Google Travel
July 20, 2009
Short honk: Navigate to Google.com. Enter the query “LGA SFO” and you get a structured search box. Click and you get air ticket prices. Google has a number of vertical sectors in its tractor beam. Google’s wants to be a player in online travel information as well. The story in Hotel Marketing provides the basics and offers some links. I provide a run down of the vertical sectors my research suggests. Disruption ahead for those in other sectors. Google is picking up its pace in my opinion. How will travel publishers and information providers respond? Ignore, surf, fight, or dither?
Stephen Arnold, July 20, 2009
Brainware and Exalead: Name Magnetism
July 20, 2009
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet … not in the world of search companies!
Let me give you two examples of search company naming and point out the importance of eliminating confusion for those seeking information about a search and content processing system.
First, run a query on Google Video for Exalead. The system returned 17 pages of videos. I scanned the 170 links and did not spot a false drop. I like the name Exalead. The “exa” reminds me of exabytes of data. With the volume of email I get as a result of my addled goose musings in this Web log. One thousand petabytes is an exabyte, so Exalead’s name connotes software that can handle large volumes of data. The “lead” evokes leadership. I think the founder of Exalead contributed to the company’s name. Whoever came up with “Exalead” deserves a happy quack. Herewith: Quack.
Exalead’s branding, therefore, is solid and strong in my opinion. Tossing the name “Exalead” into a metasearch engine like Navgle.com, I got a mash up of content from various sources, and again I did not spot a false hit. In fact, it is easy to isolate information about the Exalead search system. For Exalead, Twitter had spot on results. No false hits.
Second, run a query on Google Video for Brainware. Looking through the smaller hit list (roughly one third the number of hits for Exalead videos), I noticed several items of interest. (Please, run these queries yourself and draw your own conclusions.)
I noticed straightaway that another organization uses the name “brainware” as a conference name; that is, Montreal Brainware. Interesting. The conference was given in 2001 and did not seem to get traction. Some confusion, but it is difficult to confuse a conference with a software company. As I scanned the results list, I saw a link to a computer game, which seemed to be five months old but a dead link, a link to a wiffle ball team video, a link to a health related video, and more game references. I ran the “brainware” query on Navgle.com and left the hit list review with these points in mind:
- Navgle returned a number of false drops for the query “brainware”, including a link to a childhood education program
- One of the top Web results was a design company operating under the name “Brainware” at a .net domain which means the search vendor Brainware did not snag other domains to help prevent such brand claim jumping
- There were zero tweets about the search vendor.
There were zero tweets about the search vendor. (Twitter is reviled by many, but it mirrors certain market conditions.)
Why is naming a search and content processing company important? In my opinion there are several reasons:
First, if a searcher is confused about “which Brainware”, it may be a marketing negative. Second, by not buying other domains, the search vendor loses control of the selected name. I was surprised at how many “brainwares” were in the wild. Did the search vendor consider that potential customers, faced with wiffle ball, might give up look elsewhere for scanning and indexing technology? In my opinion, an unambiguous brand is important for search engine indexing robots, but obviously some people do not agree with my view.
My take: Exalead has a name that makes it quite easy for a potentially interested customer to find information about the firm’s search and content processing technology. No brand claim jumping. Even the single word query returns relevant results. Zero confusion in my goose pond. In contrast, Brainware has a name that creates opportunities for confusion. Naming is a big deal for marketing, trademark protection, and getting a high ranking in Bing.com or Google.com result lists.
Google’s and Microsoft’s naming conventions are problematic in my view, but these outfits can cope due to their size and marketing horsepower. Smaller search vendors need to get the basics lined up like toy soldiers. Putting hurdles in front of a prospect does not seem like a good business tactic. In today’s business environment, getting the name associated aspects of marketing nailed down is important because it can affect the perceived value of a company and its
products. Just my opinion. Honk!
Stephen Arnold, July 20, 2009
Bing and Censorship
July 20, 2009
Short honk: A reader alerted me to the Bing.com filter that chops out certain content and creates a collection of a mini vertical search engine for segmented content. The filter is now applied to X rated content. You can read about the filter in Network World’s story “Bing Gets Porn domain to Filter Out Explicit Images and Videos”. There are a number of complicated issues in play. The present solution creates an interesting revenue generating opportunity for Bing.com. Will Microsoft exploit it? I wonder how different this type of filtering from the Amazon filtering of certain content?
Stephen Arnold, July 20, 2009
Google and Government
July 19, 2009
Short honk: The budget crunch is giving Los Angeles a reason to look for a better way to control information technology costs. Washington, DC has embraced Google. If the information in “Concerns Raised as LA Looks to Google Web Services” is accurate, the Google may be poised to make life interesting for existing software and services vendors in Los Angeles. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
If approved, Los Angeles would be the second major city after Washington, D.C., to use Google’s internet-based services, known as Google Apps. The company has been promoting the package to other government agencies, too, as a way to cut costs and ensure access to Google-developed technical innovations. Google said in a statement that more than 1.75 million businesses use the technology. An unknown number of them pay the Mountain View-based company $50 per user per year for a premium version designed for businesses, government agencies and other robust needs.
The addled goose sees this as a very big deal with significant implications.
Stephen Arnold, July 20, 2009
Wall Street Journal Suggests Internet Is Dead
July 19, 2009
The addled goose is not certain if the story “The Internet Is Dead (As An Investment)” will be online without a charge when you click the link. Newspapers fascinate me. Some of their information is free; some transient; and some available for hard cash.
What I find useful to follow are stories that make it clear that certain business sectors are “dead”. In Heathrow on Friday, June 17, 2009, I received a free Daily Telegraph when I bought a nut and granola bar. I did not want a newspaper because my Boingo connection was alive. Even though the Daily Telegraph was a svelte bundle of paper, the news was old. Free “yesterday” was not compelling. The argument in James Altucher’s wealth column is that utilities like electricity and the Internet are linked in this way:
Electricity greatly improved our quality of life. But I’m not going to get excited about buying a basket of utility companies. Same for the Internet. Can’t live without it, but can’t live with it (in my portfolio).
I recall reading a business monograph The Mind Of The Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business by Kenichi Ohmae. Now more than a decade old, I recall the case analysis of the bulk chemical business. I wonder if that discussion of an uninteresting, commodity business holds some truths for Mr. Altucher and newspapers thinking along the same lines as the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Telegraph may benefit as well. There were many discarded Telegraphs in the lounge at Heathrow. Online economics requires a recalibration of some business yardsticks. Is Internet investment dead like the company who hit the jackpot with bulk chemicals? Glittering generalities are useful but may reveal more about the thinking of a newspaper’s editorial team beliefs, not the opportunities utilities and commodities represent.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
A9.com Awakens
July 19, 2009
My newsreader gonged and I read “Image Recognition Startup SnapTell Acquired by Amazon Subsidiary A9.com” in TechCrunch. I remember when A9 was under the watchful eye of Udi Manber. Mr. Manber, search wizard blew out of Burlingame and settled in Google’s Mountain View cube farm. A9.com dropped off my radar as Google added features and A9.com became less interesting to me. How tough would it be to retrieve Kindle books with tags such as “in print”, not the jumbled mess I get when looking for eBooks. Sigh.
Well, TechCrunch reported:
SnapTell’s visual product search technology lets users take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game, and the technology will automatically identify the product and find ratings and pricing information online from Google, Amazon, eBay and more. The company has a database of about 5 million+ products. SnapTell launched popular apps
for both the iPhone and Android. SnapTell’s free iPhone app, in particular, was a pretty nifty tool, letting users not only get instant reviews of a product, but also providing local and online price comparisons through TheFind,
Perhaps A9.com will enhance other areas of its technology as well.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
Google Books: More than Scanning
July 19, 2009
I think Cnet is owned by a larger media entity. Large media entities have their own DNA. When I see a story about Google Books, I step back and remind myself that the selection of a story is an objective matter, usually left to the writer and maybe the person who does a final review.
I found “Google’s Digital Book Future Hangs in the Balance” quite interesting. The writer, Steve Shankland, said:
Nobody in recent years has accused Google of lacking ambition, but its Google Book Search project is certainly among the company’s top projects when it comes to chutzpah. That’s not just because of the technical and financial hurdles of scanning, indexing, and displaying online millions of books, it’s also because of the tangled intellectual property and legal concerns involved in the controversial project.
I agree. The project is ambitious and interesting. Mr. Shankland continued:
What’s not to like for authors? Google Book Search gives them a way to sell books that are out of print, which today for them make money only for used booksellers. And through other provisions, students and other researchers would get access to vast online libraries at institutions that pay for subscriptions, and the public would get a Google-funded computer with free access to the same in every U.S. library.
He concluded:
Indeed, who else but Google has the capability to transport centuries of accumulated text into the digital future? Microsoft dropped its book-scanning project, and Amazon appears more interested in commercial transactions. The Internet Archive has hundreds of thousands of books available, but it doesn’t operate on Google’s scale, and the nonprofit group hasn’t pushed hard enough to try to break the copyright logjam the way Google has. Then, too, think of the consequences of Google controlling the content of the world’s books. Do you want the act of browsing the library to leave fingerprints in a server log, to become a transaction whose details can be revealed through a subpoena? Google has the best search engine, the most complete online maps, the most popular video site, and it wants to house your e-mail, spreadsheets, blogs, photos, and health data. Do you want Google to keep the keys to the world’s library as well?
Several observations about this long article which included a technical diagram of one of Google’s scanning innovations:
- After reading the article, I wonder if the same issues will surface when Google moves into other media types, or is a library type of publication a special case?
- If concerns are sufficiently high, will a fund raising initiative or a government action make it possible to put another organization in the role of Google; for example, the Library of Congress? The LoC may be one candidate, but other countries’ might have candidates as well that will move beyond highly specialized materials.
- With the Book project now about six years old, will Google find supporters in the library and research community? If the project is killed or delayed, will an oligopoly emerge to do the work and sell the digitized access? Dialog Information Services and Lexis Nexis were in the pole position in the 1980s and might want to get that spot back again. Of course, the financial issues are different now than they were in the 1980s.
- Will funding authorities increase the flow of cash to libraries so consortia could tackle the job and make the information in hard copy available to a wider constituency? Libraries are changing and some might be ideal candidates to tackle this type of scanning project.
I used to work for the “old” University Microfilms. I left the company before the implosion in the late 1980s but I learned that scanning is expensive, complex, and fraught with technical challenges. UMI made its Dissertation business work because student bought copies of their work for either work or personal use. The sale of Dissertation Abstracts indexes were long a staple of the research library community, but to make money with the business required a very sharp pencil.
Google finds itself in an interesting spot, and I was hoping that this article would have addressed the issue of Google’s doing what I thought the Library of Congress might have undertaken. Alternatively, I was looking for a mini case about how the scanning efforts of commercial outfits like UMI might shed light on the economics of the scanning business.
Quite a lot of information exists about scanning. Hopefully Cnet or one of the other serious Web information services will dig into the subject. As long as Google Books remains an issue for lawyers, I don’t think a full picture of the options, issues, and challenges will become available.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
SAP and Performance
July 19, 2009
SAP is a company that provides me with a living lab test of complex software, often running on Microsoft servers. Microsoft tried to buy this puppy years ago, and I wonder if the SAP stakeholders wish they had taken that deal. Shades of Jerry Yang style thinking.
If you are struggling with SAP performance issues, you are not alone. Read “SAP Gremlins Sap Performance” to learn about your soul mates. The write up in IT News runs down some results from an azure chip consulting company, so take the data with a grain or two of salt. Among the findings (offered without a sample size or margin of error data) included:
- 90 percent report monthly slow downs
- Performance issues dog both business intelligence and enterprise resource planning customers
- 62 percent report not being thrilled with SAP’s approach to performance issues.
To be fair, performance issues are, in my experience, not SAP’s exclusive domain. Other German software, engineered within an inch of its life, runs slowly as well. Throwing hardware at the applications often won’t work. Too many moving parts, too many millisecond sucking delays while complex processes lumber along. Anyone able to name other performance piggies?
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2009
Oracle Search Branding
July 19, 2009
Poking around on the Oracle Web site, I came across what may be the reason Oracle SES 10g dropped off my radar. The new SES10g is Ultra Search. You can read about the search system which is included with the Oracle database. The page I located is here. The Ultra Search system is described in part this way:
Ultra Search is based on Oracle10g Text technology and is an out-of-the box solution that requires no SQL coding. Ultra Search is included with the Oracle database, Application Server and Collaboration Suite and is available free of charge for license holders of these products. It uses a crawler to index documents; the documents stay in their own repositories, and the crawled information is used to build an index that stays within your firewall in an Oracle10g database.
The “white paper” dates from 2002. My hunch is that Oracle just bagged the SES10g “security will sell” angle and went back to the basic search system. Giving away search may be the path that Microsoft Fast will be following as well. The era of search as a commodity seems to be taking hold at Oracle. If anyone has any additional information, please, use the comments section to pass the information along.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
Digital Revision and Online
July 18, 2009
Amazon has whipped up a cloud computing thunderstorm. You can tackle this story by entering the word “Kindle” in almost any news search system. One interesting post is MG Giegler’s article for TechCrunch, “Amazon, Why Don’t You Come in Our Houses and Burn Our Books Too?” For me, the key passage was:
This remote deletion issue is an increasingly interesting one. Last year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that the company has a remote “kill switch” to remove apps from your device if it thinks that is necessary. To the best of my knowledge, they have yet to use such functionality, and would only do so if there was a malicious app out there that was actually causing harm to iPhones. They have not even used it to kill some poor taste apps that were quickly removed from the App Store, like Baby Shaker.
The addled goose wants to remain above the fray. The core issues from his perspective are different. For instance, as online services roll up via buy outs and the failure of weaker competitive services, a “natural monopoly” emerges. One can see this in the 1980s in the growth of Dialog Information Services and LexisNexis as the big dogs in online search. Over time, options emerged and now there are a handful of “go to” services. As these big dogs respond to challenges and issues, the Amazon deletion event becomes more visible. In my opinion what’s at work is an organization that makes a situational decision and then discovers that its “natural monopoly position” creates unanticipated problems. The ability of some online services to make informed decisions increases after an event such as deleting information. The deletion may be nothing more than a pointer to an object. Metadata and its persistence are more important in some cases than the digital content itself.
The second issue is the increasing awareness users and customers have about utility type services. The customer sees the utility as benign, maybe making decisions in favor of the individual user. The Kindle deletion scenario makes clear that paying customers are not the concern of the organization. I know that the ripples from the deletion of content will not subside quickly. A single firm’s decision becomes a policy issue that is broader than the company’s business decision.
Now shift gears from digital objects that one can find on such sites as Project Gutenberg in Australia to other content. When online services consolidate, the likelihood that digital revisionism will become more widespread seems a likely outcome to me. Policy decisions in commercial entities pivot on money. The policy, therefore, does not consider an individual user.
I know that most government agencies don’t worry about me, paddling around my duck pond. The impact of a decision taken by an online organization seems to send shock waves that may not be on the radar of corporate executives.
The issue, in my opinion, is the blurring of a commercial entity’s decision made for its benefit with broader public policy issues. What happens when an online service becomes a virtual monopoly. Who will regulate the entity? Legal eagles will flock to this issue, but digital revisionism is not new. Digital revisionism now gains importance as more people rely on a commercial entity to deliver a utility service.
Stephen Arnold, July 18. 2009
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