Another YAGG: Picasa Privacy
March 2, 2009
Philipp Lenssen at Googleblogoscoped wrote “Picasa Privacy Oddity” here. If the information is accurate, the Google has another YAGG (yet another Google glitch) to resolve. Mr. Lenssen wrote:
this goes to show that not password-protecting a sign-in locked album’s image URLs themselves is still not as utterly-security-obsessive as could be (which is noteworthy considering Picasa Web Album’s mixed privacy history of the past).
Alex, once a reader, is not too keen of my YAGG coinage or my pointing out the feet of clay that Googzilla may have. Worth watching I suppose.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
Potential Trouble for LexisNexis and Westlaw
March 2, 2009
Most online surfers don’t click to Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis or Thomson Reuters Westlaw. The reason? These commercial services charge money–quite a lot of money–to access legal documents. Executives at both firms can deliver compelling elevator pitches about the added value each company brings to legal documents. In the pre-crash era, legal indexing was a manual process. Then the cost crunch arrived so both outfits are trying to slap software against the thorny problem of making sense of court documents, rulings, and assorted effluvia of America’s legal factories. I may write about how these two quasi US outfits have monopolized for fee legal information about American law for lawyers, government agencies. Both Reed and Thomson then turn around and sell access to these documents to the agencies that created them in the first place. I wonder if the good senator is aware of this aspect of commercial online services’ busness practices?
What’s the trouble? I bet you thought I was going to mention Google. Wrong. Google is on the edge of indexing legal information in a more comprehensive way. But the right now trouble is Senator Joe Lieberman. Wired reported that the good senator wondered by public documents are not available without a charge. You can read the story “Lieberman Asks, Why Are Court Docs Still Behind Paid Firewall?” here. Senator Lieberman’s question may lead to a hearing. The process could, in my opinion, start a chain reaction that further erodes the revenue Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters derive from public documents. Somewhere in the chain, the Google will beef up the legal content in its Uncle Sam service here.
At their core, Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters are traditional publishing and information companies. As such, their business model is fragile. Within the present financial pressure cooker, the Lieberman question could blow the lid off these two organization’s for fee legal business. If government agencies shift to a service provided by Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, I think these two dead tree outfits will crash to the forest floor.
What the likelihood of this downside scenario. I would put it at better than 60 percent. Have another view? Share it, please. Set the addled goose straight.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
Ask.com Frames in the Picture
March 2, 2009
Frames and iframes are nifty. Over the years, their use has aroused some controversy. At one time, Google took a dim view of iframes. I have had reports that Google itself uses iframes. Other vendors have employed the technology to allow users to visit sites that are not what they seem. You navigate to another site and then discover that you are not where you want to be. Over the years, I have stumbled across patent documents that include variations of the iframe technology. Some uses are for the purpose of tracking user behavior. Others allow a Web site operator to inject content around the user’s intended destination. I lose interest in this type of cleverness, having lost my enthusiasm for tilting at windmills. There are quite a few clever and tricky folks who find ways to warp a naïf’s Internet experience.
Pandia.com, a news service that I like quite a bit, reported on some frame use at Ask.com, the also-participated Web search vendor. Ask.com for me is a good example of what happens when someone who is good at one thing tries to extend that expertise to another domain unrelated to the first. The outcome of this type of master-of-the-universe thinking is a service like Ask.com. It’s not bad; it’s not good. It’s one thing today; it will be another thing tomorrow. I recall a dinner two years ago when an azure chip consultant told me that Ask.com was on the move. I thought, “This fellow is getting paid to advise publishers about online partners?” Now Ask.com is the search engine of NASCAR. I wonder if any of the Ask.com executive team hangs out with Kentucky’s NASCAR fans? I have. I am not sure this demographic is where the action is for search.
Search Engine Roundtable followed up with its February 27, 2009, story, “Ask.com Crosses The Line: Frames Search Results.” This is a useful write up, and it includes a screenshot. For me, the most interesting comment was:
Searchers are not happy about this at WebmasterWorld. Robzilla said, “this annoys me as both a user and a webmaster, and overall just seems a little desperate.” Senior member, skipfactor, accurately points out that the search ads are not framed in.
What’s my take? Behavior that tricks users or actions that are designed to pump up revenue are part of the present culture norms. When it is a banker paying himself / herself a bonus for losing money or an insurance company refusing to honor a claim, I see behavior that makes me uncomfortable in many places. Why should anyone be surprised that online companies caught in a cash crunch would push into such murky areas. As more people use the Internet, there are more opportunities to snooker users.
The Internet is no longer something new, accessible only to scientists, engineers, and researchers. The Internet is like the Kentucky State Fair. As long as you can get on the grounds, you’re good to go. Last time I checked, the Kentucky State Fair was a mirror of the best and worst in the bluegrass state. I think it is useful to alert users of certain methods, but I don’t think most users know or care about Ask.com. Those who do may be quite happy with whatever Ask.com provides.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
Harry Collier, Infonortics, Exclusive Interview
March 2, 2009
Editor’s Note: I spoke with Harry Collier on February 27, 2009, about the Boston Search Engine Meeting. The conference, more than a decade into in-depth explorations of search and content processing, is one of the most substantive search and content processing programs. The speakers have come from a range of information retrieval disciplines. The conference organizing committee has attracted speakers from the commercial and research sectors. Sales pitches and recycled product reviews are discouraged. Substantive presentations remain the backbone of the program. Conferences about search, search engine optimization, and Intranet search have proliferated in the last decade. Some of these shows focus on the “soft” topics in search and wrap the talks with golf outings and buzzwords. The attendee learns about “platinum sponsors” and can choose from sales pitches disguised as substantive presentations. The Infonortics search conference has remained sharply focused and content centric. One attendee told me last year, “I have to think about what I have learned. A number of speakers were quite happy to include equations in their talks.” Yep, equations. Facts. Thought provoking presentations. I still recall the tough questions posed to Larry Page (Google) after his talk in at the 1999 conference. He argued that truncation was not necessary and several in attendance did not agree with him. Google has since implemented truncation. Financial pressures have forced some organizers to cancel some of their 2009 information centric shows; for example, Gartner, Magazine Publishers Association., and Newspaper Publishers Association. to name three. Infonortics continues to thrive with its reputation for delivering content plus an opportunity to meet some of the most influential individuals in the information retrieval business. You can learn more about Infonortics here. The full text of the interview with Mr. Collier, who resides in the Cotswolds with an office in Tetbury, Glou., appears below:
Why did you start the Search Engine Meeting? How does it different from other search and SEO conferences?
The Search Engine Meeting grew out of a successful ASIDIC meeting held in Albuquerque in March 1994. The program was organized by Everett Brenner and, to everyone’s surprise, that meeting attracted record numbers of attendees. Ev was enthusiastic about continuing the meeting idea, and when Ev was enthusiastic he soon had you on board. So Infonortics agreed to take up the Search Engine Meeting concept and we did two meetings in Bath in England in 1997 and 1998, then moved thereafter to Boston (with an excursion to San Francisco in 2002 and to The Netherlands in 2004). Ev set the tone of the meetings: we wanted serious talks on serious search domain challenges. The first meeting in Bath already featured top speakers from organizations such as WebCrawler, Lycos, InfoSeek, IBM, PLS, Autonomy, Semio, Excalibur, NIST/TREC and Claritech. And ever since we have tried to avoid areas such as SEO and product puffs and to keep to the path of meaty, research talks for either search engine developers, or those in an enterprise environment charged with implementing search technology. The meetings tread a line between academic research meetings (lots of equations) and popular search engine optimization meetings (lots of commercial exhibits).
Pictured from the left: Anne Girard, Harry Collier, and Joan Brenner, wife of Ev Brenner. Each year the best presentation at the conference is recognized with the Evvie, an award named in honor of her husband, and chair of the first conference in 1997.
There’s a great deal of confusion about the meaning of the word “search”, what’s the scope of the definition for this year’s program?
Yes, “Search” is a meaty term. When you step back, searching, looking for things, seeking, hoping to find, hunting, etc are basic activities for human beings — be it seeking peace, searching for true love, trying to find an appropriate carburetor for an old vehicle, or whatever. We tend now to have a fairly catholic definition of what we include in a Search Engine Meeting. Search — and the problems of search — remains central, but we are also interested in areas such as data or text mining (extracting sense from masses of data) as well as visualization and analysis (making search results understandable and useful). We feel the center of attention is moving away from “can I retrieve all the data?” to that of “how can I find help in making sense out of all the data I am retrieving?”
Over the years, your conference has featured big companies like Autonomy, start ups like Google in 1999, and experts from very specialized fields such as Dr. David Evans and Dr. Liz Liddy. What pulls speakers to this conference?
We tend to get some of the good speakers, and most past and current luminaries have mounted the speakers’ podium of the Search Engine Meeting at one time or another. These people see us as a serious meeting where they will meet high quality professional search people. It’s a meeting without too much razzmatazz; we only have a small, informal exhibition, no real sponsorship, and we try to downplay the commercialized side of the search world. So we attract a certain class of person, and these people like finding each other at a smaller, more boutique-type meeting. We select good-quality venues (which is one reason we have stayed with the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston for many years), we finance and offer good lunches and a mixer cocktail, and we select meeting rooms that are ideal for an event of 150 or so people. It all helps networking and making contacts.
What people should attend this conference? Is it for scientists, entrepreneurs, marketing people?
Our attendees usually break down into around 50% people working in the search engine field, and 50 percent those charged with implementing enterprise search. Because of Infonortics international background, we have a pretty high international attendance compared with most meetings in the United States: many Europeans, Koreans and Asians. I’ve already used the word “serious”, but this is how I would characterize our typical attendee. They take lots of notes; they listen; they ask interesting questions. We don’t get many academics; Ev Brenner was always scandalized that not one person from MIT had ever attended the meeting in Boston. (That has not changed up until now).
You have the reputation for delivering a content rich program. Who assisted you with the program this year? What are the credentials of these advisor colleagues?
I like to work with people I know, with people who have a good track record. So ever since the first Infonortics Search Engine Meeting in 1997 we have relied upon the advice of people such as you, David Evans (who spoke at the very first Bath meeting), Liz Liddy (Syracuse University) and Susan Feldman (IDC). And over the past nine years or so my close associate, Anne Girard, has provided non-stop research and intelligence as to what is topical, who is up-and-coming, who can talk on what.These five people are steeped in the past, present and future of the whole world of search and information retrieval and bring a welcome sense of perspective to what we do. And, until his much lamented death in January 2006, Ev Brenner was a pillar of strength, tough-minded and with a 45 year track record in the information retrieval area.
Where can readers get more information about the conference?
The Infonortics Web site (www.infonortics.eu) provides one-click access to the Search Engine Meeting section, with details of the current program, access to pdf versions of presentations from previous years, conference booking form and details, the hotel booking form, etc.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
Google a Twittering
March 1, 2009
On March 1, 2009, another story about a possible tie up between Google and Twitter surfaced. The source? Jennifer Bosavage and CRNCanada. You can read the story “Wedding bells for Google and Twitter?” here. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
Could Google be eyeing Twitter as an acquisition? That possibility’s got the blogosphere all “a-twitter,” pardon the pun. Earlier this week, Google activated its Twitter account and all Tweets broke loose. As of Friday morning, Google had more than 26,000 followers. The speculation is that, in a move similar to its purchase of YouTube, Google is interested in buying Twitter.
Google has been somewhat clumsy in the real time news space. Maybe Ms. Bosavage and CRNCanada have an inside track on this alleged tie up.
Stephen Arnold, March 2,, 2009
InOrder Conceptual Search
March 1, 2009
Update: link updated, March 2, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the conceptual search engine InOrder.org here. Here’s the description of the system from the organization’s Web site:
InOrder is a collaborative conceptual search interface. It is being developed by Garrett Camp at the EIS Lab at the University of Calgary. It’s design premise is that search engines such as Google already find relevant results for well-formed queries, but do not efficiently elicit these search needs from users. InOrder solves this issue by creating an interactive environment for collective group search. InOrder acquires domain knowledge of semantic relevance within a given search context. Mediated sets of “topics” and “terms” guide search exploration by collective intuition, reusing search strategies utilized by ones peers. Incremental and explicit elicitation of these collective strategies enables participants to make better-informed search decisions. In terms of existing web media InOrder may be viewed as a structured weblog of the semantic interactions of those with similar search goals.
We ran several test queries and found the system interesting. Here’s a screen shot of the result for our query “enterprise search”:
We will do some more testing.
Stephen Arnold, February 28, 2009
Wh-Eu, the Power of Google
March 1, 2009
Amit Agarwal wrote an interesting, brief item here. The French town of Eu changed its name. The reason? To improve its Google ranking. Agarwal said:
The query “eu” is fairly popular among Google users but a lot of potential tourists may be missing the scenic beauty of this French town as it doesn’t rank that well in search engines.
Good example of the power of Google. I can’t get the French to talk to me. Google gets the French to change the name of town. The addled goose is in awe of Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, March 1, 2009
Social Security: Back Up Goofiness
March 1, 2009
I don’t know much about Federal News Radio. I don’t listen to the radio when I am in DC and I don’t look at the radio station’s Web site. But this headline stopped me in my webby tracks. Federal News Radio reported in “SSA Data Backup Six Months Away” here is interesting. A chatty Cathy told me that the SSA (Social Security Administration) has a mashup of mainframes, branded servers, and other gear that are loosely federated. (This is a nice way of saying that the architecture is approaching entropy.) The article presents some government double talk about the special needs of the SSA. But the comment that I found most interesting was this:
The data backup problem is part of a larger technology challenge SSA faces. Astrue (an SSA executive) says the agency still is using more than 38 million lines of Cobol code in a siloed and mainframe environment.
Yep, 38 million lines of Cobol and a mainframe. Wow and double wow. I wondered why my father couldn’t check his benefits online. Now I know why. The Web site has to hook into the mainframe without losing state and the connection. I think the system was unable to reset his password either. Maybe a crash would be the best approach. Think of a greenfields project or a phone call to Google. I wonder of the SSA thinks its data are bigger than Google’s?
Stephen Arnold, February 28, 2009
Microsoft: Reality Like Dawn Rises
March 1, 2009
Activewin had a wonderful quote from the New Zealander turned software financial wizard. You can read the short item “Microsoft Says Yahoo No Silver Bullet to Fix Online” here. The financial wizard is Chris Liddell. He allegedly said:
“Yahoo doesn’t have the magic solution,” Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said yesterday at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference in San Francisco. “No one should think it will transform the industry.”
A glimmer of reality is evident in this remark in my opinion. Now I want to hear about the $1.2 billion acquisition of the Fast Search & Transfer outfit, the police action, the integration of Fast ESP into SharePoint and its financial implications.
Stephen Arnold, March 1, 2009
Washington Post Dings Bloggers
March 1, 2009
Marc Fisher, Washington Post, wrote “Bloggers Can’t Fill the Gap Left by Shrinking Press Corps” here. The title did an excellent job of summarizing this article. Newspapers have tough financial hurdles to get over. Journalists have been told, “Don’t let the door hit your ankle on the way out.” But newspapers have other problems as well. For me the most interesting segment of the write up was:
Many bloggers say that far from being able to replace professional reporters, they actually suffer from the diminished flow of state news. “What I can’t offer on my blogs is the relationships, the institutional memory, the why, the history that reporters who know the capital can bring to their stories,” says Waldo Jaquith, who blogs on Virginia politics and runs a site, RichmondSunlight.com, that tracks every bill. “Newspapers can describe the candidates for governor in a more balanced, deeper way because you don’t have a dog in the race. We bloggers do.” A combination of media revolution and economic collapse is dismantling our news infrastructure, especially at the state and local levels. “Someday, people will wake up to the depletion of the press corps,” Gibson says. “I don’t know if the result will be corruption or demagoguery, but the interests of the people are not being represented anymore.”
Whether bloggers can or cannot fill the gap is an interesting question to debate. The addled goose will find out because the dead tree outfits are toppling. Newspapers have fallen from favor among the demographic that was the core of daily newspaper consumption. The grade and high school students are not too keen on newspapers. Twitter brings real time news to anyone with a network connection. Traditional newspapers are, in my opinion, sliding down the mountain on their backs. Scary ride. I will read about it on Twitter.
Stephen Arnold, March 1, 2009
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