PoolCorp and Exalead Complete a High Scoring Deployment
October 6, 2010
PoolCorp. has immersed itself in Exalead’s search enabled applications framework, CloudView. According to information from Exalead, in 2009, PoolCorp evaluated its existing e-commerce platform and decided that a complete ground-up rewrite was needed to improve the ability for their customers to find products easier and faster. PoolCorp has always provided value-added tools for its dealers to grow their businesses and saw this as an opportunity to combine the best features of all of those tools into a new solution that would address all of the current customer adoption obstacles. With 35 percent of all
customer feedback surrounding search and search related functions, it was clear that in order for the new e-commerce site to provide an industry-leading customer purchase experience, an enterprise search solution was required.
Before deciding upon CloudView, PoolCorp reviewed a number of enterprise search solutions including Microsoft FAST, Endeca, Autonomy and open source Solr. Exalead told Beyond Search, “PoolCorp chose Exalead because it was cost effective, scalable and much easier to install than competing products.”
Dustin Hughes, the senior software archtect of PoolCorp said:
Great software like Exalead is like a ball of clay. You can easily push and mold it into how you need to use it. We had an extremely tight timeline for installing this software – due in part to Exalead’s fantastic customer support we got our beta up and working within weeks and rolled out to 500+ customers within 2 months. The entire system became generally available to 30,000+ U.S. customers within four months of the start of development and initial customer feedback has been very positive.
Beyond Search learned that since the POOL360 beta test in July 2010, PoolCorp found:
- The Exalead-based system offered remarkable response times, often within 1/50th of a second even when the application was pulling information directly from PoolCorp’s existing ERP system.
- Exalead’s ability to compress data from its original SQL format resulted in a 10:1 compression reduction, significantly reducing the amount of hardware necessary to deploy the POOL360 solution.
- PoolCorp saved more than $30,000 in hardware costs and licensing fees over alternative SQL-based solutions.
- The Exalead CloudView technology would be an ideal system for an internal enterprise search system.
Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.
For more information about Exalead visit the firm’s Web site at www.exalead.com. Beyond Search uses Exalead’s technology for its blog indexing demonstration here. Our experience has positive with zero set up hassles and exceptional stablity and performance.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2010
IBM – Netezza Deal and Its Implications for Netezza Partners
September 28, 2010
We learned that Attivio had a tie up with Netezza. We have heard about other search vendors partnering with the storage and analytics firm as well. Attivio is a business intelligence, content processing, and search vendor founded by some of Fast Search & Transfer’s former technologists. You can get more information about the company at www.attivio.com.
EnergySavingWeekly had reported that the combination of Netezza and Attivio would integrate unstructured content with structured data that resides in a data warehouse. According to the article:
We introduced the world’s first data warehouse appliance and challenged the status quo,” Jim Baum, president and CEO of Netezza, in a statement. And now, driven by our customers, we are shaping solutions to solve bigger, more complex enterprise-wide challenges. With the explosion in volume and variety of unstructured information driven, particularly, by the Internet and social networking, we’ve heard a clear demand for a unified approach that can scale from fairly small implementations all the way to petabyte deployments.
Will IBM allow Netezza and its partners to operate without much change? Or, will IBM which is struggling to beef up its content processing, classification, and indexing systems go in a new direction? IBM has a large number of different search, text processing, and analytics companies and their technologies. Will these be unified or is IBM buying market share? We don’t know. IBM’s strategy is looking more and more like the Yahoo approach to gathering promising companies and then moving on to another green field.
Will Attivio be drawn more deeply into IBM, or will Attivio be squeezed out? Stay tuned, as once again, we are keeping a close eye on this one.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2010
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Facebook Framework for Finding
September 28, 2010
I am trying to locate the Louisville East End Social Security Office. I navigated to Google and entered “SSA Local”. No joy. I snagged my phone and fired off an SMS to a friend. The friend sent me a text message with the directions.
A small thing, sure. But what about the notion of timely, precise information?
I read “Facebook CEO Hints at Social Mobile Application Framework” and had a small insight. Facebook is going to make life difficult for some search and retrieval vendors. Microsoft owns a piece of Facebook, so maybe the pain won’t be much more than a mosquito bite on a 20 year old hiking the Appalachian Trail in July. Yahoo has ties to Microsoft. So that may leave Google as a potential Nash or Oldsmobile.
To me, an important comment in the article was:
Facebook wants to offer a new social mobile application framework based on open standards, kind of like a counterpart to the tons of mobile application frameworks already found on smartphones. Ultimately this framework will tap directly into smartphone functionality through APIs, like every other framework, only that Facebook’s framework will be “social and friends” oriented.
A social framework is an interesting notion. Data fusion companies could plug into Facebook and develop applications for marketing firms and others with an interest in real time content streams.
Latency is emerging as the next big problem for many content processing companies. Delays in information access translate into less accurate predictive outputs. More data faster is the mantra. But the major impact of a Facebook framework if it comes to pass may be on search.
Why rely on high latency, brute force indexing methods when you can ask a social content pool and then obtain results from a curated list of “friends”. There’s geolocation and more traditional search methods to smooth out the potholes the friendless may encounter.
Social search just worked for me. On to the Social Security Office to contemplate the future of search.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2010
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Facebook and Google: Philosophies Collide
September 27, 2010
I listened to the Thursday, Buzz Out Loud podcast. On the show the talent explained that a certain high profile blog (Techcrunch) wrote a story about a rumored Facebook phone. The high profile blog garnered a meeting with the founder of Facebook (Wizard Zuck or Mark Zuckerberg). In that discussion, if I heard correctly as I was peddling my exercise bike at 66 year old goose pace, Mr. Zuckerberg point out something along the lines that social functions could not be added on. The idea I took away was that Facebook is built for social functions. Google was built for search or some other function.
As I thought about this, the comment highlighted what I think of as a “platform” fight.
The idea has surfaced elsewhere. I have started to write about the i2-Palantir tussle. That seems to be about lots of different technical issues, but it is really a platform fight. i2 has been one of the leaders if not the leader in data fusion and analysis for law enforcement and intelligence applications for 20 years. Keep in mind that I have done some work for the i2 folks. The Palantir outfit—stuffed with $90 million in semi-worthless US bucks—is a comparative newcomer. These two outfits are struggling to keep or get, depending on one’s point of view—control of a very esoteric market niche. Most of the azurini and mid-tier consultants steer clear of this sector. The types of baloney generated by the azurinis’ spam plants can harm people, not just get procurement teams reassigned. The i2-Palantir issue interests me because it is a platform tussle.
I think Facebook and Google are in a platform war as well.
Now keep in mind that if you are a Googler, you see the world through Google goggles. If you are a Facebook fan, you see the world through the friend lens. I am in the middle, and here’s my take on Wizard Zuck’s alleged comment about “adding” social instead of building a social platform.
First, I think the shift from Google to Facebook as a go-to resource is an important change. The reason Facebook “works” for 500 million or more people is that the information (good, bad, right, wrong, made up, crazy, or indifferent) comes from humans. If you have some relationship with that human, the information exists within a relationship context. When I run a search on Google, I have to figure out for myself whether the information is right, wrong, made up, crazy, indifferent or an advertisement. I don’t get much human help to figure out what’s what. As a result, the Google algorithmic and “secret sauce” results strike me as somewhat less useful now that there are “contextual” results and what I call “friend cues.” Your mileage may vary, but these friend cues also exist in services like Twitter and its derivatives/applications like Tweetmeme.
Second, Google is definitely in Microsoft Word feature mode. I am impressed with some of Google’s new services such as its new authentication method, which I will write about in one of my October columns. I am not too impressed with other Google innovations such as “Instant”. The ration of Word type features to useful features seems to be tilting toward the Microsoft model. I don’t use Word because it is a program that tries to do everything well and ends up becoming a wild and crazy exercise in getting text on the screen. My goodness: green lines, red lines, auto bullets, disappearing images, weird table behavior. Give me Framemaker 7.2. Facebook is a complicated system, but the basics work reasonably well even though the firm’s immature approach to information reminds me of the last group of 20 somethings I spoke with in Slovenia several months ago. Google is now at risk of letting features get in the way of functional improvements. Facebook is in refinement mode. When it comes to social, Facebook is refining social actions. When it comes to social, Google is still trying to figure it out.
Third, Google is a platform built originally to deliver Web search results in the manner of AltaVista without Hewlett Packard in my opinion. Facebook is a platform built to let those who are young at heart find old and new pals. Google has morphed search into advertising and now faces the challenge of figuring out how to go beyond Orkut, which as I write this is struggling with some crazy virus or malware. Facebook is, according to a rumor I heard, working to provide search that uses the content within the Facebook ecosystem as the spider list. Curation versus search/advertising. Which platform is better to move search forward in the social space? Google is layering on a new approach to people and content and Facebook is simply indexing a subset of content. Curated content at that.
My view is that Facebook and Google are in a platform battle. Who will win? Wizard Zuck and Xooglers who know technically what Google errors to avoid in the Facebook social environment? Googlers who are trying to keep an 11 year old platform tuned for brute force Web indexing and on the fly ad matching run by smart algorithms?
Interesting platform battle. And a big one. This may not be a Socrates-hemlock type of tussle but it is a 21st century philosophical collision.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2010
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Tweets with Pickles: DataSift and Its Real Time Recipe
September 25, 2010
We have used Tweetmeme.com to see what Twitter users are doing right now. The buzz word real time has usurped “right now” but that’s the magic of folks born between 1968 and 1978.
DataSift combines some nifty plumbing with an original scripting language for filtering 800 tweets a second. The system can ingest and filter other types of content, but as a Twitter partner, DataSift is in the Twitterspace at the moment.
Listio describes the service this way:
DataSift gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent everyday. Tune tweets through a graphical interface or through its bespoke programming language. Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP. Comment upon and rank streams created by the community. Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams.
The idea is that a user will be able to create a filter that plucks content, patterns like Social Security Numbers, and metadata like the handle, geographic data, and the like. With these items, the system generates a tweet stream that matches the parameters of the filter. The language is called “Filtered Stream Definition Language” and you can see an example of its lingo below:
RULE “33e3891a3aebad56f962bb5e7ae4dc94” AND twitter.user.followers_count > 1000
A full explanation of the syntax appears in the story “FSDL”.
You can find an example on the DataSift blog which is more accessible than the videos and third party write ups about a service that is still mostly under wraps.
The wordsmiths never rest. Since I learned about DataSift, the service has morphed into “cloud event processing.” As an phrase for Google indexing, this one is top notch. In terms of obfuscating the filter, storage, and analysis aspect of DataSift, I don’t really like cloud event processing or the acronym CEP. Once again, I am in the minority.
The system’s storage component is called “pickles.” The filters can cope with irrelevant hash tags and deal with such Twitter variables as name, language, location, profiles, and followers, among others. There are geospatial tricks so one can specify a radius around a location or string together multiple locations and get tweets from people close to bankrupt Blockbuster stores in Los Angeles.
The system is what I call a next generation content processing service. Perched in the cloud, DataSift deals with the content flowing through the system. To build an archive, the filtered outputs have to be written to a storage service like Pickles. Once stored, clever users can slice and dice the data to squeeze gems from the tweet stream.
The service seems on track to become available in October or November 2010. A graphical interface is on tap, a step that most next generation content processing systems have to make. No one wants to deal with an end user who can set up his own outputs and make fine decisions based on a statistically-challenged view of his or her handiwork.
For more information point your browser at www.datasift.net.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2010
Search Industry Spot Changing: Risks and Rewards
September 20, 2010
I want to pick up a theme that has not been discussed from our angle in Harrod’s Creek. Marketers can change the language in news releases, on company blogs, and in PowerPoint pitches with a few keystrokes. For many companies, this is the preferred way to shift from one-size-fits-all search solutions described as a platform or framework into a product vendor. I don’t want to identify any specific companies, but you will be able to recognize them as these firms load up on Google AdWords, do pay-to-play presentations at traditional conferences, and output information about the new products. To see how this works, just turn off Google Instant and run the query “enterprise search”, “customer support”, or “business intelligence.” You can get some interesting clues from this exercise.
Source: http://jason-thomas.tumblr.com/
Enterprise search, as a discipline, is now undergoing the type of transformation that hit suppliers to the US auto industry last year. There is consolidation, outright failure , and downsizing for survival. The auto industry needs suppliers to make cars. But when people don’t buy the US auto makers products, dominoes fall over.
What are the options available to a company with a brand based on the notion of “enterprise search” and wild generalizations such as “all your information at your fingertips”? As it turns out, the options are essentially those of the auto suppliers to the US auto industry:
- The company can close its doors. A good example is Convera.
- The search vendor can sell out, ideally at a very high price. A good example is Fast Search & Transfer SA.
- The search vendor can focus on a specific solution; for example, indexing FAQs and other information for customer support. A good example is Open Text.
- The vendor can dissolve back into an organization and emerge with a new spin on the technology. An example is Google and its Google Search Appliance.
- The search vendor can just go quiet and chase work as a certified integrator to a giant outfit like Microsoft. Good examples are the firms who make “snap ins” for Microsoft SharePoint.
- The search vendor can grab a market’s catchphrase like “business intelligence” and say me too. The search vendor can morph into open source and go for a giant infusion of venture funding. An example is Palantir.
Now there is nothing wrong with any of these approaches. I have worked on some projects and used many of the tactics identified above as rivets in an analysis.
What I learned is that saying enterprise search technology is now a solution has an upside and downside. I want to capture my thoughts about each before they slip away from me. My motivation is the acceleration in repositioning that I have noticed in the last two weeks. Search vendors are kicking into overdrive with some interesting moves, which we will document here. We are thinking about creating a separate news service to deal with some of the non-search aspects of what we think is a key point in the evolution of search, content processing and information retrieval.
The Upside of Repositioning One-Size-Fits-All-Search
Let me run down the facets of this view point.
First, repositioning—as I said above—is easy. No major changes have to be made except for the MBA-style and Madison Avenue type explanation of what the company is doing. I see more and more focused messages. A vendor explains that a solution can deliver an on point solution to a big problem. A good example are the search vendors who are processing blogs and other social content for “meaning” that illuminates how a product or service is perceived. This is existing technology trimmed and focused on a specific body of content, specific outputs from specific inputs, and reports that a non-specialist can understand. No big surprise that search vendors are in the repositioning game as they try to pick up the scent of revenues like my neighbor’s hunting dog.
US Government and Its New IT Directions
September 14, 2010
The U.S. Government is shedding its old clothes for new ones that fit the new technology. The Obama Administration wants the agencies to be transparent and innovative, giving command to U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) to implement the “Open Government” initiative, which in turn created the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT).
The CRMBuyer interview “Making Change Happen Every Day: Q&A With GSA’s David McClure”, reports the OCSIT associate administrator comment that, “OCSIT is rapidly becoming a leader in the use of new media, Web 2.0 technologies, and cloud computing, to proactively make government agencies and services more accessible to the public.” According to him, by operating at the “enterprise level,” the GSA is aiming to accelerate the adoption of technologies, including mobile applications, and improving search engine capabilities, to involve greater customer interactions and gain efficiencies. We concur with David who feels enhancing citizen participation in government will pay dividends on technology investments, but by hiring IBM to add agility, we are not sure if it could be the swiftest runner on the track team.
Why are there so many separate search systems? Is one efficiency to use one indexing system?
Is IBM the swiftest cat in the nature preserve?
Leena Singh, September 14, 2010
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Fair Search Rankings: SEO and Its Sins Come Home to Roost
September 7, 2010
You will be reading a lot from the search engine optimization crowd in the coming weeks. SEO means get a site on the first page of Google results no matter what. The “no matter what” part means tricks which Web indexing systems try to de-trick. Both sides are in a symbiotic relationship. The poor goofs with Web sites that pitch a pizza parlor have zero chance to get traffic. An elaborate dance takes place among the engineers who tweak algorithms to make sure that when I enter the query “white house”, I get the “right” white house.
A 1,000 calorie plus Krispy Kreme burger of Texas indigestion is on the menu for the Google if the Associated Press’s story is spot on. Source: http://new.wxerfm.com/blogs/post/bolson/2010/aug/06/krispy-kreme-burger/
You know the one with the President of the country where Google and Microsoft have headquarters. If you are another “white house”, you can hire some SEO azurini and trust that these trial-and-error experts can improve your ranking in Google, Bing, Ask, or other search system. But most of the SEO stuff does not work reliably, so the Web site owner gets to buy ads or pay for traffic. Quite an ecosystem.
Now the game may be officially declared the greatest thing in marketing since the invention of the sandwich board advertising bars in Times Square or be trashed as a scam on hapless Web site owners. The first hint of a potential rainy day is “Texas Opens Inquiry into Google Search Results.” I don’t quote from the AP. The goose is nervous about folks who get too eager to chase feathered fowl with legal eagles. I also am getting more and more careful about my enthusiasm for things Googley.
I don’t have much of a comment and I have only one observation. Add one more Krispy Kreme sized problem to the Paul Allen patent extravaganza, the Oracle dust up, the Facebook chase, and the dissing of the Google TV. I thought Google’s lousy summer was over. Is September 2010 going to trump Google’s June, July, and August 2010? It may. Quite a Labor Day in a state noted for its passion for justice Texas style.
Stephen E Arnold, September 7, 2010
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Facebooky Curated Search
September 7, 2010
I read “Facebook Now Displaying All Liked News Articles In Search Results.”
So here is the cost equation.
Indexing every wacky thing a spider can reach. Or why not index just the stuff that members click on or flag as Facebooky? Improve relevance and get out of the 1998 mentality toward search. In my opinion, the Googley approach is way expensive. The Facebooky approach is cheaper and probably better. The Facebook method may not emulate the wild and crazy CNN approach to news but Facebook humans are doing some heavy lifting. Facebook suck in what rings the Facebook members’ chimes. The result is Facebooky Curated Search or FCS. Add a consonant and a vowel and FCS becomes a serious stick in the eye for the Google.
Toss in the Facebook targeted ad and something interesting begins to take form.
Yep, I know the azurini see Facebook as a lower form of digital life. Yep, I know the SEO English majors can’t understand why anyone would search Facebook for news. It’s not search, right? Wrong. FCS may be a harbinger (sorry, big word, gentle reader) of a larger threat to finding information.
Why search?
There may be a Facebook app for that. Then what? A horror to awful to contemplate. Google’s traditional search becomes less vital to the Facebook set. Now of what does FCS remind me? Oh, I have an idea: Facebook crushes search. You thought something else?
Stephen E Arnold, September 7, 2010
Open Source At The Smithsonian
September 3, 2010
Resource shelf.com received several emails from people wondering about the technology used to power the Smithsonian’s popular Collection Center catalog. A new article titled “What Search Technology Is The Smithsonian Collection Search Center Catalog Using?” answers that question. The article says, “Bottom line. It was built using open-source technology.”
The museum needed a system capable of supporting a wide range of documents and objects. In the end, the Smithsonian selected open-source Lucene/Solr indexing software for the project, which has given the Smithsonian a flexible and scalable indexing environment. The Smithsonian has also enhanced their online display by programming in a Java environment.
This is a major coup for open-source SOLR/Lucene software. We’ll be paying close attention. As budget pressures increase for certain types of organizations, open source search solutions may be getting more attention. With search vendors morphing into the great marketing hyperbole dimension, Lucene/Solr may be the down to earth solution that fills a void. If you want to download a Lucene/Solr system, navigate to Lucid Imagination.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2010
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