Yahoo and Search Models
April 30, 2010
I received an email this morning pointing to the strong showing of Google at the recent Web conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. I responded that Yahoo continues to push forward with what seem to me academic-type initiatives. In terms of traffic and revenue growth, I am waiting for some real action to take place.
After writing the email to the person who pinged me about Yahoo, I read “Yahoo’s Search Model Developing a New Face.” Suddenly this morning it is a Yahoo renascence, at least for a few minutes. The SFGate story recycles the conference presentations. The idea in the write up struck me as a variant of publish or perish or publicity or perish.
The passage that caught my attention was:
[The Yahoo report] … found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user’s favorite content.
The research shows that people are “doing” things to find information. Yep, that’s search. The problem is that the word “search” is pretty much without meaning in my opinion. The reality is that the yammer about social networks is missing the obvious point; that is, some users prefer to rely on what those in their so-called network tell them, not what an ad choked, power besotted, marketing injected public Web search system tells them.
Search vendors and their research papers are in the ivery tower world. Interesting stuff, but it is not as relevant as traffic and money. Source: http://www.ivorytowerframes.com/3765/IVORYTOWERIMAGE11.jpg
How do I know?
First, look at the sudden shift from Web search to services like Facebook. Even Caterina Fake’s Hunch.com service is about finding information. True, it combines smart software with inputs from humans but it indicates the boundary condition for the phase change that is taking place.
AOL, Revenue, and Customer Experience
April 29, 2010
I liked the Relegence technology. The system sucked in content and generated really nifty reports. Now Relegence.com is a 404, a bit like the AOL earnings report summarized in “AOL Sales, Earnings Plunge.” I don’t use AOL, but like SAP, it is one of the companies that dabbles in search and content processing and provides important clues about the trajectory of these two disciplines. For example, you can navigate to AOL.com and run a query for Relegence, which AOL bought in late 2006. See “AOL Buys Relegence for Relevance.” The search results don’t come from Relegence, Fast Search, Personal Library Software, or any other commercial search system with which AOL has dallied in the last six years. The results are “Enhanced by Google.” Makes sense. AOL is run by a Googler, a pattern that seems to be like those old repeating wallpapers on Web pages in 1996. The idea is that a Googler inherits the Google magic. Therefore, the reasoning goes, a Googler can take a portal and make it into a cash machine.
I like this type of thinking but AOL is one of the online companies that was never in the search, content, or information business. Shocking, right? In my little corner of the goose pond, AOL sold potential dreams in the form of dial up access billed monthly. The company was a digital ShamWow operation. The carpet bombing of sign up discs created a cash stream that seemed to be unending.
It ended. AOL did not have another revenue stream of comparable magnitude. I have watched the acrobats try to disguise this simple fact with many different initiatives. Nothing really worked. Now the earnings reports make clear that Google magic is not transferable and that the original content angle is not exactly like the automatic billing and tough-to-cancel monthly service which was the golden goose at AOL.
Here’s the snippet I liked from the CNN story:
The New York-based company posted net income of $34.7 million, or 32 cents per share, in the first three months of 2010. That’s down from $82.7 million, or 78 cents per share, in the same period last year.
My second favorite segment was:
“We are now entering the second phase of AOL’s plan which is to greatly improve the consumer experience, scale the advertising systems and teams, and aggressively pursue our strategy in the marketplace,” said Armstrong.
I know nothing about user experience. But I do know a bit more about money.
Why’s this matter?
It means zero to me since I don’t own any shares in the company. Furthermore, since the Relegence service became Love.com I don’t use the service too much anymore. I mean, really, Love.com for an optimized business intelligence engine?
It does matter for these reasons:
- If advertising goes south, the AOL trajectory may be the “line” that Yahoo and Google will follow. If I am correct, this “line” will be an errant one indeed.
- The many AOL efforts remind me of the scrambling, hyperbole, fancy dance steps and repositioning that content centric companies do * before * their decline accelerates. The AOL moves are harbingers of what will happen if the European financial problems exacerbate the US financial situation.
- AOL may never be able to regain the revenue streams from its dial up, CD ROM marketing era. Without the golden goose (no pun intended) of recurring monthly credit card billings, AOL is just another company trying to make dough on the Internet.
Is this germane to other companies? Yep. Every time I read an inflated news release with words that are superlatives or use metrics like X times better, faster, and cheaper, I know there is some pressure on the managers.
When a Googler cannot pull a rabbit from a beanie with a propeller on top, who can? Maybe Facebook, but that company is in a different business. The irony is that AOL was an early type of Facebook. Now Facebook has jumped over AOL and its Googler boss.
The take away for me is that once that big revenue stream is in decline, replacing the money flow is a tough problem. Advantages go away. A company is just another start up with long, long odds for success.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2010
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Milward from Linguamatics Wins 2010 Evvie Award
April 28, 2010
The Search Engine Meeting, held this year in Boston, is one of the few events that focuses on the substance of information retrieval, not the marketing hyperbole of the sector. Entering its second decade, the conference speakers tackle challenging subjects. This year speakers addressed such topics as “Universal Composable Indexing” by Chris Biow, Mark Logic Corporation, “Innovations in Social Search” by Jeff Fried, Microsoft, and “From Structured to Unstructured and Back Again: Database Offloading”, by Gregory Grefenstette, Exalead, and a dozen other important topics.
From left to right: Sue Feldman, Vice President, IDC, Dr. David Milward, Liz Diamond, Stephen E. Arnold, and Eric Rogge, Exalead.
Each year, the best paper is recognized with the Evvie Award. The “Evvie” was created in honor of Ev Brenner, one of the pioneers in machine-readable content. After a distinguished career at the American Petroleum Institute, Ev served on the planning committee for the Search Engine Meeting and contributed his insights to many search and content processing companies. One of the questions I asked after each presentation was, “What did Ev think?”. I valued Ev Brenner’s viewpoint as did many others in the field.
The winner of this year’s Evvie award is David R. Milward, Linguamatics, for his paper “From Document Search to Knowledge Discovery: Changing the Paradigm.” Dr. Milward said:
Business success is often dependent on making timely decisions based on the best information available. Typically, for text information, this has meant using document search. However, the process can be accelerated by using agile text mining to provide decision-makers directly with answers rather than sets of documents. This presentation will review the challenges faced in bringing together diverse and extensive information resources to answer business-critical R&D questions in the pharmaceutical domain. In particular, it will outline how an agile NLPbased approach for discovering facts and relationships from free text can be used to leverage scientific knowledge and move beyond search to automated profiling and hypothesis generation from millions of documents in real time.
Dr. Milward has 20 years’ experience of product development, consultancy and research in natural language processing. He is a co-founder of Linguamatics, and designed the I2E text mining system which uses a novel interactive approach to information extraction. He has been involved in applying text mining to applications in the life sciences for the last 10 years, initially as a Senior Computer Scientist at SRI International. David has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was a researcher and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is widely published in the areas of information extraction, spoken dialogue, parsing, syntax and semantics.
Presenting this year’s award was Eric Rogge, Exalead, and Liz Diamond, niece of Ev Brenner. The award winner received a recognition award and a check for $500. A special thanks to Exalead for sponsoring this year’s Evvie.
The judges for the 2010 Evvie were Dr. David Evans (Evans Research), Sue Feldman (IDC), and Jill O’Neill, NFAIS.
Congratulations, Dr. Milward.
Stuart Schram IV, April 28, 2010
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Bing Costs
April 27, 2010
Short honk: “Bing Loses More Money as Microsoft Chases Google” highlighted an aspect of Microsoft’s recent financials I had overlooked. The key passage for me was:
During Microsoft’s fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, the Online Services Division, or OSD, reported a 12 per cent increase in revenue, which rose to US$566 million on the back of higher advertising revenue. That wasn’t enough to offset a surge in operating expenses during the period. The division’s quarterly loss grew by 73 per cent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year.
Not material in the scope of Microsoft’s revenues from its other business units. The recent Facebook play may pay big dividends. As search shifts from Web site text to other types of information objects, Microsoft may be poised to reverse this reported loss.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27., 2010
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Now We Worry about Earth Shattering Research
April 26, 2010
From the too little, too late department comes “Researchers “Addicted” to Bogus Internet Studies.” The point of the story is that researchers gather data and issue findings. The results get sucked into the Dyson Animal that is online information. In a nonce, the findings reveals insights. Folks these days love insights. Here’s a telling passage in my opinion:
The findings are pretty earth-shattering.
Another comment:
It’s too bad the research made such a big deal out of the addiction angle, because there is some interesting data — or at least, some interesting comments from students — about their use of social media and technologies such as texting.
The quest for data is one way to provide some anchor points to the fluid world of online.
My take is different. The authors of studies and the authors of write ups about studies might give some thought to:
- Stating the sample size
- Explaining how the sample was generated
- Providing some hint about the margin for error
- Linking to supporting data.
Until this happens, I take these studies and the reports about “earth shattering” insights as suggestive, not definitive. This applies to academics and the azure chip crowd as well. For an example of research that generates amazing numbers like 500 billion per year, read “The State of Online Word of Mouth Marketing.” Yep, 500 billion and no sample or positioning info in sight.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2010
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Coveo Surges Forward
April 23, 2010
The Coveo team has surged forward in search, according the story “Coveo Announce Une Augmentation de 55% des Revenus de License au 1er Trimestre de 2010; Conclut 24 Nouvelle Transactions.” (There’s an English version of the news release at Intelligent Enterprise as well.) If you don’t read French, this translates as significant growth and two dozen new deals in 12 weeks. Beyond Search thinks that is pretty darned good in today’s economic climate. Other highlights from the story include:
- The release of Version 6.1 of the firm’s Enterprise Search Platform with a raft of new features such as an Outlook integrated sidebar, a floating desktop search bar, and complete desktop email indexing. (You can get the full details at www.coveo.com).
- Deals with Trading Technologies, Netezza, Hewitt, Royal Mail Group, and Allina Hospitals among others
- A 97 percent reduction in time taken to find expertise across a top engineering firm and a two week ROI for a Fortune 100 financial services company
I moderated for Fierce Content Management, the publishing company, a Webinar with Louis Tetu, one of the investors in Coveo, Bill Cavendish (GEICO), and Coveo’s Executive Vice President (Richard Tessier). The company’s approach to enterprise information struck me as focused on chopping the “wait” out of the installation and delivering information that helps employees do their jobs. The “search” function meshes with work processes, so employees can click on a link, fire a query from a mobile device, or use a customized interface. After the Fierce Webinar, I spoke briefly with the firm’s founder Laurent Simoneau. He pointed out that Coveo’s architecture and “smart” software make it possible to get real payoff from search, not big engineering and consulting bills. My recollection is that Laurent Simoneau said, “We focus on making search work the way users want in their specific situation. This seems to be working quite well for us.”
With 55 percent growth in 12 weeks. I am inclined to agree.
Stephen E Arnold, April 23, 2010
This post was not sponsored.
ATT Offers a Clue to Where Search is Going
April 23, 2010
If you haven’t read Stephen E Arnold’s “The Seven Forms of Mass Media” post on his Beyond Search site, it would be worth your time. It gives some hint at as to the next big social media hole to fill.
With today’s darlings, Facebook and Twitter, generating an overload of personal data and Google and Bing producing hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’ for most queries, how can search be more relevant to the device we all use most… our smart phone?
This week, AT&T’s first quarter report to Wall Street showed the fewest number of subscribers under contracts in two years. And with the premise that it will loose it’s iPhone exclusivity at some time in the near future, where does it look for the one thing that drives increasing value…growth?
According to AT&T’s finance guy, Rick Lindner, “Wireless for anyone is not going the way it was five or ten years ago. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to grow in wireless.” Lindner told the Wall Street Journal that “AT&T will look for acquisitions in fields that would support its focus on mobile data.” BINGO!
As Arnold noted, “The challenge that is kicked to the side of the information highway is, “How does one find needed information in this seventh mass media (mobile)?” Says a reader, not very well in my experience. In fact, finding and accessing information is clumsy for textual information.
With all of the mobile companies scrambling for growth in a marketplace that has seen its well of opportunity become more full, the next thing is the big thing. Bet on search… instant and directed search of data that returns desired results in the first few hits.
The one item everyone has in hand at all times is his smart phone… and it is most often, the first used for instant results. But this ‘seventh media’ mandates conciseness and pinpoint information or it becomes the burden instead of the benefactor.
Social media advances have given us the feeling of need because it has shown the gratification of ‘instant.’ With no office or home computer or no time to pause, reflect and refine, instant and concise is the next god. No doubt about it.
Jerry Constantino, April 23, 2010
Post was not sponsored.
Oxford Flexes Its Reference Muscles
April 22, 2010
I go to a gym every couple of days when I am in town. So happens that that a number of semi pro wrestlers go to the gym. Big people. Tattoos. Muscles. I an old wimp and I graciously give up my place when one of these steroid stallions trots to the workout station I favor. Academics have muscles, but I think that my image of a muscular academic and one from Oxford University at that is of a milder, more gentle giant.
The Oxford muscle builders have turned their attention to creating online bibliographies. I think, based on reading the write up “Oxford University Press Launches the Anti-Google” that these will be variants of the old Goldentree bibliographies or the type of reference book Constance Winchell cranked out.
Here’s a synopsis of the product:
The OBO [Oxford Bibliographies Online] tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library’s own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.
Sounds good but there may be some challenges:
First, these hand crafted bibliographies are expensive to create and keep current. The rush of enthusiasm for a project of this type gets some bibliographies out the door. However, the ongoing costs are likely to be an issue because libraries may not have the agility to buy this online service. Oxford University has the money, but once the reality of the costs sink in, my hunch is that push back from the finance person will be coming in 12 months.
Second, revenue. The spreadsheet fever makes the project look pretty tasty. Oxford will find itself dancing with some big outfits in the commercial database world. My view is that Oxford will have to find a partner quickly because, let’s face it, universities are not exactly the top guns in the marketing arena.
Third, the anti Google thing is cute but irrelevant. The Google is muddling along with probes into different market sectors. The Google is in the “good enough” game and that’s where Google’s search and reference services will aim. Google may end up with some academic wonder products but that will be exhaust from the Google revenue machine. Red herring to even mention Google.
Fourth, users want to click and get the full text. When I am doing research, I know how to do the primary and secondary research drill. The problem is that time and resources force me to use my own tools like the Overflight system. But for some tiny percentage of folks looking up information online Bing, Google, and Yahoo will pretty good. To dig into the next level, libraries have Ebsco products. Those who need more are going to be Oxford level researchers, and I am not sure a product aimed for this tiny slice of online users can generate enough revenue to exist without subsidies. Will Oxford fund the rowing team or the bibliographies? Time will tell.
In short, interesting but a bit of anachronism in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
No one paid for this post.
Facebook May Be the Next Google
April 22, 2010
Short honk: I read a number of posts about Facebook’s new services. Impressive. The key item for me was the tie up between Facebook and Microsoft’s cloud services. The Facebooker can use Microsoft Docs for social networking. You can find lots of write ups. I liked “Microsoft Beats Google at Social Networking with Docs for Facebook.” Lots of gems in the article but I noted this passage:
Talk about turnaround: Google Docs is aimed at business users; Docs for Facebook at consumers. This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has beat Google at social networking. The Outlook Social Connector does a very solid job of integrating Outlook with social networks, as I detail in my review for Computerworld. And it is far superior to Google Buzz, Google’s attempt to integrate social networking with Gmail. As I write in a blog post, Microsoft Outlook Social Connector beats Google Buzz, hands down.
Will Google get its act together and deal with Facebook? Will Facebook keep on charging forward? Fascinating shift may be taking place.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
No one paid me to write this.
Cuil Founder Lands Another Google Invention
April 22, 2010
I have been reluctant to beat up on the alleged weaknesses of the Cuil.com system for one good reason. Dr. Anna Patterson is a very sharp computer scientist. She developed a quite ingenious system called Xift which she sold to the AltaVista.com crowd. After more engineering and family work, she joined Google and invented some fascinating technology which I discuss in Google Version 2.0. Even though she and her equally smart companion founded Cuil.com, the Patterson impact on Google continues. One example is the April 20, 2010 patent granted for her invention “Information Retrieval System for Archiving Multiple Document Versions.” You can read in my studies The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 about the importance of this technique to some Google “time” centric processes. A moment’s reflection will reveal that this ability to traverse deltas has some interesting applications. There are other benefits as well, but the invention is meritorious in my opinion and worth reading in US 7,702,618. Here’s the fine Google/lawyer explanation in the patent’s abstract:
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases. Index data for multiple versions or instances of documents is also maintained. Each document instance is associated with a date range and relevance data derived from the document for the date range.
Dr. Patterson has tallied more than a half dozen inventions for the Google. I pay attention to her work and I discount much of the criticism aimed at her most recent activities. In my experience, the systems reveal significant insights into the trajectory of search. Care to disagree? Just bring some facts and your list of inventions and your record of innovation in search. Dr. Patterson may find the dust up amusing. I will.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
Unsponsored post. Dr. Patterson let me pet one of her dogs once. Does that count as a payoff?
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