Inmagic Presto
July 10, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who told me about Inmagic’s upgrade to its social knowledge management platform. I read a story in CIOL.com, a developer oriented publication. Years ago I was on the Board of Directors of Inmagic, and I thought highly of their product. The company has evolved over the years, and now offers an interesting range of products. You can get the full scoop from the company’s Web site.
The Presto product connects content management, knowledge management, and social technologies. Inmagic has a search service that operates within a Presto environment too. Support for Microsoft SharePoint is quite good. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses “in the wild”, Inmagic’s Presto adds useful functions to SharePoint installations.
Presto 3.1 uses Web Parts technology that allows the search parts on the Presto homepage to be embedded and used in a SharePoint deployment. A new Web Services API lets SharePoint communicate with Presto to create, replace, update, and delete records seamlessly.
Phil Green, CTO of Inmagic said:
With Inmagic Presto 3.1, companies can enhance their SharePoint environment with a cost-effective, off-the-shelf solution suited to their needs. They can create internal, secure knowledge communities around enterprise content, with sophisticated social, search, security, and library workflow capabilities not found in SharePoint. The use of Web Parts, Presto, and SharePoint together can deliver tremendous value to an organization’s bottom line.
Based on the research I have been doing for a major SharePoint installation, a software such as Presto can save many hours of fiddling. Recommended by the Beyond Search goslings.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2009
Search Server: You Have Six Months to Live
May 24, 2009
Channel Web reported that an error in SharePoint Service Pack 2 shuts down Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express. You can read the story “Microsoft Warns Of SharePoint 2007 SP2 Glitch” here. With search a mission-critical service, the glitch could disrupt some organizations. The fix involves a manual reentry of the product identification number. No software fix is available but Microsoft is working on one. Nice Labor Day weekend news for the SharePoint admins. When a billion dollar revenue stream hiccups, the social embarrassment may be considerable. Enterprise search is not yet a no brainer.
Stephen Arnold, May 23, 2009
Interview with Janus Boye: New Search Tutorial
February 18, 2009
In the last three years, Janus Boye, Managing Director of JBoye in Denmark, has been gaining influence as a conference organizer. In 2009, Mr. Boye is expanding to the United Kingdom and the United States. Kenny Toth, ArnoldIT.com, spoke with Mr. Boye on February 17, 2009. The full text of the interview appears below.
Why are you sponsoring a tutorial with the two enterprise search experts, Martin White and Stephen Arnold?
Personally I’m very fascinated with search as it is one of complex challenges of the web that remains essentially unsolved. For a while I’ve wanted to create a seminar on search that would cover technology, implementation and management to really assist our many community of practice members that on a regular basis tells me that search is broken. Some of them have invested heavily in software and found that even the most expensive software products does not solve successful search alone. Some of them have also found their vendor go either bankrupt or become acquired. Beyond vendors, many members have underestimated the planning required to make search work. Martin White and Stephen Arnold have recently published a new report on Successful Enterprise Search Management, which the seminar is modeled after.
Janus Boye. http://www.jboye.com
What will the attendees learn in the tutorial?
My goal is that at the end of the seminar, attendees will understand the business and management issues that impact a successful implementation. The attendees will learn about how the marketplace is shifting, what skills you need in your team, what can go wrong and how you avoid it, and how you get the most out of your consultants and vendors.
Isn’t search a stale subject? What will be new and unusual about this tutorial.
Search is far from a stable subject. If you are among those that use SharePoint every day, you know that search still have a long way to go. Come to the seminar and learn about the larger trends driving the market as well as recent developments, such as the Microsoft FAST roadmap
Will these be lectures or will there be interactivity between the experts and the audience?
The agenda for the seminar is done so that there will be plenty of room for interactivity. The idea is that delegates can get answers to their burning questions. There will be room for Q & A, and some sessions are also divided into sub-groups so that delegates can discuss their challenges in smaller groups.
If I attend, what will be the three or four takeaways from this show?
There will be several takeaways at the seminar, in particular around themes such as content, procurement, implementation, security, social search, language and the vendor marketplace.
Where is the tutorial and what are the details?
The tutorial will be held in London, UK. See http://www.jboye.co.uk/events/workshop-successful-enterprise-search-management-q209/ for more.
Kenny Toth, February 18, 2009
Daniel Tunkelang: Co-Founder of Endeca Interviewed
February 9, 2009
As other search conferences gasp for the fresh air of enervating speakers, Harry Collier’s Boston Search Engine Conference (more information is here) has landed another thought-leader speaker. Daniel Tunkelang is one of the founders of Endeca. After the implosion of Convera and the buys out of Fast Search and Verity, Endeca is one of the two flagship vendors of search, content processing, and information management systems recognized by most information technology professionals. Dr. Tunkelang writes an informative Web log The Noisy Channel here.
Dr. Daniel Tunkelang. Source: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quixote/dt.jpg
You can get a sense of Dr. Tunkelang’s views in this exclusive interview conducted by Stephen Arnold with the assistance of Harry Collier, Managing Director, Infonortics Ltd.. If you want to hear and meet Dr. Tunkelang, attend the Boston Search Engine Meeting, which is focused on search and information retrieval. The Boston Search Engine Meeting is the show you may want to consider attending. All beef, no filler.
The speakers, like Dr. Tunkelang, will challenge you to think about the nature of information and the ways to deal with substantive issues, not antimacassars slapped on a problem. We interviewed Mr. Tunkelang on February 5, 2009. The full text of this interview appears below.
Tell us a bit about yourself and about Endeca.
I’m the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Endeca, a leading enterprise search vendor. We are the largest organically grown company in our space (no preservatives or acquisitions!), and we have been recognized by industry analysts as a market and technology leader. Our hundreds of clients include household names in retail (Wal*Mart, Home Depot); manufacturing and distribution (Boeing, IBM); media and publishing (LexisNexis, World Book), financial services (ABN AMRO, Bank of America), and government (Defense Intelligence Agency, National Cancer Institute).
My own background: I was an undergraduate at MIT, double majoring in math and computer science, and I completed a PhD at CMU, where I worked on information visualization. Before joining Endeca’s founding team, I worked at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and AT&T Bell Labs.
What differentiates Endeca from the field of search and content processing vendors?
In web search, we type a query in a search box and expect to find the information we need in the top handful of results. In enterprise search, this approach too often breaks down. There are a variety of reasons for this breakdown, but the main one is that enterprise information needs are less amenable to the “wisdom of crowds” approach at the heart of PageRank and related approaches used for web search. As a consequence, we must get away from treating the search engine as a mind reader, and instead promote bi-directional communication so that users can effectively articulate their information needs and the system can satisfy them. The approach is known in the academic literature as human computer information retrieval (HCIR).
Endeca implements an HCIR approach by combining a set-oriented retrieval with user interaction to create an interactive dialogue, offering next steps or refinements to help guide users to the results most relevant for their unique needs. An Endeca-powered application responds to a query with not just relevant results, but with an overview of the user’s current context and an organized set of options for incremental exploration.
What do you see as the three major challenges facing search and content processing in 2009 and beyond?
There are so many challenges! But let me pick my top three:
Social Search. While the word “social” is overused as a buzzword, it is true that content is becoming increasingly social in nature, both on the consumer web and in the enterprise. In particular, there is much appeal in the idea that people will tag content within the enterprise and benefit from each other’s tagging. The reality of social search, however, has not lived up to the vision. In order for social search to succeed, enterprise workers need to supply their proprietary knowledge in a process that is not only as painless as possible, but demonstrates the return on investment. We believe that our work at Endeca, on bootstrapping knowledge bases, can help bring about effective social search in the enterprise.
Federation. As much as an enterprise may value its internal content, much of the content that its workers need resides outside the enterprise. An effective enterprise search tool needs to facilitate users’ access to all of these content sources while preserving value and context of each. But federation raises its own challenges, since every repository offers different levels of access to its contents. For federation to succeed, information repositories will need to offer more meaningful access than returning the top few results for a search query.
Search is not a zero-sum game. Web search engines in general–and Google in particular–have promoted a view of search that is heavily adversarial, thus encouraging a multi-billion dollar industry of companies and consultants trying to manipulate result ranking. This arms race between search engines and SEO consultants is an incredible waste of energy for both sides, and distracts us from building better technology to help people find information.
With the rapid change in the business climate, how will the increasing financial pressure on information technology affect search and content processing?
There’s no question that information technology purchase decisions will face stricter scrutiny. But, to quote Rahm Emmanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste…it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” Stricter scrutiny is a good thing; it means that search technology will be held accountable for the value it delivers to the enterprise. There will, no doubt, be an increasing pressure to cut costs, from price pressure on vendor to substituting automated techniques for human labor. But that is how it should be: vendors have to justify their value proposition. The difference in today’s climate is that the spotlight shines more intensely on this process.
Search / content processing systems have been integrated into such diverse functions as business intelligence and customer support. Do you see search / content processing becoming increasingly integrated into enterprise applications? If yes, how will this shift affect the companies providing stand alone search / content processing solutions? If no, what do you see the role of standalone search / content processing applications becoming?
Better search is a requirement for many enterprise applications–not just BI and Call Centers, but also e-commerce, product lifecycle management, CRM, and content management. The level of search in these applications is only going to increase, and at some point it just isn’t possible for workers to productively use information without access to effective search tools.
For stand-alone vendors like Endeca, interoperability is key. At Endeca, we are continually expanding our connectivity to enterprise systems: more connectors, leveraging data services, etc. We are also innovating in the area of building configurable applications, which let businesses quickly deploy the right set features for their users. Our diverse customer base has driven us to support the diversity of their information needs, e.g., customer support representatives have very different requirements from those of online shoppers. Most importantly, everyone benefits from tools that offer an opportunity to meaningfully interact with information, rather than being subjected to a big list of results that they can only page through.
Microsoft acquired Fast Search & Transfer. SAS acquired Teragram. Autonomy acquired Interwoven and Zantaz. In your opinion, will this consolidation create opportunities or shut doors. What options are available to vendors / researchers in this merger-filled environment?
Yes! Each acquisition changes the dynamics in the market, both creating opportunities and shutting doors at the same time. For SharePoint customers who want to keep the number of vendors they work with to a minimum, the acquisition of FAST gives them a better starting point over Microsoft Search Server. For FAST customers who aren’t using SharePoint, I can only speculate as to what is in store for them.
For other vendors in the marketplace, the options are:
- Get aligned with (or acquired by) one of the big vendors and get more tightly tied into a platform stack like FAST;
- Carve out a position in a specific segment, like we’re seeing with Autonomy and e-Discovery, or
- Be agnostic, and serve a number of different platforms and users like Endeca or Google do. In this group, you’ll see some cases where functionality is king, and some cases where pricing is more important, but there will be plenty of opportunities here to thrive.
Multi core processors provide significant performance boosts. But search / content processing often faces bottlenecks and latency in indexing and query processing. What’s your view on the performance of your system or systems with which you are familiar? Is performance a non issue?
Performance is absolutely a consideration, even for systems that make efficient use of hardware resources. And it’s not just about using CPU for run-time query processing: the increasing size of data collections has pushed on memory requirements; data enrichment increases the expectations and resource requirements for indexing; and richer capabilities for query refinement and data visualization present their own performance demands.
Multicore computing is the new shape of Moore’s Law: this is a fundamental consequence of the need to manage power consumption on today’s processors, which contain billions of transistors. Hence, older search systems that were not designed to exploit data parallelism during query evaluation will not scale up as hardware advances.
While tasks like content extraction, enrichment, and indexing lend themselves well to today’s distributed computing approaches, the query side of the problem is more difficult–especially in modern interfaces that incorporate faceted search, group-bys, joins, numeric aggregations, et cetera. Much of the research literature on query parallelism from the database community addresses structured, relational data, and most parallel database work has targeted distributed memory models, so existing techniques must be adapted to handle the problems of search.
Google has disrupted certain enterprise search markets with its appliance solution. The Google brand creates the idea in the minds of some procurement teams and purchasing agents that Google is the only or preferred search solution. What can a vendor do to adapt to this Google effect? Is Google a significant player in enterprise search, or is Google a minor player?
I think it is a mistake for the higher-end search vendors to dismiss Google as a minor player in the enterprise. Google’s appliance solution may be functionally deficient, but Google’s brand is formidable, as is its position of the appliance as a simple, low-cost solution. Moreover, if buyers do not understand the differences among vendor offerings, they may well be inclined to decide based on the price tag–particularly in a cost-conscious economy. It is thus more incumbent than ever on vendors to be open about what their technology can do, as well as to build a credible case for buyers to compare total cost of ownership.
Mobile search is emerging as an important branch of search / content processing. Mobile search, however, imposes some limitations on presentation and query submission. What are your views of mobile search’s impact on more traditional enterprise search / content processing?
A number of folks have noted that the design constraints of the iPhone (and of mobile devices in general) lead to an improved user experience, since site designers do a better job of focusing on the information that users will find relevant. I’m delighted to see designers striving to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in information seeking applications.
Still, I think we can take the idea much further. More efficient or ergonomic use of real estate boils down to stripping extraneous content–a good idea, but hardly novel, and making sites vertically oriented (i.e., no horizontal scrolling) is still a cosmetic change. The more interesting question is how to determine what information is best to present in the limited space–-that is the key to optimizing interaction. Indeed, many of the questions raised by small screens also apply to other interfaces, such as voice. Ultimately, we need to reconsider the extreme inefficiency of ranked lists, compared to summarization-oriented approaches. Certainly the mobile space opens great opportunities for someone to get this right on the web.
Semantic technology can make point and click interfaces more useful. What other uses of semantic technology do you see gaining significance in 2009? What semantic considerations do you bring to your product and research activities?
Semantic search means different things to different people, but broadly falls into two categories: Using linguistic and statistical approaches to derive meaning from unstructured text, using semantic web approaches to represent meaning in content and query structure. Endeca embraces both of these aspects of semantic search.
From early on, we have developed an extensible framework for enriching content through linguistic and statistical information extraction. We have developed some groundbreaking tools ourselves, but have achieved even better results by combining other vendor’s document analysis tools with our unique ability to improve their results through corpus analysis.
The growing prevalence of structured data (e.g., RDF) with well-formed ontologies (e.g., OWL) is very valuable to Endeca, since our flexible data model is ideal for incorporating heterogeneous, semi-structured content. We have done this in major applications for the financial industry, media/publishing, and the federal government.
It is also important that semantic search is not just about the data. In the popular conception of semantic search, the computer is wholly responsible derives meaning from the unstructured input. Endeca’s philosophy, as per the HCIR vision, is that humans determine meaning, and that our job is to give them clues using all of the structure we can provide.
Where can I find more information about your products, services, and research?
Endeca’s web site is http://endeca.com/. I also encourage you to read my blog, The Noisy Channel (http://thenoisychannel.com/), where I share my ideas (as do a number of other people!) on improving the way that people interact with information.
Stephen Arnold, February 9, 2009
Mysteries of Online 2: Business Process Logic
January 30, 2009
I have been jotting notes to myself as I put the finishing touches on Google: The Digital Gutenberg, my forthcoming monograph about Google and integrated information manufacturing system. One of the notecards, which I am converting to this narrative Web log reminder, had the phrase “business processes built on faulty logic” circled in red.
I don’t know where or who used this phrase, but I found it suggestive this cold morning. The plunging temperatures have frozen the acid runoff stream and my pond. This addled goose, therefore, must sit in his nest contemplating the mysteries of online. Too keep my web feet frost bite free, some observations.
Business Processes: Formed by Chance, Trial and Error, and What Clients Demand
I remember an interview I conducted with a guru from Thomson, the French electronics firm, in the late 1970s. I had to jog my memory, but I looked at my 1979 copy of the “Managing Innovation” study, which my boss William P. Sommers sold to an innovation-challenged Fortune 50 company. I was one intellectual ditch digger on that project. The French PhD who answered my questions about innovation said something to the effect: “Who knows. We just do what’s been done around the lab here for years.” Whatever works, I suppose.
Search, content management and business intelligence–all in one modern package. Image source; http://www.pr.gov.br/batebyte/edicoes/2003/bb137/imagens/torto2.gif
Tradition
The notion of tradition and business processes is deeply rooted in most of the organizations with which I am familiar. In the older companies, the methods are captured customized machines like the “Joe Herman machine” to make nails in the Keystone nail mill. Today MBAs use Excel to whip up financial methods. (We know how well that works.) Tangible machine or intangible method, once these constructs are in place, change becomes difficult.
Use What You Got
Using what “you got” is a phrase that I heard in the steel mill when I was 17, and I heard it last week in a meeting with an entrepreneur building a services Web site for professionals. “Use what you got” means the learnings, instincts, and tools available here and now. When creativity flashes, a business method is developed. If the method works even sort of works, the company is good to go.
Search 2009: The Arnold Boye08 Lecture
November 11, 2008
What began as a routine speech became a more definitive statement of my views about enterprise search in 2009. I delivered a lecture on this topic to a standing room only crowd in Aarhus, Denmark, at the JBoye 08 conference. The conference organizer asked me to provide a version of my talk for the conference attendees who were unable to attend my lecture. I have now posted the full text of my remarks on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. You can read the PDF of this lecture here.
Let me highlight several of the features of this talk, which concatenated remarks I have made about the future of search over the last 90 days:
- I identify the major trends that I am watching in the enterprise search “space”. I don’t dig into social search and some of the more trendy topics. I identify what will keep people using a system and those responsible for search and content processing in their jobs.
- I highlight a small number of companies that I think are going to be important in 2009. I mention five companies, but I have a much longer list of promising players. These five are examples of what is going to drive search success going forward.
- I spell out some meta challenges that vendors and licensees face. To give one example of what’s in this short list, think SharePoint. With 100 million licensees, SharePoint is likely to have as significant an impact on enterprise information access as Google. But there is a dark side to SharePoint, and I mention it in this report.
I have one request. Feel free to use the information for your personal learning. If you are engaged in teaching, you may reproduce the document and invite your students to critique my ideas. If you are a consultant shopping for a phrase or idea to borrow, that’s okay. Just point back to my original document. I see many “beyonds” now. Beyond Google, Beyond Business Intelligence, and so on. I expect that “just there” search will experience similar diffusion. Of course, if you just pirate my phrasing, I think the addled goose will point out this activity. Geese can lay golden eggs; geese can spoil an automobile’s finish as well.
As always, I have had to cut material from this write up. You may point out my errors, omissions, and shortcomings in the comments section to this Web log. Keep in mind that this Web log is free, and it is an easy way for me to keep track of my ideas and lectures.
Stephen Arnold, November 12, 2008
FASTForward Ignores Police Action News
October 21, 2008
I took a look at the Microsoft Fast FASTForward Web log. You can find it here. The complete October 2008 archive is here. I found articles about SharePoint. I found write ups about Enterprise 2.0 (emergence and information plus other useful functions), transformation, social software, and search. What I did not find was any reference to the action taken by the Norwegian police on October 15, 2008. I am an addled goose. The thought did cross my mind that if a large company and an affiliate of Microsoft, an outfit with 100,000 employees and revenue north of $85 billion dollars is involved in a police action, a brief comment might be useful. The Web log appears to written by people who are not employees of Microsoft. The police action is important because it strikes at such issues as financial probity, trust, and reliability, among others. If the police action occurs, a bit of color from the FastForward Web log seems appropriate. A two line item pointing to an “official” statement by Microsoft would have been helpful to me. If a company wants to promote Enterprise 2.0 qualities, that firm may want to practice some Enterprise 2.0 behaviors. On the other hand, perhaps the lack of information is an indication of what is really meant by Enterprise 2.0 at Microsoft Fast. AIIM’s definition is:
A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.
Omission fuels suspicion. With enough omission, this addled goose can fall into a muddle. Agree? Disagree? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2008
The Goose Quacks: Arnold Endnote at Enterprise Search Summit
October 4, 2008
Editor’s Note: This is a file with a number of screen shots. If you are on a slow connection, skip this document.
One again I was batting last. I arrived the day before my talk from Europe, and I wasn’t sure what time it was or what day it was. In short, the addled goose was more off kilter than I had been in the Netherlands for my keynote at the Hartmann Utrecht conference and my meetings in Paris squished around the Utrecht gig.
I poked my head into about half of the sessions. I heard about managing search, taxonomies, business intelligence, and product pitches disguised as analyses. I’m going to be 65; I was tired; and I had heard similar talks a few days earlier in Europe. The challenges facing those involved with search are reaching a boiling point.
After dipping into the presentations, including the remarkable Ahead in the Clouds talk by Dr. Werner Vogels, top technical gun at Amazon, and some business process management razzle dazzle, I went back to the drawing board for my talk. I had just reviewed usage data that revealed that Google’s lead in Web search was nosing towards 70 percent of the search traffic. I also had some earlier cuts at the traffic data for the Top 50 Web sites. In the two hours before my talk, I fiddled with these data and produced an interesting graph of the Web usage. I did not use it in my talk, sticking with my big images snagged from Flickr. I don’t put many words on PowerPoint slides. In fact, I use them because conference organizers want a “paper”. I just send them the PowerPoint deck and give my talk using a note card which I hold in my hand or put on the podium in front of me. I hate PowerPoints.
Here’s the chart I made to see how the GOOG was doing in terms of Microsoft and Yahoo.
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/
The top six sites are where the action is. The other 44 sites are in the “long tail”. In this case, the sites out of the top 50 have few options for getting traffic. The 44 sites accounted in August 2008 for a big chunk percent of the calculated traffic, but no single site is likely to make it into the top six quickly. Google sits on top the pile and seems to be increasing its traffic each month. Google monetizes its traffic reasonably well, so it is generating $18 billion or so in the last 12 months.
In the enterprise search arena, I have only “off the record” sources. These ghostly people tell me that Google has:
- Shipped 24, 600 Google Search Appliances. For comparison, Fast Search & Transfer prior to its purchase by Microsoft had somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 enterprise search platform licensees. Now, of course, Fast Search has access to the 100 million happy SharePoint customers. Who knows what the Fast Search customer count is now? Not me.
- Become the standard for mapping in numerous government agencies, including those who don’t have signs on their buildings
- Been signing up as many as 3,000 Google Docs users per day, excluding the 1.5 million school children who will be using Google services in New South Wales, Australia.
I debated about how to spin these data. I decided to declare, “Google has won the search battle in 2008 and probably in 2009.” Not surprisingly, the audience was disturbed with my assertion. Remember, I did not parade these data. I use pictures like this one to make my point. This illustration shows a frustrated enterprise search customer setting fire to the vendor’s software disks, documentation, and one surly consultant:
How did I build up to the conclusion that Google has won the 2008-2009 search season. Here are the main points and some of the illustrations I used in my talk.
An Exceptional Rumor: MSFT to Buy Yahoo AOL Combo
September 26, 2008
I saw this post on Venture Beat here. Then I saw a follow on story on Peter Kafka’s write up for Silicon Alley Insider here. I am delighted to point out that these writes up do not a done deal make. I find the notion fascinating, and I hope it comes to pass. Google will probably buy another dinosaur skeleton, reinstate day care, and design more lavish housing for the NASA Moffett Field Google Housing Units to celebrate. Please, read these two posts. The plan, as I understand this speculation, is that Yahoo gobbles up the wheezing AOL. I presume Yahoo will be able to work its technical magic on AOL’s infrastructure just as it did Delicious.com’s. Yahoo took two years to rewrite Delicious.com’s code, thus allowing other social sites and bookmarking services to flourish. Once the dust settles from that MBA fueled explosion, the Bain consultants will shape the package so that Microsoft can swoop in and snap up two hot properties, solve its search and portal problems, and catch up with Googzilla and chop off its tail.
When I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, we called the Bain consultants Bainies. I can’t recall if we used this as a term of affection or derision. I like Bain and the work it did for Guinness just about 20 years ago. You can refresh your memory of that project here.
Let’s walk through the search and content processing implications of this hypothetical deal. I promise that I will not comment about SharePoint search, Live.com’s search, Outlook search, SQL Server search, Powerset search, or Fast Search & Transfer search.
- AOL has search plus some special sauce. At one time Fast Search & Transfer was laboring in the AOL vine yards. Teragram, prior to its acquisition by SAS, was also a vendor. Two vendors are enough for Yahoo to rationalize. Heck, Yahoo is relying on Fast Search technology for its AllTheWeb.com service last I heard. The Teragram technology might be a stretch, but the Yahoo technical team will be up to the challenge. The notion of becoming part of Microsoft will put a fire in the engineers’ bellies.
- AOL has its portal services. Granted these overlap with Yahoo’s. There’s the issue of AOL mail, AOL messenger, and AOL’s ad deals with various third parties. Google may still have a claw in the AOL operation as well. I haven’t followed Google’s tie up with AOL since word came to me that Google thought it made a bad decision when it pumped a billion into the company.
- AOL has a cracker jack customer service operation. Yahoo has a pretty interesting customer service operation as well. I am not sure how one might merge the two units and bring both of them under the Yahoo natural language search system that doesn’t seem to know how to provide guidance to me when I want to cancel one of my very few Yahoo for fee services. Give this a try on your own and let me know how you navigate the system.
I am delighted that I don’t have to figure out how to mesh Yahoo and AOL and then integrate the Yahoo AOL entity with Microsoft. Overlapping services are trivial for these three firms’ engineers. No big deal. If the fix is to operate each much as they now are, I anticipate some cost control problems. Economies of scale are tough to achieve operating three separate systems and their overlapping features.
I think that when I read the stories in my newsreader on Monday, September 29, 2008, I will know more about this rumor. I am still struggling with how disparate systems and the number of search systems can be made to work better, faster, and cheaper. Maybe the owner of the Yahoo AOL property will outsource search to Google. Google is relatively homogeneous, and it works pretty well for quite a few Web users, Web advertisers, and Web watchers. Watch this Web log for clarification of this rumor. For now, the word that comes to mind is a Vista “wow”.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Search: Moving Up the Buzzword Chain of Being
September 20, 2008
In one of my university required courses, the professor revealed the secrets of “the great chain of being”. After 45 years, my recollection of Dr. Pearce’s lecture are fuzzy, but I recall at the top of the chain was God, then angels, and then a pecking order of creatures. Down at the bottom were paramecia like me.
Search terminology works like this I concluded after giving my talk at Erik Hartmann’s conference in Utrecht. I prepared for my remarks by talking with a dozen vendors exhibiting at the conference. I also listened to various presenters for five to 15 minutes. I had to limit my listening in order to get a representative sampling of the topics and interests of the conference attendees.
What I concluded was:
- People perceive Google as a Web search company that sells ads. In this biased sample, I noted a discomfort about Google’s growing dominance of digital information. I did not hear any one criticize Google, but I sensed a growing concern about privacy, scope, traffic, etc. I remain excited about Google and probably come across as a Google cheerleader, which annoyed some of the people with whom I spoke.
- Vendors and consultants who once hawked content management, records management, and enterprise search have changed their tune. Instead of talking about CMS, EDM, and other smart sounding acronyms, the vendors are pulling terminology out of MBA lexicons. (More about this in a moment.)
- The people listening to these talks, including mine, hunger–even plead–for solutions to challenges arising from their inability to find needed information, manage terabytes of digital “stuff” in their offices, and create a solution that does not require constant spoon feeding.
The result is that “old” solutions and half baked solutions are wrapped in new terminology taken from a higher level in the “great chain of buzzwords”. Here’s an example: instead of saying “enterprise search” or “behind the firewall search”, some vendors talked about “information access” and “findability” whatever that means. The lesser word is search, which most people seemed to agree was uninteresting, which is a code word for “does not work”. The words “information access” come from a loftier position on the buzzword “great chain of being”. The vendors are sounding more like McKinsey and Booz, Allen known nothings than subject matter experts.
A representation of the Great Chain of Being. Image source: http://www.kheper.net/topics/greatchainofbeing/Steps.gif
Consider this example: “business process management”. This is definitely a buzzword from a loftier position on the buzzword “great chain of being”. “BPM” is in the Heaven category, not Stone or Flame category. But I don’t know what BPM means. I think the folks using this word want to avoid precise definitions because that limits their freedom. Implying that “BPM” will solve a problem is easier than actually diagnosing the problem and solving it. “BPM” was the acronym of the conference. Presenters from publishers, consultancies, and vendors inserting this three letter token for what seemed like a pretty basic notion; that is, the steps needed to complete a task. Since search and content management are losers in the revenue generating department, folks engaged in these activities now talk about BPM. Old wine, new bottles but the labels have buzzwords from higher in the “great chain of being”.
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