Autonomy Spins Another Rich Media Deal
October 8, 2010
Searching radio content based on its meaning alone is indeed unique. That’s how semantics is rapidly transforming the traditional search. The Wallstreet Online.de press release “Radioplayer Selects Autonomy,” informs about the important task attributed to Autonomy’s core infrastructure software, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), to power the Radioplayer’s search box. Equipped with “unrivalled meaning-based search capabilities, unmatched scalability, and easy maintenance,” as the press release states, “Radioplayer listeners will be able to search every station, identifying news programs, sports highlights, musical genres or even individual songs, and potentially also find a specific place within the program that mentions the topic they are searching for.”
Not only does Radioplayer encourage radio listening, but puts the audience in control and make radio listening easy and accessible. The IDOL search platform will make available rich content across the radio industry through meaningful, relevant search results, and retrieve audio content based on the meaning of key concepts in the live stream. That’s really quick and effortless.
Harleena Singh, Octobr 8, 2010
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Facebook Shuns Google, Not too Social
October 7, 2010
The questions surrounding Google and the release of a new social “Facebook Killer” network continues to keep the world buzzing. Google’s Vice President Marissa Mayer in Venture Beat’s “Google’s Mayer Criticizes Content “Locked” Inside Facebook” expresses her feelings about the social leader Facebook. In her question and answer segment the VP expresses concerns about Facebook. Mayer states “her concern about social networks, particularly Facebook, was the fact that so much of their content is hidden from Google and other search engines.” Google wants individuals conducting searches to have access to relevant non sensitive information on Facebook. Google does currently pull information from some social sites, but Facebook gives them access to very little information. With the popularity of Facebook it is clear, if granted access, the available content would add to the overall quality of Google’s search results. With the Facebook and Microsoft partnership still taking shape perhaps that means Google is the odd man out. Facebook is not behaving in what one might describe a “social” manner.
April Holmes, October 7, 2010
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PoolCorp and Exalead Complete a High Scoring Deployment
October 6, 2010
PoolCorp. has immersed itself in Exalead’s search enabled applications framework, CloudView. According to information from Exalead, in 2009, PoolCorp evaluated its existing e-commerce platform and decided that a complete ground-up rewrite was needed to improve the ability for their customers to find products easier and faster. PoolCorp has always provided value-added tools for its dealers to grow their businesses and saw this as an opportunity to combine the best features of all of those tools into a new solution that would address all of the current customer adoption obstacles. With 35 percent of all
customer feedback surrounding search and search related functions, it was clear that in order for the new e-commerce site to provide an industry-leading customer purchase experience, an enterprise search solution was required.
Before deciding upon CloudView, PoolCorp reviewed a number of enterprise search solutions including Microsoft FAST, Endeca, Autonomy and open source Solr. Exalead told Beyond Search, “PoolCorp chose Exalead because it was cost effective, scalable and much easier to install than competing products.”
Dustin Hughes, the senior software archtect of PoolCorp said:
Great software like Exalead is like a ball of clay. You can easily push and mold it into how you need to use it. We had an extremely tight timeline for installing this software – due in part to Exalead’s fantastic customer support we got our beta up and working within weeks and rolled out to 500+ customers within 2 months. The entire system became generally available to 30,000+ U.S. customers within four months of the start of development and initial customer feedback has been very positive.
Beyond Search learned that since the POOL360 beta test in July 2010, PoolCorp found:
- The Exalead-based system offered remarkable response times, often within 1/50th of a second even when the application was pulling information directly from PoolCorp’s existing ERP system.
- Exalead’s ability to compress data from its original SQL format resulted in a 10:1 compression reduction, significantly reducing the amount of hardware necessary to deploy the POOL360 solution.
- PoolCorp saved more than $30,000 in hardware costs and licensing fees over alternative SQL-based solutions.
- The Exalead CloudView technology would be an ideal system for an internal enterprise search system.
Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.
For more information about Exalead visit the firm’s Web site at www.exalead.com. Beyond Search uses Exalead’s technology for its blog indexing demonstration here. Our experience has positive with zero set up hassles and exceptional stablity and performance.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2010
A Google Goal? Capture Indian SME Market
October 6, 2010
Matching its size and reputation, Google now has a suiting target. The Financial Express article “Google has 35m Indian SMEs on its radar,” reveals that India presently has only 200,000 SMEs having online presence, which is even less than 1 percent of its entire SME sector. As per the article, Google wants to convert the entire Indian SME sector into a potential customer base, and is on a “large-scale mission to educate smaller businessmen about the viability of the Internet for finding a market for their products.”
Even though the article reports about Google’s doubling of Indian SME customer base in a year, aggressive campaign for online advertising and plans for doubling its call center support, we reckon it will still be tough for Google to change the mindsets of most Indian businesspersons. Having said that, we note that the Internet usage is on a rise in India, which increases the chances of these business persons being lured to Google’s plan. I am not writing from the goose pond in Harrod’s Creek. I am writing from India. Different perspective perhaps?
Harleena Singh, October 6. 2010
A Linux Warning: Information or Disinformation
October 5, 2010
A reader sent me a link to a story on TechNewsWorld. “Penguins Old, Penguins New, Penguins Battered and Penguins Blue” provides some cautionary words about open source in general and Linux in particular. I am not able to say whether the information in the article is 100 percent spot on, but I did want to capture its main points. The arguments may be germane as open source software continues to chug forward. Later this week I will be at the Lucene Revolution Conference, and I want to make sure I know the pros and cons of the commercial versus open source landscape.
The key point in the TechNewsWorld write up is that Windows 7 is a better option for the use case described in the story. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
The project’s afflictions included implementation delays, immature software and “disgruntled employees whose displeasure allegedly culminated in the creation of a home page dedicated to venting their gripes and who were so busy grappling with Linux that they no longer managed to do their jobs,” explains a special report in The H.
After indicating that there may be a role for Linux in this particular client situation, the author says:
Three “not-so-easy lessons” can be taken away from the Solothurn story, Hudson suggested:
Problem #1: “There will always be a significant minority that will resist any change.”
Lesson #1: “Plan for resistance, and be ready to modify plans accordingly. Giving up a little early on can mean not losing everything later. No battle plan survives the first engagement intact.”
Problem #2: “Trying to change from one computer monoculture to another ignores practicalities.”
Lesson #2: “Be practical. Save ideology for church on Sunday or discussing politics at the family reunion.”
Problem #3: “Nothing was ready on time, and a lot didn’t work as promised.”
Lesson #3: “Don’t over-promise, don’t over-sell. You’re not the 800-pound monkey — you can’t sell vaporware and then fling poo at your customers and hope some of it sticks.”
Yep, without resources, knowledge, and commitment, change is tough. I suppose that’s why 66 percent of Windows users are still running XP.
I am not convinced that this use case is necessarily representative.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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Yahoo and Prediction
October 5, 2010
Yahoo’s public relations machine is working hard to deal with the flood of news about executive turnover and the questions about Yahoo’s management leadership. I wanted to snag this “What Can Search Predict?” item before it becomes unfindable. Google Instant and Bing are wonder services but pinning down specific documents in the brave new world is getting more difficult in my opinion.
The point of the write up is that user behavior at a point in time provides information about what’s hot and what’s not. I understand this. Analyzing usage data is not a new thing, nor is the math used to clump clicks and plot them, massage them, and extrapolate from them. Most college grads had a chance to try their hand at this type of math in classes from psychology to biology and statistics. (I can hear the groans now.)
Yahoo says:
In many cases, we found that these traditional predictions performed on par with those generated from search. Although search data are indeed predictive of future outcomes, alternative information sources often perform equally well.
The idea is that big data are good but specific, narrow sets of data from specific corpuses may deliver better indicators of user future actions.
Makes sense to me. Big data are big. More precisely constrained data are narrower. When looking for a specific indicator, why not consider the constrained data? Makes sense to me, but I would prefer a method that uses big data, when available, and more constrained data. Two sets of outputs can be examined.
Yahoo adds:
The potential for search-based predictions seems greatest for applications like financial analysis where even a minimal performance edge can be valuable, or for situations in which it is cumbersome or expensive to collect and parse data from traditional sources. Ultimately, search can be useful in predicting real-world events, not because it is better than other traditional data, but because it is fast, convenient, and offers insight into a wide range of topics.
Several questions waddled across my mind:
- What is the current Yahoo use case for its insight? I know that each time I return to my Yahoo Mail, the system does not remember me, nor does it present options to me based on my behavior or a larger group’s in my view. I have to click, click, click to see a list of email. Maybe Yahoo can provide some concrete examples?
- In the midst of the shift to Bing search, where does this predictive stuff fit. I was looking for a “mens black watch” on Yahoo Shopping. Try the query. I am not sure what can be done to improve the results, but search results mixed ranges with specific prices on specific models. Huh? With user data – either big or constrained – predictive methods should reduce confusion, not create a “huh” moment for me.
- Is this a “level” problem? Here’s what I am thinking. The problem in search that Yahoo is addressing seems to be down in the weeds. There are larger findability problems with Yahoo’s system. For example, in the shopping example a user must click on a “more” link in order to access the shopping search feature. Most users don’t know to what that “More” refers. Is this a contributing factor to user frustration which in turn may explain some of the loss of polish on the purple Yahoo Y?
Worth reading and then finding a use case (which I may be missing) before recycling information already in the channel in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2010
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Floss Plone Information
October 4, 2010
I have been listening to podcasts when at the gym. New to the podcast world, I have been downloading programs to try and find out which ones have consistent, solid content. Yesterday I listened to Floss Weekly Number 137: Plone, produced by an outfit called Twit. You can get the show and information about Twit from the company’s Web site at http://twit.tv. I was surprised with the information revealed on this particular podcast, hosted by Randal Schwartz (aka merlyn), a Perl expert.
The guest on the program to which I listened was Alexander Limi, former Googler, employee at Mozilla, and user experience specialist for Plone. If you are not familiar with Plone, it is an open source content framework. You can use it to create content for industrial strength applications like the FBI and Discover Web sites. For more information about Plone, navigate to http://plone.org/.
I have no solid information about the accuracy of this particular podcast. I do want to highlight two points made in the podcast because I don’t want them to slip away.
The first point concerns Microsoft SharePoint. On the podcast I heard that Microsoft is not really selling or licensing SharePoint. Instead the model is shifting to providing the software and relying on services to generate revenue. I will have to poke around to find out if this is an early warning of a shift in the SharePoint business model or if there are only certain situations in which Microsoft is providing access to SharePoint in this way. The reason this is important is that SharePoint is, in my opinion, the fertile soil of an ecosystem that supports quite a few third-party vendors. These range from Microsoft Certified Partners who produce software that snaps in or overlays SharePoint. Example range from European vendors like Fabasoft to US firms like BA-Insight. In addition, there are many engineers who take some Microsoft classes and then support themselves making SharePoint work as the licensee requires. The notion of a “free” SharePoint or even a low cost SharePoint can explain why so many English majors, unemployed journalists, and third string business school MBAs are vociferously marketing their SharePoint expertise. This is a big ecosystem and it is going to get even bigger. I documented a study that suggested some SharePoint installations were challenges. The pricing implications are significant and the outlook for companies which can actually make SharePoint work are significant as well. I think most of the SharePoint snap in vendors could still be walking on a knife edge. The reason is that big accounts will be sucked up by Microsoft itself. Why let that revenue go to those who cultivated the cornfield? Just like big agriculture, the small farmer gets an opportunity to find a new future.
Need to Understand Transparency and Online Advertising
October 3, 2010
I don’t but you may. An outfit called Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace offers a free white paper “Openness & the Internet: The Role of Transparency in Online Search and Search Advertising.” You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get this 24 page document. Begin the question by navigating to ComputerWeekly.com. You can try this link or run a query with crossed fingers for the title of the white paper. Good luck.
I read the white paper and noted that Lord Watson of Richmond CBE wants me to provide feedback. So, here goes.
The idea is that big online entities should be able to figure out how much dough Google makes so that information can be used by advertisers to get a better deal.
Why not ask Ptolemy why he is using so many circles and arcs? I bet he would drop what he was doing and fill you in? Wrong. The guy was busy reworking Hipparchus’ system of epicycles and eccentric circles. If you didn’t get it, he probably wasn’t going to give the information to you. Is Google much different?
Fat chance.
The silliness of this idea is clear in one passage:
How important is it that a dominant firm employs consistent and predictable procedures for resolution of complaints for online publishers and advertisers?
Really? Why not just write directly about Google? A couple of thoughts:
First, I suggest the author of the white paper drop by the local high school or pre-college institution and attend a Math Club meeting. Once in the room, ask this question, “I am having trouble figuring out how many miles to the gallon I get in my Honda.” The author of the paper should note the response of the group and then revisit this question about consistent and predictable. The only behavior that will be predictable and consistent, in my opinion, will be scorn and laughter.
Second, the notion of dealing with humans who want something the Math Club does not want to provide is addled. The whole idea behind Math Club is that those who join it intuitively grasp certain ideas. Those who don’t “get it” are not worthy of Math Club and, therefore, will never “get it.” Ergo. Go find your lacrosse pals and ask them something.
Third, the underlying principle of online advertising is that everything is dynamic. That means that at any point in time factors change the rules. Asking a human, even a Math Club member, what is happening at a particular point in time and why it is happening evokes a look of disbelief.
In short, the white paper wants the Math Club to change. I think if you tracked down Ptolemy and asked him to explain how he did maps of what is now Northern Europe 2000 years ago, he would have snorted and ignored you.
That behavior doesn’t seem to change in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2010
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Arnold For Fee Columns, October 2010
October 3, 2010
Yep, another month and another series of for-fee columns. The Beyond Search blog content is a marketing effort. The good stuff finds its way into the work that people actually pay me to do. We just knocked off a report about a new market for search and content processing companies, but I won’t be sharing any of that solid gold information in this blog. Keep in mind that the blog, although written by five people each week, is putting information in the voice of a 66 year old goose. I dearly lover the breathless 20 somethings who want me to participate in briefings with senior executives who have something to say about search engine optimization or the junior mid tier consultants who think I will sit through a Webinar because some vendor was silly enough to give these azurini money to put them in touch with a thought leader. Sigh.
If you want a glimpse of some of the research we have done into information retrieval, you will have to chase down one or more of these for fee columns when each appears either in print, online, or in both media.
- For Information Today, “Connectors: The Next Search Battleground”. I used this phrase in a personal email to a vendor and the vendor wanted to snag my phrase for its Web site. No way, José. If you are in the connector business, you will want to read this column. If you have licensed connectors, you will want to read this column. Why you ask? Who cares about connectors? Well, grasshopper, you don’t know what you don’t know. Think racketeering. How about a Federal court? Of course, you can chase down your PR person or your mid tier consultant and get the “real” story. Pick a path but stay informed.
- For Information World Review, “Governance: A Politically-Correct but Toothless Notion.” I hear so much baloney about governance, I was thrilled when someone paid me to dig into the subject of “taxonomy governance.” Talk about baloney. Instead of recycling a narrow take on governance, I upped the ante an invoked Jeff Papows, Oracle, HP, and Sun Tzu. Bottomline: governance like much info-baloney is a straw man. Talk about being politically correct. You can find out more when the story hits the online and hard copy Information World Review in the next few weeks.
- For KMWorld, “Google Enterprise: Reseller Challenges Arriving.” In this column I talk about Google’s recent attempt to shore up the security of its enterprise products and services. The Google is trying, but now the battle is shifting to productive partners, resellers, and integrators. The point of the story is that now that Google is addressing some important issues with its product offerings, competitors are shifting the battle. Can the Google react quickly? You will have to read the column to find out what’s ahead.
- For Smart Business Network, “Marketing to the US Hispanic Markets: Digital and Grandmother Methods.” Fancy digital marketing is great for those who live in Silicon Valley, are between the mental ages of 10 and 40, and lack the ability to focus on one task for more than three minutes. For SBN online and its network of 12 hard copy business magazines, I point out that the burgeoning Hispanic market may require some different types of market planning and methods. Olé.
A final reminder to the PR people. Please, read the About information for this blog. I sell ads, interviews, and stories. Each story points out that it is a freebie or in some way sponsored. Beyond Search is not a “real” news publication. I have two or three readers, and these folks should have better things to do with their time. I suggest going to the park and feeding the ducks and geese. Winter is coming help out my feathered relatives. If you are an English major, take a book of Browning’s poems and puzzle over “brown Delores.”
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2010
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Alleged Android User Data Harvesting
October 2, 2010
Short honk: I have no idea if “Android Apps Sending Covert Info to Advertisers” is spot on or disclosing part of a larger story. The main idea is that Android phones beam user data, including phone numbers and location data, back to someone’s ranch. Maybe an advertiser? Maybe some other entity? If the story is false, I remain concerned that certain types of covert data collection is possible. If the story is true, I wonder if there is much chance for a user of any mobile device to have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I don’t get too many secret calls. The idea that information can be intercepted and used for some purpose for which I have not given permission could pump up my blood pressure. But at this point, I believe that this type of data activity is part of the landscape. The question is, “What other types of data sucking is going on?” Math Club was never this fun in 1958 when I was in high school.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2010
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