Google Faces More Heat in Its Data Kitchen
November 28, 2009
Talk about clumsy. Read “Europe Should Take on Google.” The idea is interesting, but even more mysterious is the lack of pegging the “get Google” to a particular person. Sure, some government big wigs are mentioned, but I think that other cooks are in the kitchen. A political backlash against Google will enliven my blog posts, but I don’t think a government is going to be able to kill Googzilla. The effort may be similar to revivifying a dead carp. Why?
First, Google has lots of users. Take away their favorite search engine, and you have some excitement bubbling in a particular demographic. Who wants a bunch of children hassling their parents? Not me and I bet that few ministers are going to get excited about a company that indexes * public * servers. I may be wrong but hobbling Google may not be politically expedient.
Second, Google is cultivating an ecosystem. The world economy is not exactly scoring hat tricks. Companies dependent on Google may not be thrilled having their golden goose (no pun intended) killed. Who wants potential campaign pals becoming less friendly? Not politicians even in a far off, mysterious place like Europe.
Third, Google is effectively playing chess with folks who think they are playing checkers. A move here by Google does not compute for folks in the checker world. In short, trying to hobble Google might be tough. A good move in checkers can lead to humiliation in chess.
Bottom-line: Google is a different type of company. Killing Google with old fashioned weapons won’t work. Also, the Google is not exactly a start up. The boys from Mountain View have been working on the chess game for more than a decade. The checker game is over. The lights in the tournament hall are closed.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
I will be harpooned unless I disclose to the Community Fisheries Control Agency that I wrote this little article about the risks of playing checkers when one’s opponent is playing chess. Furthermore, I did it for free.
User Search Strings Grow
November 28, 2009
Hitwise ran an interesting article “Search Getting Longer.” The data carry the label AltSearchEngines, and I had a tough time reading the tiny type providing more details about the source of the data. What was interesting to me is that “Users are getting more specific with their search engine requests leading to higher search success rates, illustrating how the more specific a request, the more likely a Search Engine is to accurately fulfill that request.” The percentages for the increases are growing slowly with most queries in the two to three word range. The working figure I have from my data is a query length of 2.5 words. Most users of search systems perceive their ability to search as very good or excellent. The reality, as any information professional with some real competitive intelligence work under his or her belt, is quite different. Most searchers are not so good. The proliferation of search systems with “training wheels” and “safety nets” make clear that quite a few of the engineers working in search and information retrieval are going the point-and-click direction. Mobile search is moving to the “think for me, please” approach.
Stephen Arnold, November 26, 2009
I want to disclose to the Department of Education that I was not paid to point out that instruction in search methods is not exactly top notch.
Blends: The Starbuckization of Microsoft Business Intelligence
November 28, 2009
I avoid Starbuck’s. I speak English, not Starbuckian. When I say “small”, I want the smallest container, not a restatement by an unemployable 20 something in ersatz Klingon. Microsoft is following in Starbuck’s marketing footsteps, or that’s what I concluded after reading “Microsoft Focuses BI Strategy on SQL Server, SharePoint, Excel”. the idea is
The ProClarity technology Microsoft acquired in 2006 as a BI interface for SQL Server, SharePoint and Office has been dropped in favor of the interfaces users know: Excel and SharePoint. The scorecard and dashboard capabilities in PerformancePoint Server will be embedded in the next version of SharePoint. PerformancePoint Server’s financial planning and budgeting capabilities, however, have been cut from the BI product line.
And further down in the article, this passage appears:
With PowerPivot for Excel, users will be able to conduct complex queries by downloading up to 100 million rows of data to their desktop from many data sources, such as IBM, Oracle, Teradata and SQL Server databases, or data feeds from the Web. The information can then be sliced and diced into reports or users can create BI applications on their desktops and share the applications with colleagues by publishing them on SharePoint.
And finally, this comment:
But midmarket companies can get started now with some BI capabilities and no investments, Helm [Microsoft expert / consultant] said. SharePoint 2007 has scorecard and dashboard functionality. Excel has had data analysis services in place since early 2000, and users do have some capabilities to push Excel data out to SharePoint today.
Am I alone in wondering how these names, variants, and combinations are going to improve business intelligence. The language points to three things in my opinion:
- Microsoft is trying to put a little bit of whipped cream in every cup of software
- The features and functions of these products are in flux just as Starbuck’s changes its featured coffee of the day
- The net result is a bunch of ingredients that get blended together with mixed results just like a Starbuck’s super latte triple shot with a dash of nutmeg.
My hunch is that embedded search and information access systems will become the “new” business intelligence hot product in 2010. Who am I watching in this space? MarkLogic looks good. So do Coveo and Exalead. The IBM approach is more like McDonald’s approach to upscale offerings. SAS is struggling in market where math is about as popular as cod liver oil. I’m uncertain about Attivio. I haven’t heard much about their products in the last six months. Lots of excitement in 2010, opines this addled goose.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
I wish to report to the Department of Commerce that I was not paid in cash or coffee beans to write about what happens when a bunch of names are applied to what is becoming a commodity. I will have to study those bloggers who get paid to write advertorials. That’s a New Year’s resolution for sure, and I don’t need a business intelligence mélange to move forward but I will take a dash of nutmeg.
Cloud Math from Merrill Lynch
November 27, 2009
I read “Merrill Lynch: Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $160 Billion…Really?”. Crazy forecasts once were the core competency of 20 year old consultants at down market research firms and crazed MBAs looking for a big win. In my experience, the wacky stuff from the research folks at large, diversified investment firms have some math and some data to ingest to obtain maximum spreadsheet fever. I followed the links in the ReadWriteWeb.com article and reached three conclusions for myself, not you, gentle reader.
First, any thought that the financial meltdown trimmed the sales of the wacky MBAs is out the window. The forecast for cloud computing to hit $160 billion in 13 months is crazier than anything this addled goose has been able to concoct in recent memory. The data available are fuzzy, but I suppose it is possible to did through a college math book, find a method, and stuff in variables until a magic number plops out like an egg from a steroid stuffed squab. Will government oversight address wacky speculation about market size? Government what?
Second, one would think that companies engaged in cloud computing would might offer some anchor points. Last time I checked, none of thee outfits defines what cloud computing is in the hopes of making their products and services part of the next big thing—no matter what it turns out to be. I think the vendors throw gasoline on the fires of greed that burn in the analysts’ empty inner furnaces. They are, in my view, “hollow men” and hollow women.
Third, what about customers? Do customers know whether a particular computer is doing something in the machine itself or somewhere else? The customer who reads the number $160 billion is likely to ask, “So what?” Yes, exactly. So what. As devices connect and run local software, the notion of dividing the elements of computing into distinct components means zero to the user.
To sum up, Merrill Lynch’s $160 billion number for 2011 says to me, “We’re back. Let’s pump those stocks, baby. Churn is good.”
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
I wish to disclose to the Securities & Exchange Commission, a top notch watchdog if there ever was one, that I was not paid to point out that wacky MBAs are making up numbers. Just like in the good old days. Bernie Madoff is probably doing some rough numbers right now.
Ten Trends in Search for 2010
November 27, 2009
Next week I am going to “debate” some European search wizards about the future of search. The venue? Incisive online show. Sure, I know these experts, but I am going to grab my pugnum and two semispathae and chop some logic with these computational killers. Gentlemen, prepare to be skewered.
How will I accomplish this feat? Easy. I am going to make a comment about these trends in search and content processing for 2010, a most auspicious number. In 2010, quite a few vendors are going to lose their precarious grip on survival and fall to their death. Splat.
Other points I will toss like a verutum are:
- XML repositories will deliver content services that * actually * work and provide more information access functions than traditional search engines
- Google will exert greater pressure on Microsoft. This pressure will disrupt a number of search and content processing companies, which will be collateral damage.
- Rich media will become a major content challenge to an ever growing number of organizations. These outfits have not figured out text and databases, so rich media will create more information stress. Say farewell to information technology managers who can’t cope.
- Organizations will become less tolerant of big name companies whose marketing collateral and contracts spell out one thing while their enterprise software delivers another. Can you read IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP in the interstices in these two sentences?
- Government regulation of information is going to become more oppressive. The problem is that government ability to make use of intercepts, email, and other content is going to decline. Government entities are struggling to keep email working and deal with the nasty internecine fights between those who want Google, those who live for Microsoft, and those who advocate for open source. Efficiency goes down; costs go up. The nanny state gets Alzheimer’s.
- Open source is not open. I know. I know. The community. Baloney. Commercial plays for open source work just like any money-centric outfit. That basic function is to get the client, keep competitors out, and lock the San Quentin cell block. Guards are on patrol.
Disagree? Agree? I am ready. Bring your iaculum. I am gunning for anyone named Trent or Whitney, anyone with an MBA, and anyone who thinks their view of 2010 is more informed than mine. Ave caesar! Morituri te salutamus. For the other trends? Attend the debate.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Department of the Navy. I was not paid to make these martial comments. Furthermore, I am a sissy. Put that in my file and stamp me, “Sensitive”.
Atalasoft Identifies a Search Gap in SharePoint
November 27, 2009
Short honk: I know you a playing with the Microsoft Fast search sysetm for SharePoint. But Atalasoft has identified a gap in that Microsoft $1.23 billion technology suite. According to “Atalasoft Releases Vizit SP 2.0 With Visual SharePoint Search,”
The latest upgrade to Atalasoft’s (news, site) Vizit SP adds badly needed search abilities to the integrated document viewer that will enable users search, find and preview SharePoint documents from the Vizit SP 2.0 user interface.
For more information you may want to write or call Atalasoft. I had a tough time finding many details on the firm’s Web site. That just may be my second-rate search skills, of course.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
Important news flash for the National Science Foundation Web quality control and anti-fraud unit: This write up was my contribution to ShaerPoint search information. It’s a public service.
Cicumvallation: Reed Elsevier and Thomson as Vercingetorix
November 27, 2009
Google Scholar Gets Smart in Legal Information
One turkey received a presidential pardon. Other turkeys may not be so lucky on November 26, 2009, when the US celebrates Thanksgiving. I am befuddled about this holiday. There are not too many farmers in Harrod’s Creek. The fields contain the abandoned foundations of McMansions that the present economic meltdown have left like Shelly’s statue of Ozymandius. The “half buried in the sand” becomes half built homes in the horse farm.
As Kentuckians in my hollow give thanks for a day off from job hunting,, I am sitting by the goose pond trying to remember what I read in my copy of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. I know Caesar did not write this memoir, but his PR bunnies did a pretty good job. I awoke this morning thinking about the connection between the battle of Alesia and what is now happening to the publishing giants Reed-Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. The trigger for this mental exercise was Google’s announcement that it had added legal content to Google Scholar.
What’s Vercingetorix got to do with Google, Lexis, and Westlaw? Think military strategy. Starvation, death, surrender, and ritual killing. Just what today’s business giants relish.
Google has added the full text of US federal cases and state cases. The coverage of the federal cases, district and appellate, is from 1924 to the present. US state cases cover 1950 to the present. Additional content will be added; for example, I have one source that suggested that the Commonwealth of Virginia Supreme Court will provide Google with CD ROMs of cases back to 1924. Google, according to this source, is talking with other sources of US legal information and may provide access to additional legal information as well. What are these sources? Possibly
Public.Resource.Org and possibly Justia.org, among others.
The present service includes:
- The full text of the legal document
- Footnotes in the legal document
- Page numbers in the legal document
- Page breaks in the legal document
- Hyperlinks in the legal document to cases
- A tab to show how the case was cited in other documents
- Links to non legal documents that cite a case.
You can read various pundits, mavens, and azure=chip consultants’ comments on this Google action at this link.
You may want to listen to a podcast called TWIL and listened to the November 23, 2009, show on which Google Scholar was discussed for about a half hour. You can find that discussion on iTunes. Just search for TWIL and download the program “Social Lubricants and Frictions.”
On the surface, the Google push into legal information is a modest amount of data in terms of Google’s daily petabyte flows. The service is easy to use, but the engineering required to provide access to the content strikes me as non-trivial. Content transformation is an expensive proposition, and the cost of fiddling with legal information is one of the primary reasons commercial online services have had to charges hefty fees to look at what amounts to taxpayer supported, public information.
The good news is that the information is free, easily accessible even from an iPhone or other mobile device. The Google service does the standard Google animal tricks of linking, displaying content with minimal latency, and updating new content in a a minute or so that content becoming available to Google software Dyson vacuum cleaner.
So what?
This service is similar to others I have written about in my three Google monographs. Be aware. My studies are not Sergey-and-Larry-eat-pizza books. I look at the Google open source technical and business information. I ignore most of what Google’s wizards “say” in public. These folks are “running the game plan” and add little useful information for my line of work. Your mileage may differ. If so, stop reading this blog post and hunt down a cheerful non-fiction Google book by a real live journalist. That’s not my game. I am an addled goose.
Now let me answer the “so what”.
First, the Google legal content is an incremental effort for the Google. This means that Google’s existing infrastructure, staff, and software can handle the content transformation, parsing, indexing, and serving. No additional big-buck investment is needed. In fact, I have heard that the legal content project, like Google News, was accomplished in the free time for play that Google makes available to its full time professionals. A bit of thought should make clear to you that commercial outfits who have to invest to handle legal content in a Google manner have a cost problem right out of the starting blocks.
Second, Google is doing content processing that should be the responsibility of the US government. I know. I know. The US government wants to create information and not compete with commercial outfits. But the outfits manipulating legal information have priced it so that most everyday Trents and Whitneys cannot afford to use these commercial services. Even some law firms cannot afford these services. Pro bono attorneys don’t have enough money to buy yellow pads to help their clients. Even kind hearted attorneys have to eat before they pay a couple a hundred bucks to run a query on the commercial online services from publicly traded companies out to make their shareholders have a great big financial payday. Google is operating like a government when it processes legal information and makes it available without direct charge to the user. The monetization takes place but on a different business model foundation. That also spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for the commercial online services like Lexis and Westlaw.
The Economist and Its Wobbly Approach to Online Revenue
November 27, 2009
I know that I have to separate the editorial from the advertising parts of the magazine world. The notion of the Chinese wall and genteel competition in which rivals say things like “tally ho, chum” and “well done, my word, well done” are long gone. The problem I have is that this online business is changing the children of the people who write about online revenue. The two worlds could not be more different. The “adults” want to hold on to the traditional business models. I can hear most of the Economist writers, after a dollop of malt singing, “Tradition.” Meanwhile the children do what they do to get music, videos, software, information, and news their way. I am waiting for a sitcom that shows traditional journalists at work and then at home with their children. At work, these folks write “real” news. At home, their progeny get what they need from their iPhone or computer happily oblivious that their parents’ world is about to implode.
I see this tension in “Web-Wide War.” The write up mentions a larger-than-life Web savant and then with all-knowing confidence concludes that Microsoft’s play to pay content to producers to keep content off Google won’t work. Right conclusion; arrived at the wrong way.
The realties are:
- Demographics are on Google’s side. Traditional news delivered on a little used service is not where the demographic’s collective head is at
- Google has traffic. Bing.com does not have traffic. Traditional content will not close the gap between Microsoft and Google. What it will do is encourage Google to release some of its informational potential energy. No additional cost for the GOOG and lots of excitement for the folks in the canyon below the cliffs.
- The cost to the media companies is going to be too much. Microsoft might pay through the nose for a year, but what happens when “Google’s thousand cuts” strategy bleeds revenues from Microsoft’s two big money product lines? What happens when the Google cash stops rolling in? Money talks.
To sum up, I think this is classic old school analysis. Enjoyable. I wonder what big rocks will push on the trudging publishers on the dirt road below. Wait. I hear the whistling now.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2009
Disclosure: I thought someone would pay me to write this article, but I was wrong. I cannot be correct. I used to work for traditional publishers. Oh, wait. I was involved in electronic products. Successful electronic products. I avoid dirt paths in valleys where Googlers play Foosball until it’s time to drop a rock on those below.
SAP and Communication
November 26, 2009
SAP and its search system TREX are not exactly the most popular topics among search engine pundits. SAP doesn’t talk to me about TREX, and, if Silicon.com’s “Users Tell SAP: We Need to Talk More” is correct, users are in the same goose pond. SAP, like companies, seems to have some message to its UK and Ireland user groups. According to the article:
SAP needs to better communicate with customers about the products in its portfolio as well as the technology it’s developing.
For me, this comment was significant:
SAP UK and Ireland User Group chairman Alan Bowling agreed that the technology vendor could do more to communicate its product roadmap to customers along with the knowledge the company has acquired around staff training over the years. Tim Noble, SAP’s UK managing director, also told the conference: “My goal is to further strengthen our relationship with the user group.”
Ah, to be communication. I wonder why the “as is” communication is an issue. Not talking to a goose is one thing. Not talking to users is quite another. What’s to hide? What’s the concern? What’s the management road block?
Stephen Arnold, November 26, 2009
I wish to disclose to the Council on Developmental Disabilities that I was not paid to point out that SAP has a communication challenge. I wonder if that’s a developmental disability?
Google Delivers a Teeny Weeny E-Book Surprise
November 26, 2009
Gobble, gobble. That’s the sound of Google’s practicing another money eating exercise. Google has a yen for Japan I think. Navigate to “Google Japan to Start Paid E-Book Service: Report”. Keep in mind that this MarketWatch story might be a premature flag. I did find it interesting, however. For me, the telling comment was:
Upon the launch of its service, Google Japan aims to stock an online library of up to 10,000 books. It is already in talks with smaller publishers to sell their works on Google Edition, the report said.
This push will take place in the US, Britain, and now Japan.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2009
Disclosure: Council of Foreign Relations, oyez, I was not paid to point out that the Google likes sushi. I will not include in the story this question, “When will Google go to an author and license the author’s output directly?”
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