Exalead’s High Performance Platform: CloudView
October 5, 2008
It’s no secret. When I profiled Exalead in one of the first three editions of Enterprise Search Report that I wrote, I likened the company’s plumbing to Google’s. The DNA of AltaVista.com influenced Google and Exalead. For most 20 somethings, AltaVista.com was one of a long line of pre-Google flops. That, like prognostications about Web 3.0, is not exactly on target.
The AltaVista.com search system was a demonstration of several interesting technologies developed by Digital Equipment Corporation’s engineers over many years. First, there was the multi core processor that ran hotter than the blood of a snorting bull in Pamplona. Second, there was the nifty manipulation of memory. In fact, that memory manipulation allowed Oracle performance in the system I played with to zip right along in the mid 1990s as I recall. And, the DEC engineers were able to index the Internet with its latency and flawed HTML so that a query was processed and a results list displayed quickly on my dial up modem in 1996. I even have a copy of AltaVista desk top search, one of the first of these scaled down search systems intended to make files in hierarchical systems findable. On my bookshelf is a copy of Eric and Deborah Ray’s AltaVista Search Revolution. Louis Monier wrote the forward. He used to work at Google, and, what few people know, is that Mr. Monier lured the founder of Exalead to work on the AltaVista.com project. Like I said, the DNA of AltaVista influenced Google and Exalead. In 1997, some AltaVista engineers were not happy campers after DEC was acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett Packard acquired Compaq. In the fury of the HP’s efforts to become really big, tiny AltaVista.com was an orphan, and an unwanted annoyance clamoring for hardware, money, engineering, and a business model.
François Bourdoncle–unlike Louis Monier, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Simon Tong, among others–did not join Google. In year 2000, he set up Exalead to build a next-generation information access and content processing system. What I find interesting is that just the trajectory of Google in Web search was affected by the AltaVista.com “gravity,” Exalead’s trajectory in content processing was also touched by the AltaVista.com experiment.
A result list from Exalead’s Web search system. Try it here.
When M. Bourdoncle founded Exalead, he wanted to resolve some of AltaVista’s known weaknesses. For example, the heat issues associated with the DEC Alpha chips was one problem. Another was rapid scaling, using commodity hardware, not hand crafted components which take months to obtain.
Exalead now has, according to the company’s Web site, more than 170 licensees. Earlier this week (October 1, 2008), Exalead CloudView, a new version of the company’s platform and new software features.
Paula Hane, Information Today, provided this run down of the new Exalead features:
Unlimited scalability and high performance
Business-level tuning and management of the search experience
Streamlined administration UI
Full traceability within the product
WYSIWYG configuration of indexing and search workflows
Advanced configuration management system (with built-in version control)
Improvements in the relevancy model
Provision for additional connectors with simple and advanced APIs for third-party implementations
You can read her “Exalead Offers a Cloud(y) View of Information Access here. The article provides substantive, useful information. For example, Ms. Hane reports:
One large [Exalead] customer in the U.K. can’t say enough good things about the choice of Exalead—its search solution was up and running in just 3 months. “After performing an extensive three-month technical evaluation of the major enterprise search software vendors we found that Exalead had the best technology, vision and ability to fulfill our demanding requirements,” says Peter Brooks-Johnson, product director of Rightmove, a fast-growing U.K. real estate Web site. “Not only does Exalead require minimal hardware to work effectively, but Exalead has a strong, accessible support team and a culture that takes pride in its customer implementations.”
(Note: A happy quack to Ms. Hane, whom I am quoting shamelessly in this Web log post.)
Phil Muncaster’s “Exalead Claims Enterprise Search Boost” here does a good job of explaining what’s coming from this Paris-based information access company. For me the most significant point in the write up was this passage:
The new line features a streamlined user interface, improved relevancy and the ability to extend business intelligence applications to textual search…
In my investigation of search company technology, I learned that Exalead’s ability to scale is comparable to Google’s. As Mr. Muncaster noted, the forthcoming version of the Exalead software–called CloudView–will put Exalead squarely in the business intelligence sector of the content processing market.
You can get more information about Exalead here. A fact sheet is also available here. Exalead’s Web index is available at www.exalead.com.
I have to wrangle a trip to Paris and learn more about Exalead. I hear the food is okay in Paris. The French have a strong tradition in math as well. I remember such trois étoiles innovators as Descartes, Mersenne, Poincaré, and Possson, and others. In my opinion, Microsoft should have acquired Exalead, not Fast Search & Transfer. Exalead is a next generation system; it scales; and it is easily “snapped in” to enterprise environments, including those dependent on SharePoint. I think Exalead is a company I want to watch more closely.
Stephen Arnold, October 5, 2008
The Goose Quacks: Arnold Endnote at Enterprise Search Summit
October 4, 2008
Editor’s Note: This is a file with a number of screen shots. If you are on a slow connection, skip this document.
One again I was batting last. I arrived the day before my talk from Europe, and I wasn’t sure what time it was or what day it was. In short, the addled goose was more off kilter than I had been in the Netherlands for my keynote at the Hartmann Utrecht conference and my meetings in Paris squished around the Utrecht gig.
I poked my head into about half of the sessions. I heard about managing search, taxonomies, business intelligence, and product pitches disguised as analyses. I’m going to be 65; I was tired; and I had heard similar talks a few days earlier in Europe. The challenges facing those involved with search are reaching a boiling point.
After dipping into the presentations, including the remarkable Ahead in the Clouds talk by Dr. Werner Vogels, top technical gun at Amazon, and some business process management razzle dazzle, I went back to the drawing board for my talk. I had just reviewed usage data that revealed that Google’s lead in Web search was nosing towards 70 percent of the search traffic. I also had some earlier cuts at the traffic data for the Top 50 Web sites. In the two hours before my talk, I fiddled with these data and produced an interesting graph of the Web usage. I did not use it in my talk, sticking with my big images snagged from Flickr. I don’t put many words on PowerPoint slides. In fact, I use them because conference organizers want a “paper”. I just send them the PowerPoint deck and give my talk using a note card which I hold in my hand or put on the podium in front of me. I hate PowerPoints.
Here’s the chart I made to see how the GOOG was doing in terms of Microsoft and Yahoo.
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/
The top six sites are where the action is. The other 44 sites are in the “long tail”. In this case, the sites out of the top 50 have few options for getting traffic. The 44 sites accounted in August 2008 for a big chunk percent of the calculated traffic, but no single site is likely to make it into the top six quickly. Google sits on top the pile and seems to be increasing its traffic each month. Google monetizes its traffic reasonably well, so it is generating $18 billion or so in the last 12 months.
In the enterprise search arena, I have only “off the record” sources. These ghostly people tell me that Google has:
- Shipped 24, 600 Google Search Appliances. For comparison, Fast Search & Transfer prior to its purchase by Microsoft had somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 enterprise search platform licensees. Now, of course, Fast Search has access to the 100 million happy SharePoint customers. Who knows what the Fast Search customer count is now? Not me.
- Become the standard for mapping in numerous government agencies, including those who don’t have signs on their buildings
- Been signing up as many as 3,000 Google Docs users per day, excluding the 1.5 million school children who will be using Google services in New South Wales, Australia.
I debated about how to spin these data. I decided to declare, “Google has won the search battle in 2008 and probably in 2009.” Not surprisingly, the audience was disturbed with my assertion. Remember, I did not parade these data. I use pictures like this one to make my point. This illustration shows a frustrated enterprise search customer setting fire to the vendor’s software disks, documentation, and one surly consultant:
How did I build up to the conclusion that Google has won the 2008-2009 search season. Here are the main points and some of the illustrations I used in my talk.
Mindbreeze Profile Now Available
October 3, 2008
A profile of the Austrian enterprise search system Mindbreeze is now available here. A unit of Fabasoft, Mindbreeze offers enterprise and Web search systems. The company was recently recognized as “hot” by KMWorld Magazine. The system supports open standards, features an SDK, and ships with connectors to permit the system to index email, Web sites, and standard office document types. The company’s Web site is www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2008
Microsoft Search: Norway to Be a Nerve Center
October 1, 2008
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on September 30, 2008, here that “Norway [will be a] key Microsoft search center. The story carries an Associated Press logo, so I can’t link to it. The general idea is that after buying Fast Search in April 2008, Microsoft has decided to tap Norway as the location for an important search research center. The current Fast Search staff will be expended to 350 people, up from 300. The announcement is good news for Fast Search’s staff and for Norway. As more information becomes available, I will try to reference it. Note: the Associated Press stories have a tendency to disappear. If the link goes bad, I may not be able to update it.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2008
Microsoft: Another Search Guru
September 30, 2008
Kara Swisher, Boom Town scoopette extraordinaire, reports another change in Microsoft search management. Her “Yusuf Mehdi Get a Big New Job at MSN-But Still No Digital Head in Sight”. You can read this well-crafted article here. Ms. Swisher points out that Mr. Mehdi is now part of a “troika” that consists of Brian McAndrews and Satya Nadella. For me the most interesting point in her article was:
Who will lead this three-headed beast is still unknown–both Mehdi and McAndrews have been considered the top internal candidates to lead the online properties group, which has been struggling for direction after Microsoft’s failed takeover of Yahoo (YHOO).
My take on this is that I need a score card to keep track of who has responsibility for what search business at Microsoft. Missing from this is the Fast Search & Transfer management team. Despite Fast Search’s colorful enterprise search past, the company still has a core competence in Web search. Is there a pipeline from the brains in Norway to Redmond? In my youth, sluggish systems would often be improved by throwing hardware at the problem. For Microsoft, I am starting to form the view that Redmond is throwing people at the problem.
Each day, the gap widens between Google and Microsoft. The bridge to close the gap won’t be built of management timber. A different approach is needed; for example, a leap frog solution.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2008
Silobreaker: Mary Ellen Bates’ Opinion Is on Target
September 30, 2008
Mary Ellen Bates is one sharp information professional. She moved from Washington, DC, to the sunny clime in Colorado. The shift from the nation’s capital (the US crime capital) to the land of the Prairie Lark Finch has boosted her acumen. Like me, she finds much goodness in the Silobreaker.com service. (You can read an interview with one of the founders of Silobreaker.com here.) Writing in the September number of Red Orbit here she said:
What Silobreaker does particularly well is provide you with visual displays of information, which enable you to spot trends or relationships that might not be initially obvious. Say, for example, you want to find out about transgenic research. Start with what Silobreaker calls the “360[degrees] search,” which looks across its indexes, including fields for entities (people, companies, locations, organizations, industries, and keywords), news stories, YouTube videos, blog postings, and articles.
If you want to try Silobreaker yourself, click here. With Ms. Bates in the wilds of Colorado and me in a hollow in rural Kentucky, I am gratified that news about next-generation information services reaches us equally. A happy quack to Silobreaker and Ms. Bates.
Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2008
Thomson Reuters and Open Source
September 29, 2008
Update, September 30, 2008: Thomson Reuters news story about the Thomson Reuters’ Zotero matter is here. I quite like the symmetry of this TR to TR sequence. That’s the way to do news, you graduate students.
Original Post
Despite a Googler trying to speak with me after my statement “Google has won the battle of online for 2009,” I admire the company. Like any publicly traded company, the GOOG has to be mindful of its shareholders. Googzilla can stomp on some flower gardens but in general, Google is muddling along with its “someone else pays” business model. Heck, Googzilla has released some–not all–of its goodies to the open source free for all. The Google MySQL is one example; some mobile technology is another.
Imagine my surprise when I saw the Slashdot link to this article “Thomson Reuters Sues over Open Source Endnote Alike Zotero“. You can find the Slashdot item here and the original article here. Years ago I gave a lecture at the University of Michigan. The professor who set up the lecture was working on a footnote tool, and he showed me an early prototype. Then a couple of years later, an entrepreneur in California showed me a similar tool. I lost track of this category of software because [a] I’m not a student or professor who writes scholarly or semi-scholarly papers and [b] when I needed tools to manage footnotes, I had tools that people sent me to test.
Thomson Reuters wants to stop the developer of a Firefox add in to help Firefox users create footnotes. Okay, I think I can see the value of this add in if I were a student and had zero money, did not know about freeware, or did not have an angle to get a software vendor to give me a copy of the software to test. The idea that a company like Thomson Reuters feels sufficiently threatened to get the court to stop someone from distributing a Firefox add in triggers several thoughts. Now keep in mind that I am an addled goose, not a scholar, generally anti-monopoly, and opinionated. Here are my personal thoughts and opinions:
- The action against Zotero caused me to download and install the add in. I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and I might even be motivated to put a footnote into one of my forthcoming non-scholarly monographs and reports. What great publicity for Firefox, Zotero, and the other programmers who want to poke Goliath in the nose
- I looked into the commercial footnote software and it sure looked to me as if Thomson Reuters is trying to round up the herd, brand the cows, and sell their software at a considerably higher price than Zotero. Zotero is free, so you can calculate the difference yourself pretty easily.
- This type of action is illustrative of the difference between a traditional media company (which Thomson Reuters is despite all the fancy tap dancing) and outfits like Google. Google’s business model allows the company to provide high value services like Google Maps without a fee. Try to get a Thomson Reuters’ product for free, and you will find that its business model is 180 degrees opposite from Google’s. That’s why Thomson Reuters wants to stop Zotero in its tracks. The Thomson Reuters business model dictates the action, and the company has not other ways to make enough dough to stay afloat.
The net net of this is great PR for Firefox, more work for legal eagles, and another example of why traditi0onal media, including professional publishing companies, are in a long, slow decline. Now what will happen if the GOOG puts a footnote function into Google Docs, or, better yet, in the Chrome framework. I wouldn’t be surprised in Thomson Reuters would find itself in court spending big bucks to prevent Google from doing pretty much what Google wants to do. Exciting stuff to consider.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2008
Search Monopoly: The Users Are Guilty
September 28, 2008
After 21 days of travel, I enjoyed flicking through the digital fish my newsreader snags for me. One article in Seeking Alpha caught my eye. The title is “We Can’t Afford a Search Monopoly, Even If It Kills Yahoo”. You can read the article here. I think the article is by Michael Arrington, and it originally appeared on TechCrunch, but I can’t be sure. The pivot on which the article turns is Google’s deal with Yahoo. In the background are the data that most Internet users in North America turn to Google for search. I am supportive of Google, not because I love the 20 somethings who come up to me after my lectures and expect me to explain to them why I am describing a Google they don’t recognize. The reason is that Googlers are so involved with a tiny circle of other Googlers that these bright folks can’t see the Googzilla against the background of “do no evil”.
I side with Google because every day users vote with their mouse clicks and key taps to make Google number one. I don’t for a minute think advertisers care who gets them business. As long as the ad money delivers sales, advertisers are happy. I also don’t think that users think too much about how Google generates useful results for a query or a click on a Google canned search within Chrome. If users and advertisers were deeply dissatisfied, the GOOG would find itself just another vendor fighting for survival.
I think folks are agitated about Google is that after a decade of indifference and casual dismissal of the company as a search engine that sells ads, some people are waking up to the reality of Google’s application infrastructure. Why is the infrastructure important? At this time, none of the competitors have what Google has. Microsoft is rushing to catch up, but it is tough to close a 60 percent market share gap and an infrastructure gap quickly. In fact, if Microsoft catches up, it will be in the difficult position of finding Google farther ahead. Microsoft or any other competitor has to leapfrog Google, not catch up.
Furthermore, trying to legislate away Google’s success may be tough too. The legal process can be long and drawn out. Google has enough money to keep its lawyers digging away for decades. Google is morphing into other business sectors, and it is not clear to me how a decision about Google can transfer from one sector to another or from one country to another. Toss in the fact that most people use Google of their own free will, and the problem of Google’s alleged search monopoly becomes more challenging.
Google now finds itself in a combination position. In some ways it is the 21st century version of the pre break up AT&T. In other ways, it is the child of the thumb typing generation. Google’s been chugging away for a decade, and it is going to be difficult to alter the company’s trajectory or bleed off its momentum with Web log postings, complaints from newspaper publishers, and objections from Microsoft and Yahoo that Google is not playing fair and square.
The problem with Google is that it is a service for users and advertisers. To kill Google, someone is going to have to get those users to stop using Google. That’s a big job and one that may be difficult without the aforementioned technical leap frog.
Stephen Arnold, September 28, 2008
BBC: Search Is a Backwater
September 27, 2008
I just read a quite remarkable essay by a gentleman named Richard Titus, Controller, User Experience & Design for BBC Future Media & Technology. (I like the word controller.) I am still confused by the time zone zipping I have experienced in the past seven days. At this moment in time, I don’t recall if I have met Mr. Titus or if I have read other writings by him. What struck me is that he was a keynote at a BBC Future Media & Technology Conference. My first reaction is that to learn the future a prestigious organization like the BBC might have turned toward the non-BBC world. The Beeb disagreed and looked for its staff to illuminate the gloomy passages of Christmas Yet to Come. You can read this essay “Search and Content Discovery” here. In fact, you must read it.
With enthusiasm I read the essay. Several points flew from the page directly into the dead letter office of my addled goose brain. There these hot little nuggets sat until I could approach them in safety. Here are the points that cooked my thinking:
- Key word search is brute force search.
- Yahoo BOSS is a way to embrace and extend search
- The Xoogler Cuil.com system looked promising but possibly disappoints
- Viewdle facial recognition software is prescient. (This is an outfit hooked up with Thomson Reuters, known for innovation by chasing markets before the revenue base crumbles away. I don’t associate professional publishers with innovation, however.)
- Naver from Korea is a super electronic game portal.
- Mahalo is a human-mediated system and also interesting, and the BBC has a topics page which also looks okay
- SearchMe, also built by Xooglers, uses a flash-based interface.
Xooglers are inspired by Apple’s cover flow. Now how many hits did my query “beyond search” get. Can your father figure out how to view the next hit or make this one large enough to read, a brute force way to get information of course.
These points were followed by this statement:
When you marry solid data and indexing (everyone forgets that Google’s code base is almost ten years old), useful new data points (facial recognition, behavioral targeting, historical precedent, trust, etc) with a compelling and useful user experience, we may see some changes in the market leadership of search.
I would like to comment on each of these points:
Sisense Update
September 26, 2008
Back in August, Beyond Search wrote about Sisense, a business intelligence start up dealing in software solutions. They’ve been working on software that taps Google spreadsheets holding customer data, runs the information through pre-defined intelligence schemes, and crunches away. You can review the basics here.
That software, called Prism, is now on the market. Licensing starts at $50 per month for a workgroup and $10-20 a month for additional users. There’s also a free (hey!) version and a personal option ($100) out there too.
According to a Sisense press release, Prism is desktop-based product with strong analytics and reporting and graphing capabilities. They also promote that it’s the only business intelligence software that doesn’t need IT support. Not a bad plan for users on the road like advertising or distribution personnel.
You can get a trial version at https://www.sisense.com/register.aspx.
Jessica Bratcher, September 26, 2008
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