Google Filters: Fire Arms
July 7, 2012
No big deal, but I wanted to capture this news item. Outdoor Hub reports “Google Censors Firearms Products in Shopping Search Results.” I am not a person who searches for weapons. I am also not a person who turns to Google Shopping for products. I wonder if anyone has prepared a master list of the works and phrases which Google filters. If one of my two or three readers knows of such a list, please, post a link in the comments section of this blog. Here at the goose pond, we don’t want to undertake this task. We have added a new category to this blog; it is “infoshaping.” Stories which touch on disinformation or management of indexes will receive this category assignment. We practice infoshaping, and we think it is a wonderful method for presenting curated content. Infoshaping used to be called an “editorial policy” but that term is not popular among infoshaped millennials.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Honk and Infoshaping
July 6, 2012
We issued another test issue of Honk, the opt in newsletter about search and content processing. The lead story this week is “Infoshaping: The New Approach to Search.” The feature story in Honk each week tackles a subject and takes a more direct, blunt approach to the topic. The stories in Beyond Search, OpenSearchNews, Inteltrax, TheTrendPoint, and SharePoint Semantics are useful. We do, however, write around some sensitive issues. In fact, we don’t do “real news.” We prefer to leave that to “real” journalists. The goslings and I are more along the lines of reference librarians with feathers.
This button will appear on our information services as we move toward the formal roll out of our opt in weekly newsletter.
In the infoshaping article, I tackle the touchy subject of disinformation and weaponized information. We think the subject is important because as education becomes less able to produce individuals who can think critically, the opportunity to manipulate or frame a subject increases. How does this impact search? Well, people use online search systems and analytics systems without understanding what choices are made to control the information in the index. If information is not in the index or in the database, that information is tough to find. When the information is shaped, most users don’t know what is what.
Over the years, I have produced a number of for fee articles. Information about most of my monographs is readily available, but the for fee articles are more difficult for inexperienced researchers to locate. We have just posted on LinkedIn under my public profile, a list with links to about 100 of my columns and features. You can locate the list at Stephen E Arnold on LinkedIn. If the link on the “new and improved” LinkedIn does not work, navigate to the LinkedIn.com Web site and search for “Stephen E Arnold.” There are two with that name, but I am the shifty, wrinkled and stupid looking one.
A number of the for fee write ups tackle the subject of infoshaping, but not as directly as I do in this week’s Honk feature. We are in test mode. You can opt in by writing to one of the goslings at thehonk@yandex.com or click this link.
Stephen E Arnold, July 6, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT
Microsoft through X Ray Glasses: Oh, Ugly.
July 3, 2012
Vanity Fair is a magazine I associate with fashion. Sun glasses, movie reviews, and perfume. I was incorrect. Vanity Fair is a business analysis journal. I suppose it wants to become the four color version of the estimable Harvard Business Review or the HBR before the editorial excitement over the alleged mixing article subjects with editorial fun.
I read “Microsoft’s Lost Decade.” I suppose I will buy the hard copy issue with the story. I hope I don’t get funny looks about my choice of reading material. I suggest you read the article. Quite a dark look at the Redmond-based giant.
Here’s the passage I liked:
When one of the young developers of MSN Messenger noticed college kids giving status updates on AOL’s AIM, he saw what Microsoft’s product lacked. “That was the beginning of the trend toward Facebook, people having somewhere to put their thoughts, a continuous stream of consciousness,” he tells Eichenwald. “The main purpose of AIM wasn’t to chat, but to give you the chance to log in at any time and check out what your friends were doing.” When he pointed out to his boss that Messenger lacked a short-message feature, the older man dismissed his concerns; he couldn’t see why young people would care about putting up a few words. “He didn’t get it,” the developer says. “And because he didn’t know or didn’t believe how young people were using messenger programs, we didn’t do anything.”
Notice that it was an older man who was the dolt. Since I am 67, I can relate to this. But I am not a dolt; I am an addled goose.Vanity Fair does do quite a hatchet job. Is it warranted? Who knows? What I took away from the Lost Decade piece is that Microsoft does nothing right in the eyes of this particular HBR like write up on the Vanity Fair Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Is the Internet Entering a New Phrase? Er, Phase?
June 29, 2012
Akamai CEO Paul Sagan has declared that the ability to instantly deliver online is now make-or-break for businesses, ZDNet reports in “Akamai CEO: We’re Entering ‘Instant Internet’ Phase.” The executive shared his views at the recent GigaOm Structure 2012. The article reports:
“‘We’re about to enter a phase where we talk about the instant Internet,’ said Sagan, explaining we started with being extremely patient (on dial-up connectivity) with successive improvements over time.
“If you want to be competitive, Sagan warned, basically you must deliver on this concept or your business doesn’t have a chance.
“‘It creates big thresholds of challenge for us to deliver that experience,’ Sagan acknowledged. ‘We are promising our customers that we will deliver any content anywhere, anytime.’
“Sagan added security is the other catch here as ‘the bad guys are moving in.'”
All true, and important for companies to keep in mind. However, do these developments represent a whole new phase in the life of the Internet? I think not. Becoming faster and more popular is growth, not a shift.
Akamai‘s cloud platform helps clients build their online business presence while emphasizing security. The company’s data management technology is rooted in a challenge issued among MIT professors in 1995. The company grew from solutions to this challenge, and launched in 1999. Akamai is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has offices worldwide.
Cynthia Murrell, June XX, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Rumor or Revisionism: Google to the Cloud!
June 23, 2012
I read with some amusement “Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud rival at Google I/O.” The main idea is that Google is going to roll out cloud services to compete with Amazon but really the purpose is to compete with Microsoft. Read the GigaOM “real” journalist story and decide what is being reported.
My view is that Google has been a cloud vendor from its earliest days. In The Google Legacy I described some Google research which made Google the “cloud” and everything thing was within Google. I did a briefing for some wild and crazy telecommunications folks in which a diagram showed that a telecommunications partner offering Internet service would have content and services delivered from the Google cloud. Sharply reduced latency was part of the plan. Google served the digital goods from its servers to which the telco partner would be party to the plan.
The date? 2004. My sources included information dating back to 2001.
Google in the cloud? Yep. What seems to be mesmerizing folks is that Google may make a public announcement. Be still my heart.
My question remains: Why has Google delayed bundling its cloud services for years. The foot dragging allowed Amazon to deploy most of the services with which Google engineers were fiddling.
A second question: Why has Google not moved enterprise search to the cloud? Google touts that it is a hardware company, but the Google Search Appliance is out of phase with the shift some firms are making to hosted or cloud services.
My hunch as a non journalist is that Google does not have the ability to execute and, thus, finds itself tagging along after others are in the market and enjoying a modicum of success.
Why? What about management? What about the ability to do something about market trends before those trends ossify? Honk. (If you want to receive our free, registration required newsletter Honk!, write thehonk at yandex dot com. I am more blunt in the original essay which is distributed every Tuesday at 7 am Eastern.)
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Numbers Do Not Lie: Big Things, Small Packages
June 21, 2012
Big things come in small packages, and that is the challenge desktop internet is currently facing when compared to mobile devices. The mismatched growth in mobile usage and monetization now casts a shadow that looms over the internet industry according to Mary Meeker Explains the Mobile Monetization Challenge. Mobile usage hit 10% of the total global Internet traffic as of May 2012. That may not sound like much, but it was only five percent at that time last year.
According to Meeker, cost and ecommerce are playing a big role as:
“There are lots of places to find evidence of the mobile monetization gap. Effective desktop CPMs are five times the price of mobile Internet CPMs in the U.S.: $3.50 versus $0.75. And companies like Pandora, Tencent and Zynga currently report that average revenue per user is as much as five times lower on mobile.”
“Mobile e-commerce is 8 percent of the total e-commerce market in the U.S. Today, payments for and within applications account for 71 percent of revenue versus 29 percent for mobile advertising”
Right now there are over 1.1 billion global mobile 3G subscribers as compared to the 2.3 billion global internet users. The mobile device offers desktop accessibility with the added convenience of portability at a reasonable price. When you consider all the details, it isn’t surprising the hard number results favor the smaller package.
Jennifer Shockley, June 21, 2012
PeerJ. The Latest Open Access Online Scientific Publisher
June 20, 2012
More challenges for the traditional database world: Technology Review reveals that “Open Access Online Publishing Trend Continues in Academia.” In the traditionally “pay to play” world of scientific journals, the new PeerJ chooses a route less traveled. So far.
While not technically free, the cost of membership is slim compared to the traditional setup. Reporter Conor Myhrvold writes:
“The pass comes in the form of a journal membership, so you can access others’ articles. The most basic plan, for one article a year, is $99 if you pay before you’re published. The article still undergoes peer review before it can be accepted. Members also have to commit to doing at least one peer review per year (which could be an informal comment on an already published paper.) The first 12 authors of an article need to be members, yet this means that the price of publishing just one article—$1,548 for 12 authors if membership is done after submission—is substantially cheaper than the several thousand dollars it would cost under a conventional open-access publishing model”
PeerJ is not the first to challenge customary conventions of scientific publishing. A controversy has been taking place over the last few years because the profit margins of academic journals can be almost 40 percent. If they are doing so outlandishly well, couldn’t they drop the authors’ fees and get their money from readers like other publishing sectors? Large journal publishers like Elsevier say no; are they fighting a losing battle?
Cynthia Murrell, June 20, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Sophisticated Online Searchers? Nope. Fewer.
June 18, 2012
TechCrunch published “Hitwise: Google US Search Share Down 5% In The Last Year; Bing, Yahoo Gained.” Check it out. We are less interested in the Google market share than the average goose. However, within the article was a table with some hefty data freight.
Here at the goose pond we hear from many folks, “I am a really good online researchers.” We find this amusing because about two thirds of the ArnoldIT team have degrees in library and information science. We have a handful of people with excellent research skills honed after years of wandering through the stacks of the Harrod’s Creek library with its collection of 37 volumes.
Here’s the table with a happy quack to TechCrunch and the ever reliable Experian Hitwise:
A happy quack to the ever reliable Experian Hitwise.
The key datum is the percentage of alleged Web search users who bag in a single term and take what the objective, relevance centric Web search vendors shovel out: 29.93 percent use single term queries. Call it 30 percent. How many of these expert searchers can identify disinformation? How many know how to determine the provenance of the source? How many spend time to double check the “facts” like the ones in this ever reliable Experian Hitwise table?
Another interesting point is that about 15 percent of the May 2012 users employ five or more terms. I am somewhat encouraged but that percentage is decreasing from the May 2011 figures. Bummer.
My view:
- As education erodes, the ability to figure out or even know how to sort out the goose feathers from the giblets will not be a growing asset.
- Based on my limited and skewed sample, MBAs and their ilk have little appetite to dig for information and check facts. The talk about data outweighs the actual value of meaningful factoids. I wish I could get paid by the fluff, an official unit of baloney.
- Has anyone thought about the political power of a Web search system which filters, shapes, and outputs information to one third of its customers? I do which is one reason why I am delighted to be an old, addled goose.
Yep, great data. I wonder if they are accurate. Hope not.
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
ArnoldIT Starts Free Information Service. Honk!
June 18, 2012
January was a cruel month. Now it is June and the ice has melted and the grass is green for a short time. At the ArnoldIT editorial meeting on June 14, 2012, the bright but feisty team suggested that we should try something new with our flow of more than 800 stories a month. So starting today (June 18, 2012) we are starting a test of Honk, an opt in, free restricted distribution newsletter. Key point: Free. Another key point: A test.
What will the opt in ArnoldIT newsletter contain?
We will be sending out one original and quite opinionated story plus links to six or seven supporting or complementary stories each week. Today’s test issue take a hard look at predictive methods for search and content processing. Instead of dancing around a company’s misstep, the content in the registration-required newsletter names the company. We hope that each newsletter provides the equivalent of a page in a college notebook about a specific topic.
If the feedback about the restricted distribution newsletter is positive, we want to expand the content coverage, run some ads, and use the newsletter for inclusions; that is, special content tailored to our opt in readers.
The logo for the free, weekly opt in newsletter from Stephen E Arnold
To get the free newsletter off the ground, here’s the deal. Write thehonk@yandex.com. Just tell us that you want to receive the email newsletter. You will start getting it each Monday. You can opt out at any time. As a shameless inducement, anyone who signs up in the next week will receive a free copy of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. Info about the monograph is here. The book was published in 2011 by Pandia in Norway which has shifted its business from information toward more exciting venues. Therefore, the rights are mine, and you can get a free monograph in exchange for your request to receive our new newsletter.
Just so you know what ideas the team generated are, let me highlight a few of the suggestions:
- We build our own email list. We have worked on building a search, content processing, and analytics mailing list for two publishers and several clients in the last four years. None of those outfits is still in business and we don’t have the names we acquired.
- We want to experiment with different types of content, including sponsored content. (I am not sure how this will work, but there are 20 ArnoldIT goslings who want to experiment.)
- We get requests to advertise on Beyond Search, but we have finite space. We will try to put some ads in the newsletter. Some will be gratis; others will we hope paid for by some wise advertiser.
- The newsletter may be killed because no one cares. My team and I are okay with that outcome.
We have assigned one of our content specialists to the project. Her name is Jennifer Shockley, and she will be monitoring the email at thehonk@yandex.com along with Don Anderson, the engineer who is fiddling with the email publishing systems we are testing.
The original content in the newsletter is copyrighted and may not be reused without written permission. The content on my Web site and the blogs have different terms of use.
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2012
Blekko Removes Most Popular Websites From Search Results
June 12, 2012
The Blekko Blog recently reported on a new experimental search engine called Millionshort.com that removes the most popular websites from search results in the article “Searching Without PageRank.”
The way that Million Short helps users navigate web results more easily, is by removing the top sites (be it million, thousand or hundred) from search results. The theory behind this is that often when you type keywords into a search engine, you always get the same results. This allows other websites that may not have mastered Google’s page ranking algorithm to be seen.
Blekko also has a search feature that is similar to this. The article states:
“Blekko’s search engine has a feature called slashtags, which can be used to either restrict a search to a list of websites, or remove that list of websites from the results. We typically use this feature for human curation, for example, picking out the best health websites. Hm, I thought, what an interesting hack! I’ll take that list of the most popular websites, and make slashtags which can be used to either search or exclude the most popular 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 websites. Our current effective limit to slashtag size is 100,000 websites, so I couldn’t do the most popular 1,000,000 sites.”
Blekko and Million Short are taking interesting steps to create more of a discovery search engine by allowing websites that may be new or have poor SEO and small marketing budgets to rise to the top.
Jasmine Ashton, June 12, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
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