Mobile Search: What Users Now Do
May 3, 2008
I reported on the update to Sergey Brin’s voice search patent earlier today. ClickZ (May 2, 2008) provided a bit of color for user search behavior on mobile devices. You can read–for a short time at least–ClickZ’s item is derived from Nielsen Mobile and Nielsen Online data in a report called “Total Web”. The summary of the data is here.
The first point I noted is that high-traffic Web sites benefit from mobile users. ClickZ’s “number” is a 13 percent increase in traffic. The absolute value is less important than the uptick. More mobile users translates into more traffic. That’s a good thing.
The second point is that mobile users have some specific mobile access content preferences. I found these data somewhat surprising but upon reflection, I think the ClickZ analysis makes sense. The five services used most frequently by mobile users are:
- Weather
- Entertainment
- Games
- Music
- Email.
The first three–weather, entertainment, and games–account for usage bumps of more than 20 percent. Music and email pump up usage by 15 percent and 11 percent respectively. Shopping on a mobile device is almost a non-starter.
Search returns a mere two percent increase in traffic. The questions that these data, if we assume them to be close enough for horseshoes, are [a] What’s the impact of voice search on mobile search? and [b] If voice search doesn’t goose usage from its miserable position, what happens to business models predicated on strong mobile advertising? It’s possible that voice will not improve search. After all, who wants to browse results on a tiny display? Voice may open new usage opportunities. Then the challenge becomes the one that has long-plagued online service providers–generating money from users who don’t want to pay for information unless it’s of the “must have” variety.
Stephen Arnold, May 3, 2008
IBM’s Slow Moving Cloud
April 28, 2008
In late 2007, IBM announced it “blue cloud”. If you don’t recall the announcement, you can read the IBM announcement here.
The key points that jumped out at me last year when I learned about this initiative are:
- The start of a shift from on-premises computing to cloud computing and Salesforce.com-type
- solutions for some of the IBM enterprise, government, and not for profit clients
- A series of cloud computing offerings that include hardware, services, and systems
- Distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources targeted for existing workloads and emerging massively scalable, data intensive workloads.
Last week, IBM revealed additional blue cloud component. The firm’s iDataPlex hardware is designed for cloud computing specifically for distributed data centers. Engineered to reduce power consumption and air conditioning load, the servers put the IBM “seal of approval” on network-centric or cloud computing solutions for business and large organizations. The zippy hardware can be managed with IBM’s Tivoli-based Blue Cloud software, which helps allays some organizations fears about “out in the cloud” solutions.
Infoworld’s story “Battle Brewing in the Cloud”, which you can read here, does a good job of summarizing similar initiatives from Amazon, Google, and EMC.
IBM’s push into cloud computing is interesting. The company says, “Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services…Blue Cloud will particularly focus on the breakthroughs required in IT management simplification to ensure security, privacy,reliability, as well as high utilization and efficiency.”
My take on IBM’s November 2007 announcement and last week’s iDataPlex and management software availability is that cloud computing is the next application platform. IBM’s verbiage says with authority what Webby companies have been arguing for several years. Largecompanies often pay little attention to innovations from upstarts like Amazon and Google. Industrial giants do notice when IBM gets behind an information technology trend.
Here’s the kicker. I don’t think cloud computing is going to be an overnight sensation. Large organizations are by their nature slow moving. IBM’s announcement certifies that cloud computing is a viable enterprise systems option.
The next IT struggle for dominance, mind share, and revenues is officially underway. Just slowly and for some organizations that pace won’t permit the behemoths to adapt quickly enough to avoid some consequences of the coming shift in enterprise computing.
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2008
Newspapers: Hastening Their Own Demise
April 24, 2008
I dreamed of Darwin. I think my semiconscious was mulling about survival and adaptation. The financial news from the newspaper publishing world was interesting. Losses at Gannett, McClatchy, and the New York Times suggest continued worsening of their financial weather. You can point and click through the remarkable financial picture by running this query on Google News.
To add insult to injury, Moody’s Investors Service, according to CNN.com, downgraded the New York Times Company’s senior unsecured ratings to ‘Baa3’ from ‘Baa1′ and its commercial paper rating to “Prime-3” from “Prime-2”. This is the difference between a premier league soccer team and a third-division squad playing for beer. The news story I read reported that Moody’s said the New York Times had a “stable” financial outlook. If the first quarter results are stable, I must not have a good grasp of how financial whiz kids think. (Please, read this story quickly. These CNN.com links disappear quickly.)
Enterprise search systems can ingest news and information from third-parties. Some news organizations sell live feeds directly into companies. The information is then indexed and made available to employees within the enterprise search system. Over the last few years, I’ve seen an increase in the use of news on Internet sites first as a supplement to commercial vendors’ news and now as a replacement in some organizations. Are commercial news vendors, newspapers, and legitimate commercial aggregators losing their grip in this important market?
I think newspapers are. It may be too soon to tell if outfits like the Associated Press or giant combines will be affected as well. The digitally adept may be able to deal with Darwinian forces. Others won’t be so fortunate.
Every few months I bump into an executive from a New York publishing company. Some of these titans of information work for media companies with newspapers; others labor within the multi-national combines that own professional publishing companies. A few ride the air currents rising from the burning piles of unsold books, magazines, peer-reviewed journals, and controlled-circulation publications.
Viewed as a group, the financial picture is clear. Consolidation is inevitable. I dropped my subscription to the Financial Times because I was getting three deliveries a week, not six. The FT’s hard copy distribution system was incapable of delivering the paper on a daily basis to my redoubt in rural Kentucky. No apologies and no explanations were forthcoming after three years of complaining to my elusive delivery person. My emails to the FT customer center went unheeded. At a trade show, a chipper Financial Times’s booth worker tried to give me a tan baseball cap with an embroidered “FT” logo. I returned the hat to the young person saying, “No, thanks. I have a Google cap and that is already broken in.”
Three Sources of “Real” News
I want to steer clear of the well-worn theme that Web logs provide an alternative to “real” journalism. The best Web logs from my point of view are those written by individuals who were or could have been cracker jack journalists. I worked at the Courier-Journal & Louisville Times in its salad days. I also worked for the fellow once described to me as “the most hated man in New York publishing,” the sharp-as-a-tack Bill Ziff. Mr. Ziff created three media conglomerates and sold each at the peak of their valuation. He would still be working his magic if age and illness had not side lined him. The best Web log writers could have found a home at either the CJ or at Ziff when these outfits were firing on all cylinders.
I want to take a look at three exemplary news services in a cursory way and then offer some observations about why the newspaper publishers who are losing money are probably going to continue losing money for the foreseeable future. If Rupert Murdoch’s legal eagles are reading this essay, calm down. I am not discussing News Corp., the Wall Street Journal, or the likely takeover of Newsday.
First, navigate to a site called Newsnow. I haven’t kept up with the company after speaking with executives a couple of years ago. The service provides a series of links to news grouped by categories. The center panel presents headlines and one sentence summaries of the major story. When I visited the site this morning (April 24, 2008), I had a tidy line up of items relating to the mortgage crisis affecting Europe. An important point is that even on my real lousy Verizon high-speed, use-it-anywhere wireless service–Newsnow loads quickly and is not annoying.
Indexing Dynamic Databased Content
April 20, 2008
In the last week, there’s been considerable discussion of what is now called “deep Web” content. The idea is that some content requires the user to enter a query. The system processes the querey and generates a search result from a database. This function is easier to illustrate than explain in words.
Look at the screen shot below. I have navigated to Southwest Airlines Web page and entered a query for flights from Louisville, Kentucky, to Baltimore, Maryland.
Here’s what the system shows me:
If you do a search on Google, Live.com, or Yahoo, you won’t see the specific listing of flights shown below:
Traditional Publishers: Patricians under Siege
April 19, 2008
This is an abbreviated version of Stephen Arnold’s key note at the Buying and Selling eContent Conference on April 15, 2008. A full text of the remarks is here.
Roman generals like Caesar relied on towers spaced about 3000 feet apart. Torch signals allowed messages to be passed. Routine communications used a Roman version of the “pony express”, based on innovations in Persia centuries before Rome took to the battlefield.
Today, you rely on email and your mobile phones. Those in the teens and tweens Twitter and use “instant” social messaging systems like those in Facebook and Google Mail. Try to Imagine how difficult it would be for Caesar to understand the technology behind Twitter. but how many of you think Caesar would have hit upon a tactical use of this “faster that flares” technology?
Data Bunny Unmasked
April 16, 2008
Earlier today, a well-paid, somewhat insightful senior executive ripped the fur off a 27 year charade. The keen investigative mind of the anonymous investigator revealed that the data bunny has been Stephen E. Arnold.
The shocking discovery dismayed the two known fans of Mr. Arnold. One chagrined client said:
We had no idea that Mr. Arnold was the data bunny. When he lectured at our company, we did not notice the ears. The information he conveyed was more important than his appearance. I’m not sure what he was wearing during the briefing. But now that the truth is revealed, we will not listen to his analyses if he wears those ears. I hope we don’t confuse substance and appearance again. Proper dress is more important than real information.
When Mr. Arnold learned that his secret was out of the hutch, he blinked his pink eyes and said, according to Donald Anderson, an engineer who has worked with Mr. Arnold for more than 15 years: “Those bunny ears are not funny. Mr. Arnold doesn’t wear them all the time or I just don’t notice them anymore.”
According to Mr. Anderson’, Mr. Arnold’s reaction was to stamp his paw and twitch his nose in frustration. Added Mr. Anderson, “I guess he thought the secret was safe. It’s sad. Almost like Lois Lane learning the identity of Superman. It’s sad, but the truth must come out.”
According to another member of the Beyond Search team, Mr. Arnold removed his bunny ears in disgust and slipped on his new Beyond Search rubber goose mask. A photograph of Mr. Arnold in his goose disguise is the basis of this Web log’s logo here.
Beyond Search will publish more details about this startling investigative discovery as they become available. Mr. Arnold’s attorney told Beyond Search, “Although the revelation is shocking, I have advised Mr. Arnold to not reveal the name of the genius who disclosed this 27 year old mystery.”
According to his attorney, Mr. Arnold’s final comment was, “Honk. Honk.”
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2008
Google Forms: A Data Snout for a Bigger Creature
April 12, 2008
Navigate to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. Scan the posting written by two wizards whom you probably don’t know, Alon Halevy (senior wizard) and Jayant Madhavan (slightly less senior wizard). Here’s what you will be told in well-chosen, Googley prose:
In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the Web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.
The idea is that dynamic content does not usually appear in an index. On the public Internet, this type of content is useful to me. For example, when I want to take a Southwest flight, I have to fill in some annoying Southwest forms, fiddle with drop down boxes, and figure out exactly which fare is likely to let me sit in one of the “choice” seats by boarding first. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to run a query on Google, see the flights aggregated, and from that master list jump to the order form? Dynamic content is now becoming more common.
I heard from one wizard at a conference in London that dynamic content is now more than half of the content appearing on the Web. The shift from static to dynamic is, therefore, a fundamental change in the way Web plumbing works on Web log content management systems to the sprawling craziness of Amazon.com.
A diagram from Dr. Guha’s patent applications with the Context Server shown in relation to the other parts of the PSE. This is a figure from Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator, published by Infonortics, Ltd., Tetbury, Glou. in July 2007. Infonortics holds the copyright to this study and its contents.
The Importance of Being First
April 11, 2008
Alex Moskalyuk’s Web log contained a posting on April 10, 2008, that asserted “68 percent of search engine users click on the first page of results.” The story appeared in his Web log on Ziff-Davis’ ZDNet.com site. These data can be tough to find after a few days. Please, access the story and capture the data, which are from iProspect, a unit of the Aegis Group.
I am skeptical of usage data from Internet consultancies and search engine optimization companies. With that caveat in mind, the iProspect data reveal a significant trend in search system user behavior. Specifically, over time–if the data are accurate–users click on the first page of results only. The chart below illustrates this trend:
The top line is climbing, and it means that almost half of the users on Web search systems click on the first page of results. No real surprise, I suppose. The two other lines underscore the fact that fewer and fewer users are working through laundry lists of results. If these data are accurate, information on any other than the first page is not likely to get reviewed by a user.
What’s this mean for enterprise search (sometimes called Intranet search or behind-the-firewall search)? Users won’t spend much time looking for information if it is not slapped in front of their face. Key word search in organizations is generally a push cart filled with items that may or may not be pertinent to the employee’s query. If consumer behavior carries over to enterprise searchers, any system that takes a query such as “Acme proposal” and generates lists of results is going to be annoying.
Enterprise search system users need information to do their jobs, so the laundry list is almost a cinch to be more work than hunting for the needed information in other ways.
The iProspect data have another hook for me. As more young people enter the work force, Web behaviors are going to color their expectations of online search in their employer’s organization. Faced with laundry lists when Google and Microsoft personalize results, using probabilities to deliver a best guess about what’s needed by a particular person, traditional search systems in an enterprise are going to attract fewer and fewer enthusiastic users.
With the attention reports about deep-seated dissatisfaction about traditional enterprise search and content processing systems becoming more widely known, Mr. Moskalyuk’s Web log has provided another chunk of suggestive, interesting data. More details about enterprise search are needed, but in the search business, we have to take what the vendors provide. Like it or not.
Stephen Arnold, April 11, 2008
ArnoldIT.com Headquarters
April 10, 2008
ArnoldIT.com is delighted to announce that it has moved to new headquarters in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
In response to two questions about the location of Harrod’s Creek, ArnoldIT.com has released a photograph of its spacious, state-of-the-art offices.
Harrod’s Creek is one of North America’s high-technology centers. Our staff filters enterprise search news to separate the goose feathers from the giblets. Contact ArnoldIT.com by write sa at arnoldit.com.
Stephen Arnold, April 10, 2008
Gartner and the GOOG: Is Google Failing in the Enterprise?
April 10, 2008
The Ziff Davis / eWeek story stopped me in my tracks. Chris Boulton, a fine, fine journalist, wrote a story the ZD editors called “Gartner: Google Doesn`t Understand the Enterprise”. (Read this story before it disappears from the eWeek Web site.) The hook for the piece is a Gartner professionals’ assertion that:
Google Apps is like a “fog rolling into the harbor,” permeating businesses quite possibly at the expense of Microsoft and IBM.
Allegedly Gartner pundit Tom Austin asserted that
Clients are calling us about GAPE [Google Apps Premier Edition],” Austin said. ‘They will use it as a bat to beat Microsoft or IBM to make them lower the cost of their software.’
The remarks appears to orginate in a talk at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo on April 9, 2008. The most telling part of this article, if Mr. Boulton heard correctly is:
In a line of reasoning echoing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ claims that Google doesn’t understand businesses’ needs, Austin said that Google doesn’t understand the enterprise. It is not that the company can’t, he said, it is that Google doesn’t care to understand the enterprise. For example, while Microsoft and IBM offer customers five-year roadmaps under non-disclosure agreements, Google’s roadmap is one day at a time.
If true, Gartner must know a great deal more about Google’s enterprise success than I do. My sources tell me that Google is struggling to stay on top of the wave of success with its map and geo-spatial services. Google is reacting to customer requests, at least in the US government sector from what I hear from those familiar with canvas cubes in Washington, DC. My research about enterprise search revenues indicates that Google now has more than 9,000 licensees of its Google Search Appliance. This product generated somewhere around $350 to $400 million in calendar 2007 and is growing at double digit rates. The various applications, enhanced email, and messaging functions are pulling inquiries as well. In short, the Google is disrupting the traditional enterprise market on several fronts. Google lets customers pull Google to them. Google doesn’t push for sales like most enterprise software vendors.
My hunch is that Google’s “fog-like” behavior translates to sour grapes because Google is somewhat reluctant to shovel cash into the maw of the high-end IT consultancies for guidance. Google’s reliance on “pull” tactics is challenge for some traditional consulting firms like Booz, Allen & Hamilton where I worked . Google has plenty of wizards and gurus on staff. If a pundit is Googley, that consultant will probably work for Google. This is a difficult concept for some for-hire experts to accept. But that’s just my interpretation of the matter.
I think Mr. Boulton got the story right. Could it be that Gartner doesn’t understand Google?
Stephen Arnold, April 10, 2008
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