Gilbane Group Publishes Beyond Search
April 7, 2008
An important 270-page study about fixing enterprise search systems that don’t work…
The Gilbane Group published Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work. The study includes more than 13 common problems and suggestions for fixing them. In addition, the study contains profiles of 24 vendors with next-generation search and content processing systems.
Mr. Arnold said, “I’ve made an effort to present the information in a simple, direct way. I’ve avoided jargon, and organized the information so a person with a search problem can find the answer fast. The vendor profiles contain no fluff. No vendor has paid to be included in this study. Readers get what my analysis of the system discovered. Facts, not fluff.”
More information about the study is available on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. The publisher’s information page and order form are available at the Gilbane Group’s Web site.
Stuart Schram IV, April 7, 2008
Beyond Search Published by the Gilbane Group
April 7, 2008
Stephen E. Arnold’s newest search and content processing study is now available for purchase. Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work is an electronic book in Adobe PDF format. is available for purchase and immediate download.
This study contains a discussion of how-to’s, so you can fix your broken enterprise search system. You will also find a detailed discussion of today’s market for search and content processing systems, profiles of 24 vendors (many from outside the U.S.), and a plain-talk glossary that cuts through the verbal fog characterizing much of the analysis of search and content processing.
Enterprise Search–A Problem Reaching Its Boiling Point
Mr. Arnold, author of the first three editions of the Enterprise Search Report and the 2007 monograph Google Version 2.0, reveals actionable information about remediating “broken” enterprise search systems. He said, “Most vendors and IT professionals won’t talk openly about their users’ satisfaction with the incumbent search-and-retrieval system. The reason is that as many as two-thirds of a system’s users are dissatisfied with that system.”
Thunderstone’s John Turnbull Interviewed
April 7, 2008
John Turnbull, dhief executive of Thunderstone Software LLC, said, “People are quite surprised to learn that Thunderstone pioneeded concept-based searching, real-time searching, and simultaneous search of both structured and unstructured data in the 1980s.”
Thunderstone, based in Cleveland, Ohio, offers a full range of search and retrieval systems for entrprise (behind-the-firewall), Web, and Web site search. The company’s flagship system is Texis. He said in an interviewed with ArnoldIT.com:
Texis is our high-powered search platform that licensees can employ to build complex search applications. Texis offers NLP [natural language search], parametric search, and the ability to index non-text objects like video. Texis has application programming interfaces. Our customers embed, integrate, and customize Texis into many different enterprise applications. These range from BI [business intelligence] to litigation support.
The company has introduced a parametric search appliance that delivers significant performance gains over competing products such as Google’s Search Appliance. Describing the use of his company’s ready-to-run solution, he said:
… Let’s say an employee needs to search for a particular product-item description across the entire enterprise. Keyword, full-text search will certainly provide a good list of results from a variety of documents and content sources. But what if you were only interested in the item’s occurrence within a specific document type (say, a purchase order), and one that was issued after a certain date and by a specific purchasing agent? Keyword, full-text search simply cannot provide this context for the information you’re pursuing.
He added:
I think there’s a growing realization that there are many reasons for search, and that the most appropriate results will depend on what the user is doing at that time. This includes explicit search, where the user asks a question, and implicit search where results are available based on what the user is doing, as well as if the user is asking for specific information, trying to retrieve a specific document, looking for background information or something else.
You can read the complete interview on the ArnoldIT.com Web site in its exclusive “Search Wizards Speak” feature. Additional information about Thunderstone Texis and its other products may be found on the Thunderstone Web site.
Stephen Arnold, April 7, 2008
Stratify Acquired by Iron Mountain
April 6, 2008
Late in 2007, Iron Mountain acquired Stratify (formerly Purple Yogi). With the wave of acquisitions building in the search and content processing sector, Stratify is out of play.
In 1999, Purple Yogi was one of the first companies to discover meaning and generate rich indexing from documents. After an infusion of investment, Purple Yogi repositioned itself as Stratify and offered “intelligence at a glance”. By 2005, Stratify was finding success in the legal market, one of the hottest niches for search and content processing vendors. Litigation generates massive amounts of content, and law firms have shown greater willingness to invest in technology.
The Iron Mountain deal for the privately held Stratify was valued in the $160 million range, and Stratify’s knowledge based system and need for human interaction with the system add to Iron Mountain’s arsenal of storage and content services. More information about Stratify appears at www.stratify.com.
Stephen Arnold, April 6, 2008
Niche-ization: A New Source of Revenue Oxygen
April 6, 2008
A One-Minute, One-Act Comedy
Mise en scène. An industrial wasteland in Silicon Valley or a new Euro building in Stockholm.
Set up: a conference room. Nothing flashy. No windows. Plugs and Ethernet cables in a jumble under the table. So-so lighting. A screen. A projector. A plug seeking a video connection. The whisper of air conditioning.
The money folks: 30 to 50 year old guys, casual lux, recently groomed hair and nails, movie star smiles. Testosterone. Mucho testosterone.
The techno-serfs: 20 to 30 year old engineers. Mostly thin. Laptops. Dark clothes. A few hippie-dippie hair doos. Earnest. Serious and very earnest. Less testosterone.
The agenda: Generating revenue.
The testosterone-energized VC speaks,
Money person 1: “Hey, guys, let’s get started. The agenda today is pretty simple. Let me give you some back ground and then let’s dive right in?”
Money person 2: “Right. Right?”
Techno-serfs in unison: “Okay. Sounds good.”
Money person 3: “Let me do the background, guys. We put in $1.2 million over the last three months. You guys pulled out $400K a month. That sound right.”
Serf 1: “I think we are running under that figure. Maybe we’re at $185K this month and will use the rest for payroll next week.”
Money person 3: “Like I said, You have burned $1.2 million.”
Money person 1: “May I ask a question?”
Everyone in unison: “Sure”.
Money person 1: “What are you guys going to do to generate some revenue?”
Money person 2: “Let me rephrase that, ‘How are we doing relative to the plan?”
Money person 3: “Screw the plan. What are you guys going to do to make some sales. Generate revenue.”
Serf 2: “We’re in beta.
Serf 3: “We have some great leads.”
Serf 1: “The competition sucks, man.”
Money person 2: “Forget leads. Produce revenue or we’re cutting off your oxygen.”
Money person 3: “Let’s take a bio break, shall we?”
Curtain falls. House lights up.
Discussion of this Aeshylean Tragedy
Has this happened to you? If not, you’re lucky. If it has, you know what this means. The start up–what I have called the “serfs”–has not made any sales. The friendly venture capitalists–what I have called the “money person”–have shed their fraternity rush warmth. Beneath that cheerful Norman Vincent Peale veneer is the real VC illustrated below:
BigTable or BigFable?
April 5, 2008
From the “Possible Department”–TechCrunch reported on April 4, 2008, that Google may be poised to release a BigTable service. Mark Hendrickson wrote:
Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we [TechCrunchers] haven’t been contacted by Google.
If true, Amazon’s various Web services may face some competition. Google has cloud-based technology that Amazon has been able to roll out unchallenged. The BigTable technology is discussed in some detail in The Google Legacy (Infonortics, 2005) and the Google Version 2.0 (Infornortics, 2007).
Amazon’s Web services have been funded from a relatively modest information technology budget. Some service glitches underscore that Amazon’s engineering might need more investment. Google, on the other hand, has funneled billions into its research and engineering. Significant portions of that investment has made it possible for Google to address certain technical methods in interesting new ways.
Whether true or false, the TechCrunch article fires a shot across the Bezos bow. The Google may be aiming its fleet of data centers at the world’s biggest bookstore. Stay tuned. The Beyond Search goose will be monitoring this rumor channel.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2008
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Solving the Yahoo Search Puzzle… Sort of
April 5, 2008
Yahoo–the stage-managed ingenue staying out of Mr. Microsoft’s sweaty grasp–has one foot in the Web search camp and one in the enterprise search camp. The problem is finding the software to download. After some clicking and scanning, I think I figured out where to get the software after a colleague asked me, “Where is this IBM Yahoo program?”
If you want to get a copy of IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition, navigate to IBM’s Web site here. To learn what you can and can’t do with the free system, start with this explanation by Todd Leyba here.
Be aware that if you search for “Yahoo desktop search”, you will get links that point to the X1 Yahoo desktop search system. You can download that product here.
I still don’t have a good grasp of Yahoo’s many “faces of search”. I was able to locate these IBM and Yahoo products using Google. Neither the IBM Web site search nor the “improved” Yahoo search were of much help to me. Keep in mind that these “free” products have some constraints if you want to push them beyond their performance envelope.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2008
The Disappearing Middle: Liposuction for High-Profile Search Vendors
April 5, 2008
Last week I received a telephone call from a perky MBA working at a European investment bank. The caller exuded confidence about one of the major publicly traded vendors of enterprise search. She wanted to know if I as a contrarian would speak with her.
No problem. I enjoy being contrary–especially to perky young MBAs with exotic accent-tinged English.
I spoke with her. She was confident about her belief that a share price surge for one company was imminent or “coming round the mountain” as we say in Kentucky.
I gave her my opinion that her stallion was a donkey. Her favored company (which shall remain unidentified) had a poor track record in the money and technology races. Furthermore, no company–including her dark horse–was not going to change its performance record quickly, if at all. She thanked me and disconnected without so much as a “merci” with the cute ascending note native speakers add.
Now it’s two days after this call. I am trapped on an Air Canada flight. The seat back video flickers to life, and I see a documentary about weight loss. The hero (not a sandwich) weighed about 450 pounds. After months of effort, the hero ette was a mere slice of the person’s former self, weighing a lean, mean 200 pounds. Amazing what chemicals can do, I thought. I could see that the blubber around the middle was gone. I killed the annoying LCD and looked out at the frozen wasteland that makes northern Canada the inviting clime it is.
Inside the Tokamak, Part 3: The Green Spheres of Community
April 4, 2008
In the second part of this essay, I explored the notion of context. The short comings of key word search and retrieval are easy to identify once we think in terms of what the user needs to do his job or accomplish a task. But context is larger than a single user, context spills into other areas as well and it gains significance when interacting with messages and community.
We’re ready to tackle one of today’s hottest ideas–community. I loathe the term social software, but English is what it is, and I can’t figure common usage. I will stick with the word community, and you can substitute social software, so this essay seems more in step with the times. You can see where the community function sits in this schematic:
When the Internet was unknown to the auto mechanic, community, not technology, allowed Internet Protocol to work. The early Internet and its precursor the Advanced Research Projects Agency was for a nerdy in crowd. I was lucky. The University of Illinois in Chambana was a player in this game. But for all practical purposes, Internet access when I started college was for an elite group. Flash forward four decades, and the Internet is dependent on people communicating. The surge of interest in point-and-click services like MySpace.com and Facebook.com defines millions of people’s Internet experience.
Search Technology’s Nose under Our Tent?
April 4, 2008
FCW (Federal Computer Week) explains that search technology is on the US government’s radar. You will want to read the full story “Agencies Grapple with Search and Discovery” by Michael Hardy on the FCW Web site. The point in the story that jumped at me is:
The situation will only grow more complicated, [Jason] Baron [director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration] said. To date, most of the attention to electronically stored information has centered on e-mail, text chat logs and similar common tools. But it can also include voice mail, electronic calendars, instant messages, video conferences, posts to wikis and blogs, and virtual worlds such as Second LIfe, he said.
This FCW story complements the information (which is sketchy at best) about certain search vendors’ cooperating with US intelligence agencies. A representative story appeared on SFGate (home of the San Francisco Chronicle) on March 30, 2008.
Stephen Arnold, April 4, 2008
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