Arnold Interviewed in Content Matters
February 12, 2009
A feathering preening item. Barry Graubart, who works for the hot Alacra and edits the Content Matters Web log, interviewed Stephen E. Arnold, on February 11, 2009. The full text of the interview appears here. I read what I said and found it coherent, a radical change from most of my previous interview work for KDKA in Pittsburgh and a gig with a Charlotte 50,000 watt station. For me, the most interesting comment in the column was Mr. Graubert’s unexpected editorial opinion. Mr. Graubart graciously described me as the “author of the influential Beyond Search blog.” A happy quack for Barry Graubert.
Stephen Arnold, February 12, 2009
Google: A Utility Company
February 12, 2009
There are several news stories bopping around the datasphere this morning (February 12, 2009). The gist of these stories is that the GOOG bought an abandoned paper mill in lovely rural Finland. The speculation about the intent of this acquisition is interesting. Here’s a synopsis of items I found interesting. If you want the kicker to this post, skip the dot points and jump to the final paragraph. Now the news and analysis that feeds naive minds:
- Reuters here reported here that the former Stora plant will be a data center.
- PaidContent.org and the Washington Post reported here that the Stora Enso facility consumed 1,000 gigawatt hours of power
- Global Markets reported here that part of the site will be transferred to the city of Hamina for other industrial uses.
The missing item is that Google’s patent document 20080209234 Water Based Data Center contains interesting language that includes systems and methods which can be applied to traditional power generation facilities. I wish I knew how to translate into Finnish Google Power & Light. Google Translate yields this phrase: “google teho ja kevyiden yritys”. I prefer GPL myself. I pronounce the acronym as “goo-pull”.
You can poke around other Google documents here. The “site:” instruction may be helpful too.
Stephen Arnold, February 12, 2009
IBM: Covering Its Bases
February 12, 2009
The love affair between IBM and Microsoft cooled years ago. After the divorce, Microsoft took the bank account and the personal computer industry. IBM entered counseling and emerged a consulting firm with some fascination for its former vocation as world’s leading computer and software company.
Jump to the present day. IBM has batted its eyes at Googzilla. IBM and Google have teamed to stimulate the flow of programmers from universities. You can refresh your memory here. In 2008, I received a copy of a letter to an intermediary that said, in part, we understand Googzilla quite well. The outfit interested in this answer was not the addled goose. The interested party was a certain government agency. That outfit was not confident IBM understood Googzilla fully. I wrote about this in a Web log story last year. You can find the article here.
IBM issued a news release here that has been picked up by various information services. The headline makes clear that IBM is not going steady with the GOOG: “IBM to Deliver Software via Cloud Computing With Amazon Web Services”. You can read the full article here. In a nutshell, IBM wants to
make available new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) at no charge for development and test purposes, enabling software developers to quickly build pre-production applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. The new portfolio will over time extend to include Service Management capabilities from IBM Tivoli software for Amazon EC2 to help clients better control and automate their dynamic infrastructures in the cloud.
The idea is a good one. But the significance of this deal is that IBM is making clear to the GOOG that a certain someone is no longer numero uno. IBM is playing the field. Amazon has outpaced Google in some cloud services and by spending a fraction of the billions Google has invested. What’s IBM know that I don’t?
Stephen Arnold, February 12, 2009
Email Alert Web Site Online
February 12, 2009
A new web site is launching Monday that will send you e-mail alerts. Crap, I Missed It! is somewhat similar to Yotify.com (The Beyond Search addled goose wrote about Yotify.com here. CrapIMissed wants to distinguish itself by focusing on “sweet spot” alerts with info unavailable elsewhere, such as Amazon.com bestsellers, new audio CDs, upcoming concerts and so on. This isn’t like Google Alerts. You don’t enter a couple keywords and get an info dump as-it-happens or daily for every search term. Crap lines up your request into a single e-mail message per day compiled from only new information. There’s no account creation, there’s a reference archive of your alerts; and a one-step unsubscribe. For us goslings who suffer daily information overload, it may be worth a try.
Jessica Bratcher, February 12, 2009
Yahoo Monetizes BOSS Soon
February 12, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Yahoo’s business model for BOSS (build your own search system). BOSS has been “free”. The reasons range from building traffic to expanding the reach of Yahoo. Free is generally good. Spidering the Web and indexing content can be expensive. Yahoo knows this first hand. Certain vendors have been quick to embrace BOSS because the price was right. Besides Yahoo’s own search results often leave me unsatisfied. I have written about Cluuz.com because the company uses BOSS and the firm’s technology makes much better use of the Yahoo index than Yahoo itself does in my opinion. Now Yahoo wants to charge outfits like Cluuz.com, a small Canadian company, to use BOSS. The new story in Network World here said:
Once Yahoo introduces BOSS fees towards mid-2009, it will also increase the number of search results an engine can obtain via a single API call to 1,000 from 50. The fees vary depending on the type and quantity of search result involved. Yahoo will also offer SLAs to promote the creation of more sophisticated BOSS search engines.
Yahoo assumes that some of the outfits using BOSS will monetize their services. I think that if a company using Yahoo’s BOSS could monetize its services, the company would be monetizing now. The economy is a bit shaky and among the hardest hit are small search and content processing companies. Yahoo and others of its ilk give away search systems. Presumably Yahoo perceives a revenue win.
In my opinion, BOSS users may start looking around for ways to shift from BOSS to another service. Microsoft, are you listening? The GOOG never listens but maybe the idea of tweaking Yahooligans again might spark some activity.
Maybe this is a brilliant play that will reverse Yahoo’s search fortunes? I hope so. I am uncomfortable watching the company follow the trajectory of Ask.com and America Online, among others in the information processing game.
Stephen Arnold, February 12, 2009
Exalead Accelerates
February 12, 2009
Exalead is flexing its muscles by powering search for the famous Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (http://www.sanger.ac.uk). Sanger does genome research involving large scale sequencing and analysis like the Human and Cancer Genome projects. The institute needed a powerful search solution for its monstrous scientific data requirements, and Exalead offered a scalable, flexible program that can handle a lot of abuse: the data quantity at Sanger grows by about 120 million records annually. Now a simple text request will return results from a pool of 500+ million data–a mere puddle compared to the projection of a possible 20 billion files over time. You can read the case study here. Looks like Exalead has a huge task ahead of it. If it succeeds, it will be indexing possibly one of the biggest public databases in the world. A happy quack to the Exalead team.
Jessica West Bratcher, February 12, 2009
Business Intelligence: An Useful and Intelligent Review
February 11, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Stephen Swoyer’s “How BI Habits Are Changing” here. In general, I agree with his points. What impressed me was the jargon free analysis of the changes in business intelligence. For me, the most interesting comment was:
SAP has a lot of account control in SAP shops that makes up-selling to Business Objects possible. With IBM, it seems the WebSphere and consulting services bring influence.” she [Cindi Howson — founder of BIScorecard.com] says. “Customers that are only using DB2 — so that’s all that IBM is in the account — don’t seem to be looking at Cognos in a new light. So again, it really depends who has strong account control… [emphasis added]
You may find other nuggest in Mr. Swoyer’s write up. I don’t get too excited about business intelligence, but I think one can discern a movement in this market sector that may provide some hint of what lies in the future for enterprise search and content processing. Worth reading.
Stephen Arnold, February 11, 2009
More SEO Oh, Oh
February 10, 2009
Years ago when I worked at Ziff Communications I listened to John Dvorak. He was an insightful thinker, and his expertise was not leveraged at Ziff. I left the company coincident with Bill Ziff’s announcement of his intention to sell his empire. Mr. Dvorak continued to work on Ziff properties after the break up. I have followed his comments over the years, and I regret that I was probably a suit in a crowd in meetings we both attended.
This morning I read PCMag.com’s “SEO Fiascoes: the Trouble with Search Engine Optimization” and noticed that he wrote the article. The article does a good job of pointing out what I have long known. The statement “…from what I can tell its proponents are modern snake-oil salesmen” is coincident with my research findings.
I steer clear of the SEO crowd. I gave talks at several SEO conferences six or seven years ago, and it was clear to me that this group of “experts” were promising Web site traffic by tricking the indexing subsystems. I mentioned this in The Google Legacy (2005), and that accomplished one thing: no SEO conference organizer wanted me on their program.
Please, navigate here and read Mr. Dvorak’s column. I am not going to summarize it. He is a good writer and an addled goose can do little to make his message more clear. A happy quack for his taking a stand on an issue and indirectly the consultants who snooker clients to pay to get traffic without investing in high value content.
Stephen Arnold, February 10, 2009
Patent Search from Perfect Search
February 10, 2009
The Perfect Search Corp. Google patent search attracted significant traffic on February 9, 2009. If you have not tried the system, navigate to http://arnoldit.perfectsearchcorp.com and then open a new window for your browser. You will want to point that new tab or window at http://www.google.com/patents. Now run the following query in each system: programmable search engine.
Here’s what Google displays to you:
The Google results force me to track down the full patent document to figure out if it is “sort of” what I want.
Run the same query programmable search engine and you get these results:
The ArnoldIT.com and Perfect Search collection makes it easy to decide if a hit is germane. A single click delivers the PDF of the patent document. Everything is clear and within a single interface.
Try these services and run the same query. You will find that you can dig into Google’s technology quickly and without the silly extra steps that other services insist upon. The USPTO search system is here. How about that USPTO search interface? I don’t want to name the vendor who provides this system and I don’t want to call attention to this company’s inability to make a user accessible system. FreePatentsOnline.com is here. Do you understand the results and how you access the various parts of a patent document? I do, but it takes quite a bit of work.
Notice the differences. First, the abstracts or summary of the patent is more useful because it contains substantive detail. Second, the key words in the query are in bold face, making it easy to spot the terms that were in your query. Third, notice the link to the PDF file. You don’t see fragments of the patent document. You get one click access to the patent document plus the diagrams if any. Fourth, because the Google patent collection includes only Google patent documents, you can easily explore the technical innovations that often “fly under the radar” of the Google watchers who deal with surface issues.
Information about the Perfect Search system is here. You can read an interview with one of the Perfect Search senior engineers, Ken Ebert, here. A happy quack to the Perfect Search team for contributing to this free Google patent document search and full text delivery service. Right now the system includes the Google patent documents that I have been able to identify in the course of my research into Google’s technical infrastructure. I cannot say with certainty that this collection has every Google patent application and granted patent. If you know of a Google patent document, I have overlooked, please, let me know. I am not an attorney and take my advice, “Don’t use this system as your only source of Google patent information.” It’s free and not the whiz bang service that West and Lexis provide for a fee. A hefty fee I might add.
Stephen Arnold, February 10, 2009
More Google Layoffs
February 10, 2009
Interesting article at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/090208-230735 concerning the GOOG and quiet employee cuts. According to the blog post, some industry people are all a-Twitter with the news, acting like it was unexpected. But Google has already been in the news about some paring down that included RIFs (engineers too), the apparent closure its office in Trondheim, Sweden, (http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/01/15/google-shutters-trondheim-office/) and the announcement that it was reorganizing Google Israel offices (http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/02/08/google-israel-re-googles/). With the economy the way it is, why are people surprised that even the GOOG would have a deadwood reduction plan? As a side note, one of the addled geese here at Beyond Search wrote about the great Twitter versus Google battle. You can read that article here. http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/02/09/google-threatened-by-twitter/. Maybe Twitter’s the as-it-happens news source, replacing the you-were-there of the dead tree crowd.
Jessica W. Bratcher, February 10, 2009
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