Larry Page on Real Time Search
May 21, 2009
After watching Twittermania steal some Google thunder, one of Google’s founders has addressed the issue. ReadWriteWeb reported that Google is into real time indexing. You will want to read the story “Larry Page on Real Time Google: We Have To Do It” here. For me the most interesting remark in the write up was:
“I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search,” Le Meur quotes Page as saying. “At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about real-time.”
My question: Is it too late?
Stephen Arnold, May 21, 2009
The Real Time Search Delusion
May 20, 2009
We are in for an exciting autumn. I keep looking for signs that Microsoft is making headway in new Administration. I thought Google would nail some major deals but I have a hunch, Redmond has put a stick in the Google’s advance in one key US government agency. More about this when a “real journalist posts a Kobe beef news story”. I just link and comment as an addled goose should.
I was thinking about Google’s government snub when a reader sent me a link to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, a good source of anti Google messaging. The story “Google ‘Falling behind Twitter’” did not disappoint.
The point of the story was that Google has been body slammed by Twitter in the areas of real time search based on microblogging. For me, the most interesting segment in Richard Wray’s story were these remarks allegedly made by Googlers here:
“People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” Page said in a closing address at Google’s Zeitgeist conference . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.”
Let’s think about this. Twitter is not new. Twitter contains short comments that are broadcast to people. Twitter is the hot info company. Twitter makes no sense to some people.
If the Guardian’s story is accurate, Google is just now realizing that it missed the Twitter brass ring. A question to ask the Googlers is, “Why?” The Google fix is to build Twitter applications and tap the buzz that way. Good plan but the approach conceded in my opinion that Twitter at the moment owns the real time consumer content space. Said another way, Google missed a chance. Just as Microsoft missed Web search and IBM missed on PC operating systems.
What I find fascinating is that the time between these business misses (what Ben Gilad calls “business blindspots”) is decreasing. With fewer opportunities to rework online content, a miss today has a greater chance of going critical without warning.
Google glitches, Google legal hassles, and now a Google business blindspot. Twitter that.
Stephen Arnold, May 20, 2009
Searching for Spy Recruits
May 19, 2009
I can’t quote from this news report. You will have to click here and read the Associated Press story “Israeli intelligence Issues Facebook Warning.” The AP stringer Ian Deitch reported that intel pros in Israel believe that bad guys from Al-Qaida are using Facebook.com to recruit helpers. Why search the old fashioned way by asking people and hanging out in certain restaurants? Use Facebook’s zippy new features to round up potential operatives. Social search has a fresh use case. Is this true? Not for me to say.
Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2009
Browsys Twoogle
May 18, 2009
Curious about what the differences are between Googzilla’s search system and the pesky bird, Twitter. Twoogle makes it dead easy to compare results. Click here and enter the query “Wolfram Alpha”. You see a side by side display of search results from Twitter and Google.
The company said:
Twoogle aims to make easier for people to get the best of two worlds: The real-time web powered by Twitter and the most prominent sites, powered by Google. Twoogle also provides the “Tweet this search” functionality, making it easy for users to post their queries to Twitter with just one click. Twoogle is a free service, and is not responsible for the terms of service, privacy policies and practices of neither Twitter or Google.
How different are the services? Google’s results are more library like. The Twitter results have life. I fiddled with links on both services and found that there was an advantage to using both services. Here’s the result screen I saw on May 16, 2009:
Browsys Labs makes a number of products, including virtual folders here. My records suggest that Juan Sosa is the CEO.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
Google and Its Facebook Twitter Challenge
May 16, 2009
Mark Cuban’s “How Twitter and Facebook Now Compete with Google” here provides a preview of what will be thousands of Web log posts. The high-profile Blog Maverick caught my attention when he predicted that YouTube.com would be a problem for Google. Right now, he seems more correct than some of the azure chip consultants who comment about things Google. Now he’s trained his intellect on the social microblogging phenoms Facebook and Twitter. He wrote:
From a business perspective, I’m sure I’m not alone in getting more referrals from Twitter than Google Search. That’s money in the bank for Twitter and FB for commercial accounts. There is no reason why a big or small company, say Charmim selling toilet paper, cant set up a twitter account and do whatever marketing they can to build the largest number of followers possible. From there, Twitter could charge them on a cost per referral click originating from their followers. As long as they cost per click is lower than competing options, why wouldn’t they do it ? Things change. We are seeing a change in our referral logs right now. That could translate into systemic change in user behavior and business opportunity.
My hunch is that he is more than half right. With the half life of technology decreasing, today’s giant may be tomorrow’s leaden mass. Google’s huge lead in Web search becomes a less interesting variant of Pb; that is, lead feet.
Stephen Arnold, May 16, 2009
Arnold’s Life Is Tweet Available
May 16, 2009
Short honk: one of those for-fee write ups that contain real information, not the quacks of the addled goose, is now available in the May 2009 Information World Review. You can find details about the column and the opinion piece “Life Is Tweet for Real-Time Search”. My editor, Peter Williams, has done an excellent job with the article. If you can snag a copy of this UK publication, you can get some chunks of Tweet stew served up. The information will stick to your ribs, unlike the marketing honks of the contributors to this free Web log. Click here for more information. I wrote: Twitter is a hybrid information service. Want to know more. Subscribe to IWR.
Stephen Arnold, May 16, 2009
Google, Micro-Blogging: Makes Perfect Sense
May 14, 2009
Google, the tarantula of the web, purchased Jaiku in October 2007, a service that allows it’s users to gather micro-blogs from other Web sites. The content can be viewed via the Web or by mobile phone. Google open sourced Jaiku in January 2009, just as Twittermania was gaining momentum.
Google’s decision could be a vote of confidence for open source, or it could be a response to Google’s failure to gain traction among the Twitterati.
Sites like Twitter, Flickr and MySpace each offer their own twists and user-friendly ways of appealing to mass amounts of micro-bloggers and furthermore, potential customers, but using a site that collects each feed and makes it accessible through one’s cell or computer, just makes sense.
In a business world where it’s crucial to keep in contact and notice emerging trends, it would be easy to spend your entire day signing-in and utilizing the sites previously mentioned. Google, despite its success in other search spaces, recognized the importance of real time search in its recent Searchology mini-camp.
The reality may be that Twitter, despite the hype, may be a challenger to Facebook. Facebook’s recent redesign nods in the direction of Twitter. Google, on the other hand, acknowledges the importance of real time search, making a distinction between Twitter’s indexing of tweets and the larger, Google-scale challenge of real time search of Web content.
“Less talk and more indexation” is the goose’s cry.
Hunter Embry, May 15, 2009
More on Search Performance
May 12, 2009
Search performance remains a bit of a mystery in many organizations. Once a search system has been deployed, the team is thrilled that the users can run queries. Performance often becomes an issue when the system crashes, and the licensee discovers the meaning of “just rebuild the index”. In other situations, a merger may create a surge in demand, and the system simply times out or falls over under heavy query spikes.
Some useful performance information appeared in Information Management’s article by Chris Kentouris here. “BNP Speeds Risk Calculations With Hardware Acceleration” made clear that improving search performance often requires more than routine tweaking. The article touches upon the performance characteristics of graphics chips or GPU and field-programmable gate arrays or FPGAs. For me the most interesting part of the write up was this segment:
Exegy ran a test in November using CPUs, FPGAs and GPUs to perform Monte Carlo calculations on a portfolio of 1,024 equities. According to Exegy, “a calculation that would normally take 15 minutes on a multicore CPU now only takes 12 seconds with all three technologies.”
I profiled Exegy in my 2008 study Beyond Search for the Gilbane Group here. Exegy specializes in high volume content processing for governmental and financial institutions.
The short take: if you want to improve search performance, you may need sophisticated hardware and specialized engineering. Cosmetics and easy fixes may not do the job.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
Real Time: Fad or Foundation
May 11, 2009
Ben Parr wrote “Is Real Time the Future of the Web?” I had not considered this question because moving one mode of communication from a traditional telephone to a mobile device with a keyboard is part of the hybridization and diffusion of technology that characterizes “cut and paste” innovation. Mr. Parr raises some interesting questions in his article here. The one that intrigued me was, “Is it [real time information] sustainable?” On the surface, the answer is, “Yes.” After some reflection, I think that the emergence of text mining, predictive analytics, and comprehensive surveillance may have a significant impact on certain types of real time information flows. The Hawthorne Effect may have a side and backspin which causes certain changes in information behavior. The examples I am thinking about include:
- Bad guys using non monitored channels in order to remain outside the real time flow; for example, hire a person to deliver a coded message
- Teens using F2F (face to face) communication for important information such as the kid with parents away for the weekend
- Executives discussing deals by walking down a noisy sidewalk in a metro area.
Check out Mr. Parr’s approach. I will keep thinking about how certain communication methods may make real time online communications unattractive.
Stephen Arnold, May 10, 2009
Twitter Pumps Search
May 7, 2009
Newsfactor here and other Web news services posted stories about Twitter getting a dose of search steroids. You will want to read “Not-for-Sale Twitter Is Expanding Search Functionality” by Patricia Resende to get the details. Ms. Resende wrote:
Twitter Search will be used to crawl information from links by Twitters to analyze and then index the content for future use, Jayaram, a former vice president for search quality at Google, told Webware. Currently Twitter Search is only used to search words included in tweets, but not words in links. Along with its new crawling functionality, Twitter Search will also get a ranking system. When users do a search on trending topics — the top-10 topics people tweet about, which get their own link on the Twitter sidebar — Twitter will analyze the reputation of the tweet writer and rank search results partially based on that.
To me, I think this scoring will be an important step. Here’s why:
- Clickstream metrics by individuals about topics, links, and words provide important clues to smart software
- Individuals with large numbers of followers provide “stakes in the sand” for making some type of subjective, value-centric calculation; for example, a person with more followers can be interpreted as an “authority”
- Individuals who post large number of results and have followers and topics add additional scoring dimensions for calculating “reputation” and other squishy notions.
A number of commercial content processing companies are in the “reputation” and subjective scoring game, but Twitter is a free (for now) real time service with a large volume of posts. The combination makes Twitter a potential dark horse in the reputation analysis game. Believe me. That game has some high stakes. Nonsense about waiting in line at a restaurant becomes high value data when one can identify high score folks standing in line multiple times per week. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the restaurant is doing something right. The score may not be a Zagat type report, but it works pretty well for making certain types of marketing scans useful.
Twitter on steroids plus real time search. More than teen craziness I assert.
Stephen Arnold, May 8, 2009
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