Microsoft Fast for Portals
August 17, 2009
Author’s Note: The images in this Web log post are the property of Microsoft Corp. I am capturing my opinion based on a client’s request to provide feedback about “going with Fast for SharePoint” versus a third party solution from a Microsoft Certified Partner. If you want happy thoughts about Microsoft, Fast ESP, and search in SharePoint environments, look elsewhere. If you want my opinions, read on. Your mileage may vary. If you have questions about how the addled goose approaches these write ups, check out the editorial policy here.
Introduction
Portals are back. The idea is that a browser provides a “door” to information and applications is hot again. I think. You can view a video called “FAST: Building Search Driven Portals with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Silverlight” to get the full story. I went back through my SharePoint search links. I focused on a presentation given in 2008 by Two Microsoft Fast engineers–Jan Helge Sageflåt and Stein Danielsen.
After watching the presentation for a second time, I formed several impressions of what seems to be the general thrust of the Microsoft Fast ESP search system. I have heard reports that Microsoft is doing a full court press to get Microsoft-centric organizations to use Fast ESP as the industrial strength search system.
Let me make several observations about the presentation by the Microsoft Fast engineers and then conclude with a suggestion that caution and prudence may be fine dinner companions before one feasts on Fast ESP. Portals are not a substitute for making it easy for employees to locate the item of information needed to answer a run-of-the-mill business information need.
Observations about the 2008 Demo
First, the presentation focuses on building interfaces and making connections to content in SharePoint. Most organizations want to connect to the content scattered on servers, file systems, and enterprise application software data stores. That is job one or it was until the financial meltdown. Now organizations want to acquire, merge, search, and tap into social content. Much of that information has a short shelf life. The 2008 presentation did not provide me with evidence that the Microsoft Fast ESP system could:
- Acquire large flows of non-SharePoint content
- Process that information without significant latency
- Identify the plumbing needed to handle flows of real time content from RSS feeds and the new / updated content from a SharePoint system.
Google Pushes over the Book Shelves
August 17, 2009
If there is one thing I admire about Google, it is the company’s craftiness. Craftiness is not a negative. I refer to the art of execution, a skill in doing what is needed to advance the company’s interests and achieving its goals with little effort. A good example is “Bringing the Power of Creative Commons to Google Books.” If I were a traditional publisher, the Google announcement will not make much sense. “Real” authors have agents and understand the New York publishing game. However, the individuals who want to create material and get it distributed by the Google now have a way to achieve this goal. I explain some of the tools Google has at its disposal in my Google: The Digital Gutenberg. You can find a link in the ad at the top of this Web log’s splash page. I heard about this program and I comment about Google’s platform as a new type of text and rich media “River Rouge”. What will interest me is watching to see which publishers understand that the math club has put a cow on top of the building where the writing and journalism faculties have their offices. How will publishers top creative commons content available via the Google with few financial burdens placed on authors, students, or Internet users with an interest in longer form content? The third quarter is now beginning. Google kicks off. Publishers receive.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
Microsoft Gets an F from Professor Google for Scale Paper
August 16, 2009
I wrote a short post here about Microsoft’s suggestion that Google has gone off track with its engineering for petascale computing. Since I have two or three readers, no one really paid much attention to my observations. I was surprised to learn from Tom Krazit in his article “Google’s Varian” Search Scale Is Bogus” that Google disagrees with Microsoft. Dr. Varian is a Google wizard, and he teaches at Berkeley. His comments, as I understand them from Mr. Krazit’s article, amount to Microsoft’s getting an F. Yikes. Academic probation and probably a meeting with the dean.
For me the most interesting comment in the article was a comment by Dr. Varian:
So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm. Maybe I’m pushing this metaphor farther than it should go, but I also think we have a better kitchen. We’ve put a lot of effort into building a really powerful infrastructure at Google, the development environment at Google is very good.
Microsoft now has to repeat a class and prove that it can generate revenue from its Web search business. Oh, Microsoft also has to repay prior investment plus interest to make the numbers satisfy this addled goose’s penchant for counting pennies.
Stephen Arnold, August 15, 2009
Content Wins in the Traffic Game
August 16, 2009
One of my clients was excited to learn that his original content was pulling more hits than content pulled from RSS sources. I agreed. Original content, about a specific topic, frequently updated, and correctly tagged acts like a magnet. This “secret” was revealed by Hitwise in a report by Robin Goad’s write up “Hitwise Intelligence.” This discovery and chart will get quite a bit of attention in the traditoinal publishing sector. My take, however, is that the horse is out of the barn and it has been converted to a bed and breakfast. Web sites with original content will be the winners. Traditoinal publishers have not solved the business model challenges that makes Web publishing such a difficult undertaking and one that returns less cash than some organizations expect.
Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2009
Microsoft Traffic
August 16, 2009
Short honk: I spoke with a person about Microsoft’s pricing tactics for the Fast ESP search system. I promised to do some thinking about how Microsoft will get Fast ESP into its accounts. I think there are important sign posts. First, Microsoft offers those who use Bing.com double cash back. Search Engine Land explains why paying people to use a search system is working. The article includes a chart. Younger eyes than mine may find it helpful. Second, Microsoft has allegedly priced the Zune HD lower than Apple’s iTouch. Putting these two data points in my addled goose brain, I anticipate that Microsoft will try to “sell” Microsoft Fast ESP. When the customer balks, Microsoft will bundle Fast ESP with other Microsoft products as long as the customer agrees to pay for those CALs. In short, open source search may have a challenger—free Microsoft Fast ESP. Now about those set up, tuning, and upgrading fees? My addled goose brain sees those costing real money. The question becomes, “Will Microsoft be able to generate enough cash to satisfy Wall Street and subsidize products that are bleeding red ink?”
Stephen Arnold, August 15, 2009
InQuira Steps Up Its Marketing
August 16, 2009
InQuira landed a deal with Blue Coat. Blue Coat is an application delivery network company. InQuira natural language search system will support the Blue Coat Application Delivery Network. The article “Blue Coat Deploys InQuira’s Knowledge Solution” reported:
“Web self service is rapidly becoming the new channel of focus for customer support, especially given the current economic climate. We are seeing a lot of companies struggling with disparate platform technologies to try and deliver the right content, while agents still have cheat sheets pinned to their monitors and cubicles,” said Mike Murphy, CEO of InQuira.
A happy quack to InQuira.
Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2009
AP Craves Wikipedia Allure
August 15, 2009
For some reason the Nieman Lab write ups keep plopping into my RSS reader. Today’s story is “How The Associated Press Will Try to Rival Wikipedia in Search Results”. I have a tough time figuring out if the writer (Zachary M. Seward) is for the AP’s plans or against them. What I found most interesting was this statement:
Google juice goes in, swishes around, doesn’t come out.”
I don’t know what this means, but Mr. Seward has worked long and hard on his articles. The addled goose will sit on the sidelines and wait to see what happens to the AP’s revenues. With traffic, the AP gets revenue if it plays its AdSense cards correctly. Without traffic, the AP will have to find another way to generate the type of money that it enjoyed during the salad days of the newspaper, radio, and TV businesses. Wikipedia? Honk.
Stephen Arnold, August 15, 2009
Index Engines and Performance Data
August 15, 2009
Index Engines, http://www.indexengines.com/, is touting “Unmatched Speed. Unprecedented Scale.” for its 3.0 platform. The platform function discovers full content and metadata of LAN data, classifies it, indexes it (up to a billion files and e-mail!), and sets up a streamlined, “blazing fast” search: one terabyte per hour using a single indexing node. That gets an impressed quack. There’s a spiffy white paper at http://www.indexengines.com/LP_IE_speed.htm that gives configuration details and an explanation of how they create that speed. There’s a pdf brochure on the LAN engine at http://www.indexengines.com/download/LAN_Engine_DS.pdf. Here’s our question: Is the evidence reliable, repeatable, and accurate? Speed certainly is one of the top watchwords in search today, but so are consistency and relevance. The proof is in the tasty giblets, not the pretty feathers.
Jessica Bratcher, August 18, 2009
Tweets Are Mostly Pointless Babble
August 15, 2009
I enjoy Mashable. The articles come at topics in a way that is youthful, enthusiastic even. I noted Jennifer Van Grove’s “40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble.” I was surprised that * only * 40 percent of the message traffic was pointless. However, I think Ms. Van Grove reveals that she has not spent much time in monitoring traffic for intelligence and law enforcement entities. With that experience in her bag of tricks, she might reach a different conclusion about the “noise” in the Twitterstream. “Pointless” to one person might be evidence to another. Youth has its advantages but understanding the value of filtering traffic may not be apparent to an avid sender of Tweets.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
Visualization and Confusion
August 15, 2009
Visualization of search results or other data is a must-have for presentations in the Department of Defense. What’s a good presentation? One that has killer visualizations of complex data. The problem is that sizzle in one colonel’s graphics triggers a graphics escalation. This is a briefing room version of Mixed Martial Arts. The problem, based on my limited experience in this type of content, is that most of the graphics don’t make much sense. In fact, when I see a graphic I usually have zero idea about where the data originated, the mathematical methods used to generate the visual, or what Photoshop wizardry may have been employed to make that data point explode in my perceptual field. Your mileage may differ, but I find that visualization is useful in small doses.
To prove that what I prefer is out of date and that my views are road kill on the information superhighway, you will want to explore “15 Stunning Examples of Data Visualization”. Stunning is an appropriate word. After looking at these examples, I am not sure what is being communicated in some of these graphics. Example: Big fluctuations.
If you want to add zing to your briefings, you will definitely get some ideas from this article. If I am in the audience, expect questions from the addled goose. Know your data thoroughly because I am not sure some of these examples communicate on the addled goose wave length.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
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