Picking on Google
January 7, 2010
The Atlantic Monthly is jumping into the digital world. What better way to rack up clicks than to tackle a subject that will work like an the best a search engine optimization expert can craft. Navigate to “Is Google Too Big?” The write up explains that some folks think Google is, well, to big. On the other hand, some folks think that Google is just fine. After 153 years of operation, the Atlantic Monthly—er, Atlantic Wire—let me know that Google is either too big or not too big. I whipped out one of my candy colored 4X6 note cards and jotted down: “Google, either too big or just right.”
When I was a college debater, I treasured factoids that I could use to crush my opponents argument. One never knows when a “too big, just right” factoid will come in handy.
For my part, the Google has been chugging along for 11, 12 years. Google has not changed all that much in the last five years. What’s changed is that folks are now understanding the importance of infrastructure, the third party payer model, the importance of integrated services, and usage tracking.
Light bulbs have been operating on a time delay. Too bad the room illuminated has been lived in for a long time by the Math Club members. Room occupied. Look elsewhere. But picking on Google is au courant.
Here’s a run down of the “challenges” Google faces in 2011:
- Dealing with the privacy hassles related to Street View data acquisition. Various US states and a number of countries continue to bite Google’s ankles about alleged improper data matters.
- Figuring out what to do about Facebook, which continues to generate investment, traffic, and buzz. The Facebook Goldman Sachs approach seems to be astrategic variant of the method than used by Google for its IPO.
- Addressing the issues of Google TV. Rumors aside, the Internet on the TV sector is a mixed bag. The content challenge may be a bigger issue than the usability of the Logitech and Sony gizmos.
- Putting a damper on the Android fragmentation subject. Open source is free and it forks. Telecommunication companies like free and don’t like software outside their span of control. Android, therefore, is a technical Pandora’s Box. Google may have to do some fancy dancing to keep pace with the telcos approach to the Android software.
- Addressing the multi front war challenge. It may be a distorted view, but here in Harrod’s Creek it sure looks as if Google is fighting a lot of big companies. Apple and Oracle may be particularly problematic. It is not a matter of right or wrong; it is ego time.
- Responding to cloud computing threats. I am now of the mind that Microsoft is a better marketer of cloud services to the US government. Amazing as it seems to me, Amazon is out Googling Google in the cloud space as well. We like Google’s engineering, but time may be slipping away in some markets.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2011
Freebie, definitely a freebie
“
Autonomy Targets Marketers
January 7, 2010
A number of pundits, poobahs, and mavens are beavering away with their intellectual confections that explain enterprise search in 2010. The buzz from those needing billable work is that enterprise search is gone goose (pun intended) and that niche solutions are the BIG NEWS for 2010.
I thought I wrote an article for Search Magazine two or three years ago that made this point. But the Don and Donna Quixotes of the consulting world are chasing old chimera. I nailed the real thing for Barbara Quint, one of my most beloved editors. With Gartner buying Burton Group, the azure chip crowd is making clear that the down market push of Booz, Allen (now a for fee portal vendor) and the up market push of the Gerson Lehrmans of the world is making their sales Panini toasty and squishy.
Against this background, I noted this Reuters’ news item: “Autonomy Interwoven Enables Marketers to Deliver the Most Relevant End-to-End Search Experience.” I have difficulty figuring out which articles branded as Reuters-created is from the “real” Reuters and which comes from outfits that are in the bulk content business (sorry I can’t mention names even though you demand this of me) and which comes from public relations firms with caviar budgets. You will have to crack this conundrum yourself.
The write up points out that Autonomy makes it possible for those engaged in marketing to provide their users with “relevant end-to-end search experience.” I am not clever enough to unwrap this semantic package. For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
A recent report published by Gartner entitled Leading Websites Will Use Search, Advanced Analytics to Target Content states: “Search technology provides a mechanism for users to indicate their desires through implicit values, such as their roles and other attributes, and explicit values such as query keywords. Website managers, information architects, search managers and Web presence managers can adopt search technologies to improve site value and user impact.” The research note goes on to say, “Choose Web content management (WCM) vendors that have robust search technologies or that have gained them through partnerships, acquisitions or the customization of open-source technology.”
The explanation of “most relevant end-to-end search experience” hooks in part to an azure chip consultant report (maybe a Gartner Group product?) that is equally puzzling to me. Here’s where I ran into what my fifth grade teacher, Miss Chessman, would have called a “lack of comprehension.”
- What the heck is relevant?
- What is end-to-end?
- What is search?
- What is experience?
- What is a Web presence manager?
- What is a robust search technology?
I try to be upfront about my being an old, addled goose. I understand that Autonomy has acquired a number of interesting technologies. I understand that azure chip consulting firms have to produce compelling intellectual knowledge value to pay their bills.
What I don’t understand is what the message is from Reuters (this “news” story looks like a PR release), from Autonomy (I thought the company sold the Intelligent Data Operating Layer, not experience), and from Gartner (what’s with the job titles and references to open source?).
I will be 66 in a few months, and I don’t think anyone in the assisted living facility will be able to help me figure out the info payload of this Reuters’-stamped write up. What happened to the journalism school’s pyramid structure? What happened to who, what, why, when, where, and how? Obviously I am too far down the brain trail to keep pace with modern communication.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 8, 2010
Oyez, oyez, I have to report to the Library of Congress, check out a dictionary, and admit to the guard on duty that I was not paid to explain I haven’t a clue about the meaning of this write up. I do understand the notion of rolling up other companies in order to get new revenue and customers, but this relevance and experience stuff baffles me. I am the goose who has been pointing out that “search sucks” for free too.
Shining Light on IT Failures
January 7, 2010
Tim Bray’s “Doing It Wrong” provides some common sense, useful perspective on failures in traditional information technology in organizations, and a couple of killer quotes. Bray was among the first to tackle SGML. He labored at Sun Microsystems, cranked out an interesting content processing and visualization system, and contributed to various Web standard efforts. His “doing it wrong” essay makes one point: traditional IT methods produce some spectacular and all-too-common flops. He writes:
Obviously, the technology matters. This isn’t the place for details, but apparently the winning mix includes dynamic languages and Web frameworks and TDD and REST and Open Source and NoSQL at varying levels of relative importance. More important is the culture: iterative development, continuous refactoring, ubiquitous unit testing, starting small, gathering user experience before it seems reasonable. All of which, to be fair, I suppose had its roots in last decade’s Extreme and Agile movements. I don’t hear a lot of talk these days from anyone claiming to “do Extreme” or “be Agile”. But then, in Web-land for damn sure I never hear any talk about large fixed-in-advance specifications, or doing the UML first, or development cycles longer than a single-digit number of weeks.
There’s no one size fits all, just use the newer methods whether you snap together components in the cloud or build an on premises system. In short, emulate the Facebook / Google approach and when possible. Minimize the approaches recommended by the IBM type experts. The cloud and iterative approaches make sense.
One of his most interesting comments in my opinion is:
So if your enterprise wants the sort of outcomes we’re seeing on the Web (and a lot more should), you’re going to have to adopt some of the cultures and technologies that got them built.
Spot on. The problem is that the changes technologists like Tim Bray identify do not compute in certain organizations where business methods deny that a fundamental change is taking place. When Eric Schmidt suggests that publishing companies use technology, the publishing companies here this as “use new printing methods”. What Messrs. Bray and Schmidt are saying is closer to “shift technical domains.” That is going to be almost impossible for many organizations because the time required to figure out how to merge technical domains is in a race with available cash.
Lots of business dislocation awaits organizations unable to understand what folks like Messrs. Bray, Schmidt, and W. Brian Arthur are trying to communicate. That sucking sound I hear so often is companies going out of business.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 7, 2010
Oyez, oyez, this is a freebie. Ah, so many of my blogs posts are. I must report this miserable situation to the Labor Department (DOL).
Quince from Infragistics
January 7, 2010
The UX “thing” is gaining momentum. “UX” means user experience. The idea is that a naked search box won’t do the job for some people looking for information. A reader sent me a link to the Quince EX Patterns Explorer Web page. I ran some queries and did some clicking. One of the screens that the system generated was a display of user interface controls. Here’s a portion of that display:
On the left side are tabs that provide one click access to recently viewed patterns. On the right side of the display are filters; that is, keywords that narrow the result set. In the center, are the hits.
Infragistics makes controls for Microsoft implementations. With a bit of poking around I located a Quince Web log and a quite useful write up about “Faceted Navigation”. I think that Infragistics provides the interface or UX components to a couple of the companies profiled in the write up, but I can’t be certain.
If you want a crib sheet for facets, check out this document. Infragistics’ main Web page is here, but the number of options and the UX controls can be a bit baffling to an addled goose like me.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 5, 2010
A freebie, darn it. I will report this situation to the Delaware River Basin Commission.
Hadoop, Throwing Hardware, and Engineering for Results
January 7, 2010
We hear, “Let’s throw hardware at this problem.” Do you? Several years ago we did a SQL Server performance analysis for a major organization. The problem was not SQL Server; the problem was the suite of software that used SQL Server. We gently recommended a project to recode a couple of troublesome modules. You know what the client did? Yep, threw hardware at the problem. The system still ran like a slug, but the customer is king.
I enjoyed “The Mathematics behind Hadoop-Based Systems.” The goslings love Hadoop, a Google-blessed approach to stream processing. But this write up is more than a clever way to calculate the size of a Hadoop cluster. The author provides a case example of how to think about a problem.
Even if you suck at math, you will find the explanation, the logic, and the approach useful. Instead of following the advice of your hardware rep, why not sit down and do some thinking about what is being processed. And if you want to throw hardware at a problem, do the throwing with informed intent, not to make your IBM, Dell, or HP rep “like” you.
A most useful write up.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 7, 2010
I want to admit that I did not receive one bent penny tossed at my feet for this write up. Because of the literary allusion, I shall report this sad fact to the Library of Congress.
Backtype and Social Search
January 7, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who reminded me that I have not commented about the Backtype social search system. Truth be told, the goslings and I are working on a new Web log with the code name “Social Security System” or SSN. We expect to have a sample of this new blog / information service available in a couple of weeks. Backtype is one of the companies that “fits” into the SSN space. I want to make a distinction between search and content processing and the burgeoning field of social content. Like the Social Security number, social content is becoming sufficiently large to warrant more focused coverage.
Backtype is a search system that shows comments from blogs and other social or grassroots information sources about a topic. Here is a query I ran a few minutes ago about Google Press. The results make clear that few people know about Google and its push into book publishing with O’Reilly. That is fine with me because Backtype provides a verification for me that most folks are yapping about the Android phone, not the real game changing in which Googzilla is engaged.
Backtype is one of those lean, mean start up machines that Y Combinator loves. The company has caught the eye of other VCs, and it is chugging along.
One of the most interesting features of Backtype is its API. You can get a good sense of what can be done with scraped and spidered content from various grassroots sources by reading the company’s two blog posts about its APIs. You can find the first blog post here and the second one here.
There has been some controversy about the firm’s approach to content. Plagiarism Today took umbrage at the company’s approach to indexing. “BackType: Republishing Comments” hoses the start up with this point of view:
But while the service itself has a great deal of potential for usefulness, it also republishes the full comments on their results pages. Furthermore, those results pages are indexable by other search engines, including Google, and that opens the door for duplicate content issues. Worse still, there is currently no way for a commenter to opt out of the system. At this time, the only way you could get your comments removed from the system is to file a DMCA notice with their host. At this time, however, I do not recommend such a solution.
Try the service and make up your own mind. I find it quite useful. Kosmix, for example, uses the system, and I know Kosmix and Google share some vibes. Maybe some of the BackType approach will add spice to Google’s alleged social search system.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 7, 2010
A freebie. I know a bit about the Y Combinator short leash approach to funding. I suppose I could try to hit up Backtype for cash, but I would probably have to loan the fellows the money to pay me. I will report this pitiable situation to the USPTO.
Gune: Mobile Metasearch
January 6, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Gune, a mobile metasearch system. The reader’s link pointed me to “Gune, a New Mobile Search Engine.” The write up said:
The new Gune solution comes as a meta-search system, meaning that it looks over other websites and provides users with a single page of results, optimized for access from mobile phones and smartphones. At the same time, the solution consults other search engines to deliver the results, and the popular Google and Bing are on the list.
The developer of the service is Handcase, a developer of mobile software based in Brazil (where I used to live). You can reach the Gune service at this page. When I get more details, I will report them. Maybe I will have to make a trip to Brazil to research this company in person. In the meantime, a news release is here.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 6, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to the Brazilian embassy in Washington, DC. I can hear the music of Carlinhos Brown now.
Language Weaver in the World of Google Translation
January 6, 2010
Several years ago, I took a look at Language Weaver, founded in 2002 by some wizards from the Univ3rsity of Southern California. The company’s technology struck me as more up to date than Systran, the engine that powers Yahoo’s Babelfish. In-Q-Tel pumped some money into the firm as well. Then Language Weaver caught my attention with its 2008 estimate that the machine translation market would tap into a $67 billion market. I remember watching an interview with Mark Tapling on Fox. The video is still available here. There were not too many details, but the number not long after the start of the financial meltdown in 2008 was an eye catcher.
The firm’s positioning is:
Language Weaver provides trusted automated translation solutions for high-value, dynamic digital information to improve human communications. Delivering a trusted level of translation quality, Language Weaver ensures that organizations maintain and extend brand voice across global media types and audiences.
The company now has a Wikipedia entry which strikes me as quite useful. You can read it here, and I won’t recycle that information. The company offers translation for about two dozen languages, and it offers what I think is an interesting software method that aligns translated documents at the segment or chunk level. This works, in my opinion, a bit like a knowledge base with some semi autonomous functions improving the core translation system.
The system can handle rich media; that is, “listening” to a podcast and translating the content. Language Weaver uses algorithmic methods. As computing horsepower creeps up, the system improves. The underlying method is statistical, so fast computers yield better translations.
What caught my attention on a routine updating of my search and content processing files was the fact that a number of links on the company’s home page did not work.
I was able to access an article by CEO Mark Tapling called “Building Loyalty after the Sale with Customer Driven Support Channels and Languages.” and “Dissolving Customer Support Communication Barriers.”
Like other search and content processing firms, the one-size-fits-all solution seems to be expressed in terms of solutions that solve specific problems; for example, voice of the customer or customer support problems.
Kirk and a Klingon need to avoid a failure to communicate. Image source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3380/3533169483_bae603ca18.jpg
When I reviewed various links on the company’s Web site, I located a list of the firm’s partners. This was interesting to me and included a number of firms whose marketing people had neglected to tell me that their employers’ translation functionality was licensed from Language Weaver. You can find this list on the Language Weaver current partners page.
IBM Jumps on a Bandwagon It Fell Off Earlier
January 6, 2010
Intelligent Enterprise reported that IBM is in the voice of the customer game. I thought IBM was already in the voice of the customer game. Goes to show what I know. The article “IBM Launches Voice-of-the-Customer Analytic Service” reveals all. The “all” is another of those glorious umbrella service offerings that in the 1970s made sense. Today, IBM is mostly a consulting firm with a backpack stuffed full of technology, open source programs, and consultants. In my opinion, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
VOCA has been in pilot deployment mode for nearly a year, according to English [IBM wizard], and tests have ranged from daily to monthly reporting scenarios. By year end, IBM plans to add text analytic and transcription and translation services for the major European languages and Arabic. In the first half of next year, the VOCA service will add speech-to-text technologies that will enable customers to mine customer support calls and other audio recordings.
Ah, the most recent customer support package will be forthcoming by the end of the year. To test this, I navigated to IBM.com and ran these queries:
- VOCA
- voice of the customer
- customer support systems
Here’s what I learned from these queries, but I urge you to run your own searches too:
VOCA
I received pointers to VOCA or voice of the customer analytics. The active link was to the December 16, 2009, news release which seemed to presage some of the Intelligent Enterprise comments. There were other links as well, including:
- A link to another news release
- Pointers to a “cross industry” news release here
- A link to Streamline Business Processes, which I did not understand but there was another link to a page of more news releases.
Okay, I get it. The search system indexes news releases. Not what I expected but I accept that marketing is more important than some other functions at IBM.
“Voice of the Customer” as a Bound Phrase
I got a different result set than I did from VOCA. The set was only 26 hits, and the first hit was a news release. The second and third hits were to an older news release and another link to the VOCA news release. Still not substantive content.
“Customer Support System” as a Bound Phrase
I got one hit to the Customer Support Newsletter date 2007 Q2. I thought this VOCA stuff was new. Guess I was correct when I perceived the story in Intelligent Enterprise as another marketing attempt by IBM to look relevant. Obviously the PDF newsletter did not make any sales.
Hopefully, IBM will find a way to make its actual products and services findable on its Web site. The present method of putting out a news release, getting a publication to parrot the information, and then sending a goose like me to the IBM Web site looking for concrete information is sufficient.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 4, 2010
Oyez, oyez, a freebie. I will report this sad state of affairs when Washington DC returns to work to the Bureau of Labor Statistics who cares about productivity such as that evidenced by IBM’s marketing and Web search teams.
Interactive Computing from Apple
January 6, 2010
Short honk: Take a peek at how Apple presented the tablet concept about 25 years ago. Voice interaction, touch screen, and sort of rich media. You can find the video on TUAW.com here. Search does not work exactly the way depicted in the video. Slow progress. Mom still calls in the video. Son ignores mom. That’s accurate for some I suppose.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 6, 2010
A freebie. To whom do I report? I know for apple related information it must be the USDA.
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