder if Microsoft will jump into the news business and provide the much-needed cash infusion needed to keep traditional news operations heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
Answering Questions: Three Semantic Hot Rods
May 2, 2009
Short honk: ReadWriteWeb.com published “The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing Three new Cyborg Q&A Services” is a useful write up here. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides descriptions of Aardvark, Hunch, and Swingly. Each of these services uses sophisticated content processing methods to answer a question typed in a search box. My question: “How many users are able to type a suitable question in a search box?” Q&A technology has a great deal to contribute to search but, in my opinions, as plumbing. Worth downloading and tucking away.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
Lousy Sales, Trust Your Search Engine Marketing Consultant
May 2, 2009
Short honk: Remarkable assumptions make this short article quite interesting. The title sets the stage: “Why It’s Important to Trust Your SEM Company in a Down Economy” here. The author Scott Buresh is a search engine marketing consultant, and he addresses an issue that struck me as counter intuitive – trust a marketer. Hmm. Not only is it important to trust a marketer in a lousy economy. You need leads. Do you use your network? Do you make phone calls? Nope, you trust your search engine marketing consultant. Mr. Buresh wrote:
It’s probably true for most businesses that there are fewer people actively searching for their products and services due to the economic climate. Companies reasonably approach this situation thinking, “Why should we pay the same amount in marketing that we’ve traditionally been paying when our current target market has shrunk?”
The points seems reasonable to me, but Mr Buresh has a different viewpoint:
Although the budget you allocate for a search engine marketing company and its services may be fixed, it’s likely that many of your competitors have lost their budgets, opening up the playing field and potentially allowing you to garner more of the business that’s still out there.
You get the idea. I don’t trust search engine marketers in a good economy. In a down economy, I put my billfold in my AMSEC safe and hide the key.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
Twitter Bashing
May 1, 2009
Short honk: If you hate Twitter, you will love this criticism of Twitter. It appeared on the MadAtoms.com Web log here. The author of “The Devolution of the Internet” by Farley Elliott is entertaining and insightful. Among the weaknesses of Twitter, Mr. Elliott highlighted:
… perhaps the most disgusting part of Twitter is it’s most basic: it is a chatroom. A quick check of the calendar reveals that it’s not 1995. Yet twitter allows in the same riffraff that early chatrooms attracted, but without any of the moderation, or the ability to spend more than 140 characters wording up trolls and goons.
A keeper for sure.
Stephen Arnold, April 30, 2009
Microsoft Has a Top Search Term. Google.
May 1, 2009
The Guardian dropped its Google voodoo doll and pins and picked up a story about Microsoft’s Live.com and the service’s most popular search term. The story ran in the dead tree outfit’s Web log, called PDA The Digital Blog, which is quite trendy and quite a mouthful. The title of the story is “Most Search Term on Microsoft’s Live Search is … Google”. You can read it here. The story, which I found somewhat hard to follow with odd comments such as “More after the jump” inserted in paragraphs in the middle of the text, provides a smattering of statistics and a reference to “a Live Search overhaul” later this spring also puzzled me. I found the write up interesting for two reasons:
First, many people use a default search engine as a portal. It is easier I have been told to type the name of the service in a search box than keying the full location in the browser’s address bar. With lots of Internet Explorers in front of people, it makes sense that a widely used search service like Google would be one of the top terms in any browser.
Second, the data displayed in the write up show (if indeed they are accurate) that only Microsoft is not a top destination on either Google or Yahoo top search listings. I would conclude that people will use Microsoft to go run their queries on other services. Not good news for Microsoft in my part of the goose pond.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
SearchMe Changes
May 1, 2009
SearchMe, http://www.searchme.com, promotes itself as “true, blended multimedia search.” You get video, images, music, web pages, Twitter results and more organized by relevance. It’s a visual slideshow interface, so you see a miniature web page instead of having to click through a link. Results returned for “Iron Chef Japan” varied, including a Flickr picture, a Yahoo! video, an About.com listing for Japanese food and the Fine Living channel profile of the show. Results for “NASA shuttle launch” were less impressive, returning the NASA home page, a CBS news article and a CNN news article, but no videos. I didn’t see any social media results on either search. The web site functions like Viewzi, which I talked about here, but doesn’t have the various entertaining display options. Searchme also has a best-selling iApp and is configured for several mobile platforms, which gives it a leg up on other visual search engines.
Jessica Bratcher, May 1, 2009
Web Site Search: More Confusion
May 1, 2009
Diane Sterling, e-Commerce Times, wrote a story that appeared in my newsreader as a MacNewsWorld.com story called “The Wide Open World of Web Site Search”.
. You can find the article here. The write up profiles briefly several search systems; namely:
- SLI systems here. I think of this company as providing a product that makes it easy to display items from a catalog, find indexed items, and buy a product. The company has added a number of features over the years to deliver facets, related searches, and suggestions. In my mind, the product shares some of the features of EasyAsk, Endeca, and Mercado (now owned by Omniture), among others.
- PicoSearch here is a hosted service, and I think of it as a vendor offering indexing in a way that resembles Blossom.com’s service (used on this Beyond Search Web log) or the “old” hosted service provided by Fast Search & Transfer prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Google offers this type of search as well. Google’s Site Search makes it easy to plop a Google search box on almost any site, but the system does not handle structured content in the manner of SLI Systems, for example.
- LTU Technologies here. I first encountered LTU when it was demonstrating its image processing technology. The company has moved from its government and investigative focus to e-commerce. The company’s core competency, in my view, is image and video processing. The system can identify visual similarity. A customer looking at a red sweater will be given an opportunity to look at other jacket-type products. No human has to figure out the visual similarity.
Now the article is fine but I was baffled by the use of the phrase “Web site search”. The idea I think is to provide the user with a “finding experience” that goes beyond key word searching. On that count, SLI and LTU are good examples for e-commerce (online shopping). PicoSearch is an outlier because it offers a hosted text centric search solution.
Another issue is that the largest provider of site search is our good pal Googzilla. Google does not rate a mention, and I think that is a mistake. Not only does Google make it possible to search structured data but the company offers its Site Search service. More information about Site Search is here.
These types of round up articles, in my opinion, confuse those looking for search solutions. What’s the fix? I think the write up should have made the focus on e-commerce in the title of the article and probably early in the write up included the words “e-commerce search”. Second, I think the companies profiled should have been ones who deliver e-commerce search functions. None of the profiled companies have a big footprint in the site search world that I track. This does not mean that the companies don’t have beefy revenue or satisfied customers. I think that the selection is off by 15 degrees and a bit of a fruit salad, not a plate of carrots.
Why do I care?
There is considerable confusion about search. There are significant differences between a search system for a text centric site and a search system for a structured information site such as an e-commerce site. One could argue that Endeca is a leader in e-commerce. That’s fine but most people don’t know this side of Endeca. The omission is confusing. The result, in my experience, is that the reader is confused. The procurement team is confused. And competitors are confused. Search is tough enough without having the worlds of image, text, and structured data scrambled unnecessarily.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
The Google Causes a Swallowing Problem
May 1, 2009
The Financial Times has picked up the Google bat and taken a whack at Googzilla. The article “Gagging on Google” appeared in the Financial Times here. The article, written by Maverecon, a serious looking fellow named Willem Buiter has a killer lead:
Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women’s rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business. It would not be missed.
I have been involved in online information for a long time. I have written numerous and dull articles and monographs. Never did the notion of comparing an online vendor to the Taliban and civil liberties cross my mind. In a way, it is quite imaginative and provides a good example how the dead tree crowd is responding to Google. Metaphors in a blog can be a powerful weapon. At least, I surmise that’s what the top dogs at the FT believe.
Mr. Buiter touches upon the “m” word via indirection, copyright head on, and Google’s street view as “the universal voyeur.” I don’t have the energy to see if Mr. Buiter knows that Udi Manber’s street images for Amazon’s A9 was the pioneer in this type of content enrichment. I suppose Mr. Buiter is happy with a dead tree telephone directory and no photo of the business or home that he is trying to find in the rain in heavy traffic. Mr. Buiter has also discovered Google’s tracking cookies. I was disappointed that he cited another source instead of my 2005 The Google Legacy for his explanation of cookies. The wrap up is a call to readers to accept this assertion:
Google company’s founding motto is: ‘Don’t be evil.’ But it does evil. It has indeed, become the new evil empire of the internet. It is time for people to take a stand, as individual consumers and internet users, and collectively through laws and regulations, to tame this new Leviathan. When I get back from this trip, I will do my best to remove every trace of Google from my computers, even the tracking cookies (if I can!).
I think that the FT has trumped the vituperation directed at Google by the Guardian and the Telegraph. I am looking forward to what these dead tree outfits write. In my opinion, that Taliban comparison is going to be tough to beat.
Unfortunately for the dead tree crowd, the GOOG has been plodding along for a decade. Now the newspaper folks have discovered how online works. What revelations await me? What do I know? I just captured the information I unearthed about Google in publishing in my new monograph. I wonder if the FT will review it? Probably not. I focus on what Google will be doing in a year or two, not what Google has been doing for a decade. Ah, for the days of yesteryear. When grapes were not sour. When newspapers were the information giants. When paper was cheap. When eight year olds would peddle them for a few pence. When ink was economical. When there was no other way to get information…
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
The Beeb and Alpha
April 30, 2009
I am delighted that the BBC, the once non commercial entity, has a new horse to ride. I must admit that when I think of the UK and horse to ride, my mind echoes with the sound of Ms. Sperling saying, “Into the valley of death rode the 600”. The story (article) here carries a title worthy of the Google-phobic Guardian newspaper: “Web Tool As Important as Google.” The subject is the Wolfram Alpha information system which is “the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram”.
Wolfram Alpha is a new content processing and information system that uses a “computational knowledge engine”. There are quite a few new search and information processing systems. In fact, I mentioned two of these in recent Web log posts: NetBase here and Veratect here.
Can Wolfram Alpha or another search start up Taser the Google? Image source:
In my reading of the BBC story includes a hint that Wolfram Alpha may have a bit of “fluff” sticking to its ones and zeros. Nevertheless, I sensed a bit of glee that Google is likely to face a challenge from a math-centric system.
Now let’s step back:
First, I have no doubt that the Wolfram Alpha system will deliver useful results. Not only does Dr. Wolfram have impeccable credentials, he is letting math do the heavy lifting. The problem with most NLP and semantic systems is that humans are usually needed to figure out certain things regarding “meaning” of and in information. Like Google, Dr. Wolfram lets the software machines grind away.
Second, in order to pull of an upset of Google, Wolfram Alpha will need some ramp up momentum. Think of the search system as a big airplane. The commercial version of the big airplane has to be built, made reliable, and then supported. Once that’s done, the beast has to taxi down a big runway, build up speed, and then get aloft. Once aloft, the airplane must operate and then get back to ground for fuel, upgrades, etc. The Wolfram Alpha system is in it early stages.
Third, Google poses a practical problem to Wolfram Alpha and to Microsoft, Yahoo, and the others in the public search space. Google keeps doing new things. In fact, Google doesn’t have to do big things. Incremental changes are fine. Cumulatively these increase Google’s lead or its “magnetism”, if you will. So competitors are going to have to find a way to leapfrog Google. I don’t think any of the present systems have the legs for this jump, including Wolfram Alpha because it is not yet a commercial grade offering. When it is, I will reassess my present view. What competitors are doing is repositioning themselves away from Google. Instead of getting sand kicked in one face on the beach, the competitors are swimming in the pool at the country club. Specialization makes it easier to avoid Googzilla’s hot breath.
To wrap up, I hope Wolfram Alpha goes commercial quickly. I want to have access to its functions and features. Before that happens, I think that the Beeb and other publishing outfits will be rooting for the next big thing in the hopes that once of these wizards can Taser the Google. For now, the Tasers are running on a partial charge. The GOOG does not feel them.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
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