Search Silver Bullets, Elixirs, and Magic Potions: Thinking about Findability in 2012
November 10, 2011
I feel expansive today (November 9, 2011), generous even. My left eye seems to be working at 70 percent capacity. No babies are screaming in the airport waiting area. In fact, I am sitting in a not too sticky seat, enjoying the announcements about keeping pets in their cage and reporting suspicious packages to law enforcement by dialing 250.
I wonder if the mother who left a pink and white plastic bag with a small bunny and box of animal crackers is evil. Much in today’s society is crazy marketing hype and fear mongering.
Whilst thinking about pets in cages and animal crackers which may be laced with rat poison, and plump, fabric bunnies, my thoughts turned to the notion of instant fixes for horribly broken search and content processing systems.
I think it was the association of the failure of societal systems that determined passengers at the gate would allow a pet to run wild or that a stuffed bunny was a threat. My thoughts jumped to the world of search, its crazy marketing pitches, and the satraps who have promoted themselves to “expert in search.” I wanted to capture these ideas, conforming to the precepts of the About section of this free blog. Did I say, “Free.”
A happy quack to http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amcl_astronomical_material02.html for this image of the 21st century azure chip consultant, a self appointed expert in search with a degree in English and a minor in home economics with an emphasis on finger sandwiches.
The Silver Bullets, Garlic Balls, and Eyes of Newts
First, let me list the instant fixes, the silver bullets, the magic potions, the faerie dust, and the alchemy which makes “enterprise search” work today. Fasten your alchemist’s robe, lift your chin, and grab your paper cone. I may rain on your magic potion. Here are 14 magic fixes for a lousy search system. Oh, one more caveat. I am not picking on any one company or approach. The key to this essay is the collection of pixie dust, not a single firm’s blend of baloney, owl feathers, and goat horn.
- Analytics (The kind equations some of us wrangled and struggled with in Statistics 101 or the more complex predictive methods which, if you know how to make the numerical recipes work, will get you a job at Palantir, Recorded Future, SAS, or one of the other purveyors of wisdom based on big data number crunching)
- Cloud (Most companies in the magic elixir business invoke the cloud. Not even Macbeth’s witches do as good a job with the incantation of Hadoop the Loop as Cloudera,but there are many contenders in this pixie concoction. Amazon comes to mind but A9 gives me a headache when I use A9 to locate a book for my trusty e Reeder.)
- Clustering (Which I associate with Clustify and Vivisimo, but Vivisimo has morphed clustering in “information optimization” and gets a happy quack for this leap)
- Connectors (One can search unless one can acquire content. I like the Palantir approach which triggered some push back but I find the morphing of ISYS Search Software a useful touchstone in this potion category)
- Discovery systems (My associative thought process offers up Clearwell Systems and Recommind. I like Recommind, however, because it is so similar to Autonomy’s method and it has been the pivot for the company’s flip flow from law firms to enterprise search and back to eDiscovery in the last 12 or 18 months)
- Federation (I like the approach of Deep Web Technologies and for the record, the company does not position its method as a magical solution, but some federating vendors do so I will mention this concept. Yhink mash up and data fusion too)
- Natural language processing (My candidate for NLP wonder worker is Oracle which acquired InQuira. InQuira is a success story because it was formed from the components of two antecedent search companies, pitched NLP for customer support,and got acquired by Oracle. Happy stakeholders all.)
- Metatagging (Many candidates here. I nominate the Microsoft SharePoint technology as the silver bullet candidate. SharePoint search offers almost flawless implementation of finding a document by virtue of knowing who wrote it, when, and what file type it is. Amazing. A first of sorts because the method has spawned third party solutions from Austria to t he United States.)
- Open source (Hands down I think about IBM. From Content Analytics to the wild and crazy Watson, IBM has open source tattooed over large expanses of its corporate hide. Free? Did I mention free? Think again. IBM did not hit $100 billion in revenue by giving software away.)
- Relationship maps (I have to go with the Inxight Software solution. Not only was the live map an inspiration to every business intelligence and social network analysis vendor it was cool to drag objects around. Now Inxight is part of Business Objects which is part of SAP, which is an interesting company occupied with reinventing itself and ignored TREX, a search engine)
- Semantics (I have to mention Google as the poster child for making software know what content is about. I stand by my praise of Ramanathan Guha’s programmable search engine and the somewhat complementary work of Dr. Alon Halevy, both happy Googlers as far as I know. Did I mention that Google has oodles of semantic methods, but the focus is on selling ads and Pandas, which are somewhat related.)
- Sentiment analysis (the winner in the sentiment analysis sector is up for grabs. In terms of reinventing and repositioning, I want to acknowledge Attensity. But when it comes to making lemonade from lemons, check out Lexalytics (now a unit of Infonics). I like the Newssift case, but that is not included in my free blog posts and information about this modest multi-vehicle accident on the UK information highway is harder and harder to find. Alas.)
- Taxonomies (I am a traditionalist, so I quite like the pioneering work of Access Innovations. But firms run by individuals who are not experts in controlled vocabularies, machine assisted indexing, and ANSI compliance have captured the attention of the azure chip, home economics, and self appointed expert crowd. Access innovations knows its stuff. Some of the boot camp crowd, maybe somewhat less? I read a blog post recently that said librarians are not necessary when one creates an enterprise taxonomy. My how interesting. When we did the ABI/INFORM and Business Dateline controlled vocabularies we used “real” experts and quite a few librarians with experience conceptualizing, developing, refining, and ensuring logical consistency of our word lists. It worked because even the shadow of the original ABI/INFORM still uses some of our term 30 plus years later. There are so many taxonomy vendors, I will not attempt to highlight others. Even Microsoft signed on with Cognition Technologies to beef up its methods.)
- XML (there are Google and MarkLogic again. XML is now a genuine silver bullet. I thought it was a markup language. Well, not any more, pal.)
Beyond Search About Page Update
November 9, 2011
After the carpet bombing by AtomicPR, I updated my About page. I wanted to make clearer than ever my policies. You can find the About page at this link.
The main point is that I did not design Beyond Search to be a news publication. If news turns up in the blog content stream, that’s an error. We rely on open source content and use it as a spring board for our commentary.
Beyond Search exists for three reasons:
First, I capture factoids, quotes, and thoughts in a chronological manner, seven days a week, three to seven stories a day. We have more than 6,700 content objects in the archive. I use this material for my for fee columns, reports, and personal research. If someone reads a blog post and thinks I am doing news, get out of here. The blog was designed for me by me. I have two or three readers, but the only reader who counts is I.
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Test question: Which one bills for time and which one donates to better the world? Give up. Mother Theresa is on the right. The billing machine is on the left with the mustache. PR and marketing professionals, are you processing the time=money statement?
Second, if someone wants us to cover a particular technology topic, we will do it if the item is interesting to us. If we write something up, we charge for our time. We also sell ads at the top and side of the splash page content window. The reason? I pay humans to work on my research with me, and I put some, not all, just some of the information I process in the blog. I am not Mother Theresa, don’t have much interest in helping injured dogs or starving artists. Therefore, in my world my time invokes money. Don’t like it? Don’t ask me to do something for you, your client, your mom’s recent investment, or a friend of a friend.
Third, the Beyond Search content links to high value, original information like the Search Wizards Speak series. Anyone in an academic or educational role can use my content without asking. If you are a failed home economics teacher now working as a search expert or an azure chip consultant pretending you know something about content analytics, you will have to get my permission to rip off, recycle, republish, or otherwise make what’s mine yours. I have been reasonable in allowing reuse of my content. There’s one person in Slovenia who actually translates my blog content into a language with many consonants. No problem. Just ask. Don’t ask? Well, I can get frisky.
Business Process Management: Bit Player or Buzz Word?
November 7, 2011
I spoke with one of the goslings who produces content for our different information services. We were reviewing a draft of a write up, and I reacted negatively to the source document and to the wild and crazy notions that find their way into the discussions about “problems” and “challenges” in information technology.
In enterprise search and content management, flag waving is more important than solving customers’ problems. Economic pressure seems to exponentiate the marketing clutter. Are companies with resources “too big to flail””? Nope.
Here’s the draft, and I have put in bold face the parts that caught my attention and push back:
As the amount of data within a business or industry grows the question of what to do with it arises. The article, “Business Process Management and Mastering Data in the Enterprise“, on Capgemini’s Web site explains how Business Process Management (BPM) is not the ideal means for managing data.
According the article as more and more operations are used to store data the process of synchronizing the data becomes increasingly difficult.
As for using BPM to do the job, the article explains,
While BPM tools have the infrastructure to do hold a data model and integrate to multiple core systems, the process of mastering the data can become complex and, as the program expands across ever more systems, the challenges can become unmanageable. In my view, BPMS solutions with a few exceptions are not the right place to be managing core data[i]. At the enterprise level MDM solutions are for more elegant solutions designed specifically for this purpose.
The answer to this ever-growing problem was happened upon by combining knowledge from both a data perspective and a process perspective. The article suggests that a Target Operating Model (TOM) would act as a rudder for the projects aimed at synchronizing data. After that was in place a common information model be created with enterprise definitions of the data entities which then would be populated by general attributes fed by a single process project.
While this is just one man’s answer to the problem of data, it is a start. Regardless of how businesses approach the problem it remains constant–process management alone is not efficient enough to meet the demands of data management.
Here’s my concern. First, I think there are a number of concepts, shibboleths, and smoke screens flying, floating, and flapping. The conceptual clutter is crazy. The “real” journalists dutifully cover these “signals”. My hunch is that most of the folks who like videos gobble these pronouncements like Centrum multivitamins. The idea is that one doze with lots of “stuff” will prevent information technology problems from wrecking havoc on an organization.
Three observations:
First, I think that in the noise, quite interesting and very useful approaches to enterprise information management can get lost. Two good examples. Polyspot in France and Digital Reasoning in the U.S. Both companies have approaches which solve some tough problems. Polyspot offers and infrastructure, search, and apps approach. Digital Reasoning delivers next-generation numerical recipes, what the company calls entity based analytics. Baloney like Target Operating Models do not embrace these quite useful technologies.
Second, the sensitivity of indexes and blogs to public relations spam is increasing. The perception that indexing systems are “objective” is fascinating, just incorrect. What happens then is that a well heeled firm can output a sequence of spam news releases and then sit back and watch the “real” journalists pick up the arguments and ideas. I wrote about one example of this in “A Coming Dust Up between Oracle and MarkLogic?”
Third, I am considering a longer essai about the problem of confusing Barbara, Desdemona’s mother’s maid, with Othello. Examples include confusing technical methods or standards with magic potions; for instance, taxonomies as a “fix” for lousy findability and search, semantics as a work around for poorly written information, metatagging as a solution to context free messages, etc. What’s happening is that a supporting character, probably added by the compilers of Shakespeare’s First Folio edition is made into the protagonist. Since many recent college graduates don’t know much about Othello, talking about Barbara as the possible name of the man who played the role in the 17th century is a waste of time. The response I get when I mention “Barbara” when discussing the play is, “Who?” This problem is surfacing in discussions of technology. XML, for example, is not a rabbit from a hat. XML is a way to describe the rabbit-hat-magician content and slice and dice the rabbit-hat-magician without too many sliding panels and dim lights.
What is the relation of this management and method malarkey? Sales, gentle reader, sales. Hyperbole, spam, and jargon are Teflon to get a deal.
Stephen E Arnold, November 7, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Do Some Search Vendors Have Name Issues?
October 6, 2011
Long conference call after I returned from the land of beets and goulashes. The problem which the client wished to discuss was traffic to the firm’s Web site. My view of search engine optimization is that it is pretty much a waste of time. Buy Adwords and skip the silliness of have home economics majors “index” content and coders looking for ways to fool Father Google and Mother Bing.
I won’t mention the client’s company, but I can use a handful of examples to illustrate the what I call the “findability” problem. Here are a few examples of vendors selected from the Overflight service:
Brainware. Clever name, but when you run the query on YouTube.com, I get academic institutions, an outfit in India sharing the same company name, and some “interesting” videos which I won’t describe.
Connotate. Connotate does well in Google search results. When looking for the company in blogs, the word “connotate” predominates. Run a Twitter query to see what I mean.
Mark Logic or MarkLogic. There seem to be two spellings floating around. I am not sure if the name is an issue or if there is simply zero content when running queries in services like Moreover.
Solr. Although not a company, the name is a problem. A publicly traded company uses the string “solr” as a ticker/trading code. To see the consequences of this naming choice, set up an alert on Google or another service. You will see that the “solr” links pumps mostly the stock, not the search system.
Thunderstone. This company has been in the search business a long time. When I run a query for Thunderstone, most of the hits are to a game. Google does show the company on the first page of the search results, but the game company seems to be in a commanding position in a query.
What’s my take?
I think that search vendors have quite a bit of work to do to protect their existing product or company names. I think that Brainware and Thunderstone are examples of vendors not putting enough horses on the wagon to keep their firms visible. For Connotate, the word is a good one, but in today’s free text world, work must be done to keep the company semantically hooked to the terms. Clearly, that’s not happening for Connotate, the vendor of agent software. For MarkLogic, I think the dual spellings are a possible factor, but maybe the company is just not outputting enough information to have traction.
Is there a fix? Yep, www.augmentext.com. Will SEO do the job? Probably not.
When I mentioned this on the call, my client wanted SEO. I said, “So buy SEO services.” Then I said, “Supplement that investment with Adwords.” Traffic is the name of the Bing and Google game, not traffic because one has a clever name.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Hadoop, Search, and Business
July 8, 2011
We have had a theory that the NoSQL data management systems were poised to make search a component of their systems. There was the repositioning of MarkLogic’s XML server as a search engine. But MarkLogic is not an open source centric company in my opinion.
However, we noted an interesting perspective on the Open Source data analytics tool Hadoop. eWeek.com’s article “Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Hadoop Data Analytics: 10 Reasons Why It’s Important for Business” was thought provoking.
Created by Apache Chairman Doug Cutting, Hadoop has since resided at Yahoo! Now, it plans move to the startup Hortonworks, which is funded by Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. Writer Chris Preimesberger remarks,
Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework built in Java that works with distributed data-intensive applications. It enables applications to scale securely in order to handle thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. More and more businesses are finding out that they need to analyze their stored data to help them make better business decisions. A number of Hadoop distributions are now available.
He presents his ten reasons in slideshow format. They include such persuasive points as “Hadoop Is No Longer a Science Experiment,” “Hadoop Was a Key Part of IBM’s Watson,” and “Hadoop Knows It Still Needs to Improve.” Do see the article for the complete list.
We agree, but we think that there is a larger movement taking place. The companies which are cloud centric, based on open source technologies like Hadoop, and providing access to structured and unstructured data may pose a challenge to traditional enterprise search and business intelligence vendors relying on relational data management systems.
The mini trend is an interest in reducing costs and complexity. The cloud may not be an ideal solution, but when data management, findability, and reduced headcount become available, we think quite a few organizations will shift their approach to search.
Oracle and other data management outfits may need to consider these reasons and take action. Open source search vendors may find themselves squeezed by open source vendors once considered partners or benign organizations. Now we think the landscape is shifting.
Cynthia Murrell July 8, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Perceptive Software, Brainware Inc. Team-Up
July 5, 2011
Perceptive Software has partnered the Brainware, Inc. to embed its flagship product, Brainware Distiller into Perceptive’s image capture and intelligent OCR products like ImageNow . Brainware Distiller increases the speed and accuracy at which companies can access and process information in paper and electronic documents. As described in Image and Data Manager article “ECM Market gets Perceptive”:
The Perceptive ECM platform is designed to manage content in context, not just handle ingest and routing’ said Giagnacovo (the GM for Perceptive Software International). ImageNow incorporates the Brainware Distiller engine for OCR and data capture.
This is a smart marriage between technologies. By combining Brainware’s intelligent data capture and enterprise search solutions with the Perceptive’s enterprise content management (ECM) platform, the real winner becomes customer. They will not only benefit from top-class business intelligence, but their operational efficiency should greatly increase as well. It sure seems like a winner to us.
What’s interesting is that Brainware’s sales are not coming from its search technology. The firm is finding traction in the somewhat less glamorous but still important back office of organizations. Brainware is moving away from search just as MarkLogic is moving into enterprise search. Which firm is making the “right” choice? Maybe both? Maybe neither? Search seems to be more and more a problemantic enterprise function. Just our view from Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
Jennifer Wensink, July 5, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of the New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Asia Technical Services
April 20, 2011
An Interview with Patrick and Jean Garez
In Hong Kong in late March 2011, I met with one of the senior officers of Asia Tech. The company’s official name is “Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd.” I learned about the company from Dassault Exalead. For eight years Asia Tech has been the partner for Exalead in Asia and has become the “go to” resource for the Dassault Systèmes team covering South Asia regarding Exalead after the acquisition. Based in Singapore, Asia Tech is hours away from Dassault clients in Thailand, China, and Viet-Nam, among other countries whose thirst for Dassault technology continues to increase. In my initial conversation with Jean Garez, the person who appears to be the heir apparent to the firm his father founded, I learned that Asia Tech is now responding to a surge of inquiries about Exalead’s search based applications.
Patrick (founder) and Jean Garez (senior manager), Asia Technology Services Pte Ltd.
Upon my return to the US, I followed up with Mr. Garez via Skype for a more lengthy discussion. On the call, Patrick Garez joined the interview. For convenience, I have merged the comments from both Garezs into one stream. The full text of that interview appears below:
What’s the history of Asia Tech?
Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd was first conceived in Hong Kong in 1974 by our founder, and my father, Patrick Garez. The original business was the marketing and after-sales support of products, engineering services and asset management solutions to the commercial aviation industry. My father was a pioneer because he was among the first to predict the growth potential of commercial aviation in the Asia Pacific region and to identify Singapore as the future hub for South East Asia and beyond.
Along the way ATS tackled some industry-specific software solutions supporting various maintenance data management, engineering processes and workflows, but it wasn’t until 2003 that ATS officially began distributing software solutions as a dedicated part of our business.
What triggered the shift?
Client demand. ATS has prided itself on responding to the needs of its clients across this region. Once we started doing work in a different area, word of mouth sent additional projects our way.
ATS focuses on finding leading edge innovative and cost effective ISV solutions from Europe and the US and offering them a platform to enter into the Asia Pacific market with a limited investment.
And your activity in search?
Same path.
In the mid-2000’s up until probably 2009, the search market in Singapore and the region was dominated by legacy platforms built with an 80’s approach key word indexing and information retrieval. There was some interest in the SPSS and SAS approach to structured data, of course.
However, in response to a client project, we came across a technologically-advanced company in Paris, France. The founder was a member of the original Digital Equipment AltaVista.com search team and making significant progress with technology that was scalable and very, very speedy. In addition, Exalead was deploying a lighter, automated semantic engine that did the thinking for the user by automatically categorizing and providing structure to unstructured data. We tapped them for our client project from then on, we knew we were going to see great things from them. We continued to follow and participate in the growth of this company from their incubation phase until its acquisition in 2010 by Dassault Systems. ATS remains its partner for the region.
Is Customer Support a Revenue Winner for Search Vendors?
February 26, 2011
In a word, “Maybe.” Basic search is now widely available at low or
InQuira has been a player in customer support for a number of years. The big dogs in customer support are outfits like RightNow, Pega, and a back pack full of off shore outfits. In the last couple of weeks, we have snagged news releases that suggest search vendors are in the customer support business.
Two firms have generated somewhat similar news releases. Coveo, based in Canada, was covered in Search CRM in a story titled “2011 Customer Service Trends: The Mobile Revolution.” The passage that caught our attention was:
The most sophisticated level of mobile enablement includes native applications, such as iPhone applications available from Apple’s App Store, which have been tested and approved by the device manufacturer. Not only do these applications offer the highest level of usability, they allow integration with other device applications. For example, Coveo’s mobile interface for the company’s Customer Information Access Solutions allows you to take action on items in a list of search returns, such as reply to an email or add a comment to a Salesforce.com incident. Like any hot technology trend, when investing in mobile enablement it is important to prioritize projects based on potential return on investment, not “cool” factor.
Okay, mobile for customer support.
Then we saw a few days later “Vivisimo Releases New Customer Experience Optimization Solution” in Destination CRM. Originally a vendor of on-the-fly clustering, Vivisimo has become a full service content processing firm specializing in “information optimization.” The passage that caught our attention was:
Vivisimo has begun to address the needs of these customer-facing professionals with the development of its Customer Experience Optimization (CXO) solution, which gives customer service representatives and account managers quick access to all the information about a customer, no matter where that information is housed and managed—inside or outside a company’s systems, and regardless of the source or type. The company’s products are a hybrid of enterprise search, text-based search, and business intelligence solutions. CXO also targets the $1.4 trillion problem of lost worker productivity fueled by employees losing time looking for information. “All content comes through a single search box,” Calderwood says, “which reduces the amount of time to find information.” CXO works with an enterprise search platform that indexes unstructured data, and a display mechanism that uses analytics to find the data. It sits on top of all the systems and applications a company can have—even hosted applications—and pulls data from them all. It can sync up with major systems from Remedy, Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and many others.
So, customer support and customer relationship management it is.
Promises are easy to make and sometimes difficult to keep. Source: http://dwellingintheword.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/172-numbers-30-and-31/
I have documented the changes that search and content processing companies have made in the last year. There have been significant executive changes at Lucid Imagination, MarkLogic, and Sinequa. Companies like Attensity and JackBe have shifted from a singular focus on serving a specific business sector to a broader commercial market. Brainware is pushing into document processing and medical information. Recommind has moved from eDiscovery into enterprise search. Palantir, the somewhat interesting visualization and analytics operation, is pushing into financial services, not just government intelligence sectors. There are numerous examples of search vendors looking for revenue love in various market sectors.
So what?
I see four factors influencing search and content processing vendors. I am putting the finishing touches on a “landscape report” in conjunction with Pandia.com about enterprise search. I dipped into the reference material for that study and noted these points:
- Repositioning is becoming a standard operating positioning for most search and content processing vendors. Even the giants like Google are trying to find ways to lash their indexing technology to words in hopes of increasing revenue. So wordsmithing is the order of the day. Do these firms have technology that will deliver on the repositioned capability? I am not sure, but I have ample evidence that plain old search is now a commodity. Search does not generate too much excitement among some organizations.
- The niches themselves that get attention—customer support, marketers interested in social content, and business intelligence—are in flux. The purpose of customer support is to reduce costs, not put me in touch with an expert who can answer my product question. The social content band wagon is speeding along, but it is unclear if “social media” is useful across a wide swath of business types. Consumer products, yes. Specialty metals, not so much.
- A “herd” mentality seems to be operating. Search vendors who once chased “one size fits all” buyers now look at niches. The problem is that some niches like eDiscovery and customer support have quite particular requirements. Consultative selling Endeca-style may be needed, but few search vendors has as many MBA types as Endeca and a handful of other firms. Engineers are not so good at MBA style tailoring, but with staff additions, the gap can be closed, just not overnight. Thus, the herd charges into a sector but there may not be enough grazing to feed everyone.
- Significant marketing forces are now at work. You have heard of Watson, I presume. When a company like IBM pushes into search and content processing with a consumer assault, other vendors have to differentiate themselves. Google and Microsoft are also marketing their corporate hearts into 150 beat per minute range. That type of noise forces smaller vendors to amp up their efforts. The result is the type of shape shifting that made the liquid metal terminator so fascinating. But that was a motion picture. Selling information retrieval is real life.
I am confident that the smaller vendors of search and content processing will be moving through a repositioning cycle. The problem for some firms is that their technology is, at the end of the day, roughly equivalent to Lucene/Solr. This means that unless higher value solutions can be delivered, an open source solution may be good enough. Simply saying that a search and retrieval system can deliver eDiscovery, customer support, business intelligence, medical fraud detection, or knowledge management may not be enough to generate needed revenue.
In fact, I think the hunt for revenue is driving the repositioning. Basic search has crumbled away as a money maker. But key word retrieval backed with some categorization is not what makes a customer support solution or one of the other “search positioning plays” work. Each of these niches has specific needs and incumbents who are going to fight back.
Enterprise search and its many variants remains a fascinating niche to monitor. There are changes afoot which are likely to make the known outfits sweat bullets in an effort to find a way to break through the revenue ceilings that seem to be imposed on many vendors of information retrieval technology. Even Google has a challenge, and it has lots of money and smart people. If Google can’t get off its one trick pony, what’s that imply for search vendors with fewer resources?
It is easy to say one has a solution. It is quite another to deliver that solution to an organization with a very real, very large, and very significant problem.
Stephen E Arnold, February 26, 2011
The Need for Granular Search
February 25, 2011
Companies that use taxonomies for their business to business (B2B) sites could be in big trouble. That is, if we can believe results of a survey conducted by e-commerce application provider Endeca.
As reported in “The Evolution of E-Commerce,” the survey showed that people who shop B2B sites now expect the same personalized experience that shoppers of B2C (business to consumer) sites expect. Neither wants to sort through generalized search results like those returned by taxonomies.
The solution? According to John Andrews with Endeca:
“Websites … need to make use of much more granular approaches to tagging content in order maximize the Web customer experience. That will require in many cases new content management systems that make managing the relationship between all those tags a lot simpler. The increased nuances of e-commerce is going to push more companies to embrace a SaaS model rather than try to build it themselves.”
We tend to agree that there are better ways of structuring an e-commerce site than using taxonomies. We also agree that it makes sense for most companies to outsource the development of a content management system rather than tackling this in-house.
We have no problem with Endeca, but we feel that some of their competitors, such as Mark Logic, should also be considered.
Companies that use taxonomies for their business to business (B2B) sites could be in big trouble. That is, if we can believe results of a survey conducted by e-commerce application provider Endeca.
As reported in “The Evolution of E-Commerce,” the survey showed that people who shop B2B sites now expect the same personalized experience that shoppers of B2C (business to consumer) sites expect. Neither wants to sort through generalized search results like those returned by taxonomies.
The solution? According to John Andrews with Endeca:
“Websites … need to make use of much more granular approaches to tagging content in order maximize the Web customer experience. That will require in many cases new content management systems that make managing the relationship between all those tags a lot simpler. The increased nuances of e-commerce is going to push more companies to embrace a SaaS model rather than try to build it themselves.”
We tend to agree that there are better ways of structuring an e-commerce site than using taxonomies. We also agree that it makes sense for most companies to outsource the development of a content management system rather than tackling this in-house.
We have no problem with Endeca, but we feel that some of their competitors, such as Mark Logic, should also be considered.
Robin Broyles, February 25, 2011
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TEMIS Pursues Traditional Publishers. Interesting.
December 28, 2010
TEMIS, a text mining company, has jumped into publishing. PR Newswire highlights the transition in “Atex Expands TEMIS Partnership and Announces 7 new Deals”as does News and Tech in “Atex cites 7 users for Temis partnership.” Atex and TEMIS announced that seven publishers will use an integrated package that uses Atex Polopoly Web CMS and TEMIS Content Enrichment solution. The seven happy customers are: Publishers Press, Erdee Media Groep, Sempre Editora, O Dia, Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, New York Daily News, and Condé Nast.
“The Atex Web CMS and TEMIS Content Enrichment solution is proving itself with leading media companies around the world as a single-vendor system that drives traffic, increases page views and time spent on sites, attracts unique visitors, thereby driving revenues for the publisher.”
The combined programs allow their clients to increase their web traffic and gain new advertisers by repurposing content assets to create new products. Social media is another factor that comes into play. Automatic tagging improves user generate information such as blogs and forums. Atex and TEMIS are a great team-up, but it makes you wonder if they are chasing MarkLogic.
Stephen E Arnold, December 28, 2010
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