Vivisimo’s Stan
March 21, 2009
Clusty has a new friend, Stan. Stan, said Vivisimo, is:
an everyman. (Hey, that rhymes!). He could be you, or your colleague or anyone frustrated with their company’s ability to search internal data (or inability to search). Stan is the man!
You can learn more about Stan here. The FAQ here provides more information about this personification of a user of an enterprise search system. I learned that Stan has a Web log. You can read his musings here. I learned from the March 17, 2009 posting:
I heard about this enterprise search thing. Frankly, it sounds too good to be true. Searching across multiple repositories from a single search box. Presenting results into topical clusters. Tagging and rating documents to impact future search relevancy. Sharing results with other users. All of this while respecting my individual security rights. Seems like pie in the sky to me. Is anybody actually doing this, or is it just some marketing hype? So I’ve started this Web site and blog to figure things out for myself. But I need lots of help. So bookmark the site, friend me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter. Give me suggestions for future videos and blogs postings. Maybe I can actually find something at work now.
Like the a recent consultant’s report about search, Vivisimo has jumped on Google’s “simple” marketing bandwagon. Google’s game plan calls for its sales professionals to state that Google’s enterprise search solution is simple. When one licenses the Google Search Appliance, the customer eliminates the months of fiddling that go along with some search systems. The administrative console makes set up quick and painless. Google makes available to customers who want to do more the OneBox API and expert Google partners like Adhere Solutions. But the message is clear. Google reduces the hassle and hence the cost pain of setting up and maintaining some enterprise search solutions.
Stan is at http://meetstan.com
Is the CMSWatch report right? Is Stan right? I have no idea. I get asked questions about search because the caller has discovered that what looks easy was not for that caller’s particular situation. In general, search is hard. Even Steve Ballmer said that search was tougher than it looked.
Simple is good. Great teachers make the complex easy to understand. In search, there are a number of issues to simplify. Getting one component wrong can create some challenging situations. Some create budget havoc. Others lead to legal matters.
I suppose that if most people insist that search is simple, a minority opinion is irrelevant. At some point, a person may sit down and figure out what has to be done to make electronic information available for specific use cases in a particular organization. I don’t think that is a simple task. Someone may have to figure out how to transform content to make it crunchy. Someone may have to figure out how to create a 24×7 system with near real time updates. I don’t think that is simple either.
For now, I am going to suggest that making issues clear and easy to understand is good. I hope that mythical Stan does that. Simple as a marketing tactic may not be appropriate for some information access situations such as eDiscovery, medical information, law enforcement, or similar applications. Just my opinion. Simple.
Stephen Arnold, March 21, 2009
Navgle: Nifty and Useful
March 21, 2009
I don’t like the word or phrase mash up, usually written mashup. I don’t like the phrase programmable Web. Heck, I don’t like much of the wordsmithing generated by the trophy kids who swarm over Web companies. I do like a service called Navgle. You must try it here. The name is a combo of Naver.com (South Korea) and Google.com (intergalactic). I looked at this service on the laptop of a Google partner not long ago. Naver.com dominates search in South Korea and has revenues of about US$1.0 billion. More information about the company is here.
I needed to locate information about Cleveland business failures, and I was not too happy with lots of Crain hits and the baloney about how wonderful the northern Ohio business climate was. I decided to give Navgle.com a try.
What happened? See for yourself. Go to Navgle.com. Plug the phrase “Cleveland business” in the search box, and you can see what I found useful. Here’s the result screen for my home run query a couple of days ago. Navgle.com updates frequently, so your screen will probably look different from this one.
The first result–note, the first hit!–reported that Crain’s Cleveland Business was chopping employees. When you run your query, you will see that Navgle.com returns results by type of content, delivering the top hits from each in a useful relevance ranked order.
On this one page, I could see that Cleveland is in a world of hurt. There were Tweets. I had Google search results. I had useful Web log entries. I had snippets from Google Groups. In short, I had a useful way to get an overview of the Cleveland business scene.
Is Navgle.com perfect? No, but it is a heck of a lot more useful than most of the search systems I use on a daily basis. I can think of a number of ways to use the Navgle.com system to make this Web log more useful to my five or six readers. In fact, I am going to write the Navgle.com “contact” and see what the company has to say. Maybe I can wrangle a way to put some search related info links on this site to provide more context for my opinion pieces.
I keep getting emails from readers who ask, “Who are you? Why do you act like a stupid goose?” Navgle.com might slap some bacon around my write ups and the grousers can live with my view of the world.
Bottomline: a nifty service. Not much latency. A very useful service. What’s with the tie up between Naver.com and Google.com? In my opinion, more than meets the eye.
Stephen Arnold, March 21, 2009
Google and Microsoft: Core Competencies
March 20, 2009
One of my readers sent me a couple of links to remarks by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s top gun, this morning. The news story contained one revealing observation here attributed to Mr. Ballmer:
I’ll tell you the search business has been harder for me and for other senior people to learn than most businesses…
Interesting because Microsoft has invested in search and watched as its market share in Web search has declined. The company has not fared well in the enterprise arena either. The $1.2 billion investment in Fast Search & Transfer has yielded since April 2008 when the deal concluded:
- One Norwegian police action
- A Web part
- A roadmap.
But Google’s YouTube.com executive quoted in Mediaweek’s “YouTube Exec: Google Not Good at Content” here reveals a similar incompetency. Kevin Yen, director of strategic partnerships at Google allegedly said:
We’re not good at content… We create platforms that allow other people to succeed.
After investing in multiple content-related businesses, creating a legal stewpot with copyright hawk Viacom, and launching Knol (yep, I know. What’s a Knol?)–Google admits that it is not too good in content.
Step back.
What do these quotes reveal about two of the most influential companies in software, electronic information, and systems?
My thoughts:
- Competence in one area does not transfer competence to another area
- Believing one is able to solve every problem does not mean that one can actually solve those problems
- Technology does not equip Google and Microsoft with magic wands.
Just my opinion about two influential companies with reservoirs of confidence in their abilities to climb every mountain.
Stephen Arnold, March 20, 2009
We Have the Data, Now What
March 20, 2009
ZDNet’s Tom Espiner’s “Gov’t May Track All UK Facebook Traffic” here. I found the post interesting because of this comment:
Under the EU Data Retention Directive, from the 15 March, 2009, all UK Internet service providers (ISPs) are required to store customer traffic data for a year. The Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) is a government proposal, introduced last year, for legislation to use mass monitoring of traffic data as an anti-terrorism tool. The IMP has two strands: that the government use deep packet inspection to monitor the web communications of all UK citizens; and that all of the traffic data relating to those communications are stored in a centralised government database.
Let me be clear. I have zero problem with law enforcement taking such steps to fulfill their mandated duty. If that is a problem for you, quit reading my Web log. My concern is that lots of data poses a search and retrieval problem. When those data change, the problem gets bigger and quickly. Based on my research, there are only a handful of companies with the technology to tame these exascale data sets. One is Google. The other is Exalead. If you know of others, please, let me know. Just bring facts, gentle reader.
Stephen Arnold, March 20, 2009
Financial Times: Try, Try, Try
March 20, 2009
Flashback. FT.com year 2005. I was a paying subscriber. I got a user name and a password. I logged on. Ran a query and the system timed out. Flash forward to 2007. FT.com licenses Fast Search & Transfer. I tested the system. Slow. I was asked to test a semantic system under consideration by the Financial Times. Useful but slow, slow, slow. Now the Financial Times has tapped another point and click vendor for a “deep” search experience. Time out. The Financial Times, arguably one of the two bigger franchises in business information, has been a laggard in online search for quite a while. The FT’s parent owns a chunk of the Economist, another blue chip in business information. I was a subscriber to * both * the print and online editions until late 2007. Why did I drop these must read news sources? Too much hassle. I hope the FT’s new system moves from the “deep” to the daylight. I hope the FT monetizes successfully its content. I hope that I will be able to play in the World Cup, but I am a realist and recognize that hope not mean accomplishment. If you are cheerleading for a dead tree outfit that once owned a wax museum, read the Guardian’s “Financial Times Launches Business-Focused Deep Search Service” here by Kevin Anderson. The article included a useful description of what the FT hopes to do with indexing:
The service allows users to search easily by news topic, organisation, person, place or theme. If a user searches for stories about business in China, the search can quickly be refined to cities in China, showing stories about Beijing, Shanghai or Hubei. Greenleaf described this as a “know before you click” model so that users can see related topics and the number of stories available for each sub-topic. In addition to automatic tagging, Newssift editors have also added other relationships to the service relevant to their business audience so that if someone looks for news about Ford Motor Company, they can also see related content from Ford suppliers.
This type of metatagging is useful, but it is computationally and human intensive. But the main difference between this most recent try in FT’s quest to develop an online service that makes up for the precipitous loss of revenue from its traditional dead tree business is the economy. Too late. I wish the FT team success, but I don’t think this most recent service will deliver the cash needed to get the ship squared away for even rougher seas ahead. Red ink ahead in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 20, 2009
Emotional Search
March 20, 2009
There’s social search. People search. now there’s emotional search. This new species is explained by Patricia Skinner in her article “Search is Getting All Emotional Thanks to Twitter” here. I have been getting email explaining that my Twitter stories are chasing off some readers. Not much I can do about that. Free Web log and all that apply. Her point was:
Because Twitter is essentially a huge network of millions of tiny networks (you and your friends), talking about what matters to you and what you think about. So a kind of ‘innate, emotional-level understanding’ is built in.
Ms. Skinner includes some examples, a bit of information about behavioral marketing, and some examples. I agree with most of her points. Is Twitter important to search? In my opinion, yep. I don’t care much for the emotional angle, but tapping real time content flows is a big deal.
Stephen Arnold, March 20, 2009
Entitlement Generation Wins
March 20, 2009
Sarah Perez has an interesting write up in ReadWriteWeb.com. Her story “Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web” here explains why Google is a big threat to companies who don’t see Google as much more than a Web search company peddling ads. On the surface, her story is about 13 to 31 year-olds. I am plagued by these folks but that’s normal. Old age home candidates face a big hurdle when understanding those a half century younger. I don’t want to summarize the characteristics of this cohort. Read her list first hand.
My view is that Google and Googley things are part of the this cohort’s environment. This means that it makes no difference what I and those like me have as information behaviors. The Googley groups are going to make social computing, cloud computing, pervasive computing, and other types of computing the norm. Companies that think Google, Twitter and similar services are not in their business or mildly disruptive are going to be in for a jolt. Big changes coming. And fast.
Stephen Arnold, March 20, 2009
A Darker Shade of Azure
March 19, 2009
Joe Panettieri’s “Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud: Dark for a Day” summarized the outage for Microsoft’s cloud service. You can read the article here. The most interesting comment in the write up was:
But 22 hours of darkness doesn’t inspire peace of mind in cloud systems. And I’m starting to think that Amazon.com — backed by loads of open source applications — is the cloud to beat.
Google has converted Gmail into Gfail. Now Microsoft has stumbled. Maybe Mr. Panettieri’s analysis is dead on?
Stephen Arnold, March 20, 2009
Google on the Hot Seat
March 18, 2009
Google got some good news. President Obama’s chief technical officer was back on the job. The sudden step down was as surprising as the allegations against two of Vivek Kundra’s assistants. Mr. Kundra was, in my opinion, one of the supporters of Google-type thinking in information technology. You can read about the return of Mr. Kundra here. Now Telecommunications Online reported here that:
An online privacy group called on Tuesday for government regulators to investigate the adequacy of Google Inc’s security safeguards after the company inadvertently released consumers’ private information this month.
The FTC is now holding this fresh hot potato. Coincidences? I don’t think this is the case. Google is the lucky recipient of interesting attention.
Stephen Arnold, March 19, 2009
Twitter: Bombed Out of Existence
March 18, 2009
Interesting write up and comments here. The post that caught my attention was “Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?” by Twine’s founder Nova Spivack. Twitter as an application does not fascinate me. Twitter as an indication of what can be done with pervasive connections and real time messaging does interest me. If you want a good run down of the weaknesses of the present Twitter, check out this write up and be sure to review the comments.
Stephen Arnold, March 18, 2009
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