Will an Infusion of Google Blood Save AOL?
January 16, 2010
I stopped using AOL a year after its roll out. Not for me was the interface, the scattered files, and the influx of AOL CD ROMs. I paid some attention when the company merged with Time, but the notion of a traditional media company and an online company falling in love and remaining happy struck me as an outlier.
Over the years, Yahoo became a free version of AOL and AOL struggled to replace its dial up business with new revenue. I gave a talk about AOL’s making clear that a tech company with old modem technology faced the same problems as a traditional book publisher dealing with certain technical innovations. This is what I call “when domains collide”, and the effects can crop up in aging high tech businesses, not just traditional media businesses.
With a Googler at the helm, more Googlers seem to be a part of the remediation for AOL. The most recent Google graft is described in “AOL To Name An Ex-Googler “Head Of Technology””. The key passage was:
Several sources close to AOL (AOL) management tell us the company has hired Jeff Reynar, a former Google engineering manager, to “run overall technology” and report to CEO Tim Armstrong.
I think this is a pretty good idea. However, the main message for me was that I argued in The Google Legacy that Google was an organization showing others how to be Googley. If anything can save Mr. Brin’s once beloved AOL instant messaging company, it will be the infusion of Google blood into the company. But the AOL patient may be too far gone, so if this strategy of Google transfusions works, we have a validation of the potency of the Google approach to online. Will AOL change search technologies? How “fast” I wonder.
Stephen E Arnold, January 16, 2010
A freebie. I herewith report this miserable situation to the manager of Dulles Airport, a facility that has seen many AOL staff come and go over the years. Maybe even a few of the people who volunteered to be fired.
Yahoo Speaks Search Advertising, Pundits Read Search
January 15, 2010
Yahoo is not much of a force in the Web search arena. Years ago it abandoned its enterprise search effort. The IBM Yahoo search tie up may still be around, but I dropped that from Overflight a couple of years ago. I liked Yahoo’s “New Search Improvements for the New Year: Yahoo! rings in 2010 with search advertising enhancements that deliver.” The phrase “search advertising” is clear to me. Yahoo wants to do a better job selling ads. I grimaced when I saw the discussion of Yahoo in the search business. Overlooking the “advertising” suggests that Yahoo is in the same league as Web indexing systems that have orders of magnitude greater market share. Yahoo has traffic and its management team is trying to generate revenue from that traffic. Yahoo is not a synonym for search. Once in Camelot but not today in the harsh world of Google’s market share, the deal with Bing, and the sell off of various media properties. Yahoo!
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
No one paid me to write this brief item. In fact no one has paid me for a year. Addled geese get made into pillows and North Face stuffing. I will report this unacceptable situation to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Microsoft and a New Cloud Formation
January 15, 2010
A few days ago we tried to access one of the small and mid sized business download sites operated by Microsoft. It seemed to be on holiday. Today I read the CNet report about Web market share. The article “Google Rules Search in December, Bing Drops” provided some numbers showing Google widened its lead in Web search. One comment that struck me was:
Google accommodated almost 6.7 billion queries, capturing a 67.3 percent share of the month’s searches.
I don’t believe these data for one Kentucky Wildcat minute. What I do believe is that the decision engine, a cloud service, is drifting off. But the interesting cloud news was the tie up between HP and Microsoft. I know that Microsoft was not too keen on other vendors’ hardware, particularly when it ships with Linux. I also heard that Microsoft’s data centers have some HP hardware. Now the companies are, according to “HP’s Hurd Calls $250m Microsoft Agreement ‘Breakthrough Stuff,” teaming for a cloud computing play. Allegedly $250 million will be invested to “better integrate corporate software and hardware.”
Simplifying life for corporate information technology professionals is one objective. And the money:
will be spent across a range of areas — including email servers, database management, and cloud computing — to make HP’s hardware work smoothly with Microsoft’s software in a wider variety of settings.
My view is that cloud computing can simplify * some * IT challenges. But the complexities of SharePoint and Microsoft Fast Search won’t really go away. In the cloud, these will be hidden and someone has to pay for the engineers who have to keep these puppies from misbehaving. An investment on this scale suggests that Microsoft knows it has some gaps to fill in cloud computing, but I don’t think HP type engineering will resolve these. Some of those former Alta Vista guys would probably be able to make a contribution in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
Full disclosure: I am sitting with Tess and Tyson. Both are asleep. No one paid me to point out that putting complex systems in the cloud does not resolve their complexity nor the cost of dealing with that complexity. “Cloud”, you say. I am under the thumb of NOAA.
Personalized Playlists
January 15, 2010
I read “PerfectStream: The Future for Personalized Video Playlists, Advertising?” and thought that it was a good idea. I think that the sentence that snagged me was:
Munich-based PerfectStream is taking the business-to-business route and hopes to license its technology out to media and tech companies that already have professionally-produced or user-generated content. It came out of stealth this week and has raised funding solely from Brandenburg.
I recall reading about personalized playlists somewhere else. Maybe a Google patent application. Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
Sad to say a freebie. Possible patent research ahead. I will report my non-compensation to the ever vigilant USPTO.
Google and China: Who Will Control the Internet?
January 15, 2010
I think it is fascinating to look at the headlines from analysts about the “meaning” of the China-Google dust up. Let me point to one online observation and invite you to read the many others available on most news aggregation sites. The exemplary discussion is “China Brushes Off Google Threat, Welcomes Law Abiders”. The news story offered this:
Mountain View, California-based Google said Jan. 12 in a blog posting that it wanted to reach an agreement with the Chinese government to allow unfiltered Internet searches, and would be removing restrictions in coming weeks.
Why did I find it representative? The reporter is putting the nation of China and Google on equal ground. The assumption is that Google (a company) is in a position of dealing with China (a nation) on equal ground. The Bloomberg story said:
“Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information,” Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, said in a question-and-answer session with reporters, a transcript of which was posted on the office’s Web site today.
The issue, in my opinion, is access to the Internet. Google is on the path leading to a position in which Google becomes the Internet. I include a number of references in my 2007 monograph, “Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator”, to technical systems and methods that give Google this “effective guidance”. China—at least for its citizens—wants to define the Internet.
The notion of a free and open Internet is the point. Economics is not the issue. Control is. You can poke around with various queries and find for yourself certain topics or content gaps in most Web indexing services. “Old” information may not exist. A good example is information about the Top 5% of the Internet created by The Point in the early 1990s. I have some information on ArnoldIT.com, but the indexing services do not pay much attention to certain unvisited, deep content. Other examples include information retrieved via certain “stop” words. An example is to search the Department of Energy’s main Web site for SCRAM or ECCS. Information is scarce, and the last time I ran these queries, I found dribbles, not torrents, of information on these acronyms.
The notion of control is important for three reasons:
- A service with control can offer users and customers information on the vendor’s or the gatekeeper’s terms. In one scenario, if you want certain information, you may have to pay for it. With control, monetization is somewhat easier
- A service can create specific collections of information which give that control point a competitive advantage. The notion of exclusives in the world of online has been around long time. One example was my experiments with making the database Pharmaceutical News Index exclusive on a single vendor in order to determine the monetary impact of an exclusive versus multiple outlets for a single source of information. The exclusive won because I could charge whatever I wanted and the users who perceived the content as “must have” paid more for the information. In short, exclusivity—that is, control—was more lucrative.
- The ability to see or index “everything” provides ammunition for information warfare. The battle can be more useful customer data or for “information nuggets” that another entity cannot “see” or easily obtain. Information nuggets can be used to perform a number of useful functions; for example, shape a particular type of information flow.
The dust up between China and Google is a significant step in my understanding of the strategy of Google. I have argued in my studies that Google is a new type of enterprise, crafted to match the emerging world of pervasive data. Google is a domain, and that domain wants to make decisions for itself. China wants to make the decisions itself, particularly with regard to digital information.
Google will be on the world stage when it decides what to do with regard to other nation states’ steps to get its arms around certain Google issues. For me, the Bloomberg story and others have elevated Google to nation state status. That’s exciting. And interesting. A pivot point between China and the “nation” of Google. Just an opinion, gentle reader, just an opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
Oyez, oyez, I am herewith reporting to the League of Nations that I was not paid to point out that the interaction of China and Google is a real nation to a “digital nation”. I did this because I had some time at 6 14 am on January 14, 2010, sitting in an airport awaiting another convenient flight.
Monetizing Information to Find a Job via Social Media
January 15, 2010
Two unrelated conversations triggered my alarm clock this morning. One conversation concerned the hot trend of social networking. The other conversation pivoted on the value of knowledge.
Value of Social Networking
The social networking conversation surfaced an observation that was completely new to me. The person who made the observation said to the best of my recollection:
I was surprised to learn that some of my friends from my MBA class did not make a connection between their activities on Facebook and their job hunt.
The link seems obvious to me. Anywhere there is a network, the possibility exists that one of the friends may know about an opportunity or may have an idea that the other party to the conversation did not know about. I have been thinking about how to convert this assertion into a fact backed by data. The more I thought about this comment, I wondered if that a “gap” problem exists for avid users of social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The question I considered this morning was, “What is the value of connecting a person looking for work with the method for finding work via social networking?” The use of social networking is widespread. How could this statement that “some of my friends from my MBA class did not make a connection between their activities on Facebook and their job hunt” be true? The “value” of social networking would rest on a more casual use of a powerful and, to my mind, flexible system. I poked around for some information about the use of social networks to find work and turned up lots of hits. Obviously quite a few blog writers and poobahs have written about the use of social networks to make money. Frankly the comment puzzles me.
A perpetual motion machine cannot exist in the real world. Can it exist in a virtual world? Google seems to be close to a subsidizing financial model that may be getting close to permanet. Image source: http://cdrucker.com/files/labsphys/forceworkenergy_files/b2-3.gif
Value of Knowledge-Based Services
The second conversation focused on an upcoming trip I am making to Europe. The deal is in place, and the job is underway. However, one of the coordinators for this project asked, “What is your method for calculating the value of the work you do?” That comment was surprising as well. Assigning value to an intangible like expertise or information triggers in my mind endless hours reading about Austrian economic theories. I asked the person, “Why?” Her reply to the best of my recollection was: “I want to be a consultant, and I don’t understand how to value my time.”
What joins these two comments is the issue of the value of knowing something. A person who can use social networks to find a job interview or maybe sell a consulting engagement has connected the dots in the fuzzy world of online. A person who has not may be unwilling to pay for the information necessary to use online to locate work in today’s economic siroccos. My hunch is that the value is going to tough to define accurately. The person who “doesn’t get it” may not pay anything due to a lack of understanding due to my inability to make something clear. A person who does get it may work like Mozart, who sucked in music data and could then with what looked like little mental strain generate new melodies. The budding Mozart of social media may be unwilling to pay because from that person’s point of view, the insight was a trivial one. Why pay for what’s obvious?
The pricing of services is in some ways faced with a similar problem. The customer who “gets it” may be willing to pay for certain types of knowledge work because its value is obvious. The customer who doesn’t “get it” may not want to pay anything. Thus, the European MBA’s question about charging for a consulting project is a valid one.
Information, not necessarily electronic, is a slippery fish. What struck me is that each domain or “era” in technology imparts a different spin on the notion of “value”.
In our technology-infused world, the domain of experience includes different options (maybe more options as well). The methods of exercising those options would be influenced by the person’s knowledge of methods, tools, and tactics. A person without an Internet connection might know about Amazon, but that person might not have the methods, tools, and tactics to take advantage of an Amazon discount.
A Domain Problem?
My present uncertainty about the value of social networking is a domain problem, not just a knowledge problem. The technology domain requires a different type of knowledge. Where knowledge is lacking, friction will exist between the abstractions and the specific activities required to buy a leather jacket from Amazon or from a local big box store.
The differences are not just in the “how” part of the process. The differences cut across social norms, methods, thought processes, and abstractions like figuring out what is the “right way” versus what is the “wrong way” to accomplish a task.
What about those MBAs who did not see Facebook or LinkedIn as the method for generating employment opportunities? Is that a failure of the instructor? A failure of that group of students? A failure on the part of Facebook and LinkedIn? In fact, how could anyone familiar with online or popular culture for that matter not “know” something about the utility and instrumentalities of Twitter.com?
What about the European who wanted to know how to put a price tag on expertise? What has happened in that person’s education to make fixed price and time and expense based pricing puzzling?
My hunch is that the factors at work are easy to spot and difficult to identify. Online and knowledge are paradoxical, and I think that quite a bit of mental friction takes place when domains collide. A publisher who creates a printed magazine or newspaper knows how to cost estimate, price single copies, and set ad rates. When that publisher moves the information online, the old rules don’t apply because online is a different domain. This means that a publisher trying to embrace a new domain may face the business process risks not “part of the woodwork”.
Google and Free Information
Online vendors in the 1980s charged a customer to run a query in a specific database. The customer paid even if the database did not contain the needed information. Explaining the value of a null set was tricky in my experience. Charging for certain types of information that is free on a government Web site or marketing blog like this on may find a small group of buyers willing to pay. But a lower cost or free service will reduce the for fee company’s options. The genius of Google is that people subsidize certain services. Users get something that looks free. It isn’t. Google has found a way to subsidize a service. The power of Google is its business model and the company’s technical expertise to keep the “perpetual motion machine” running. Advertisers who want sales leads have to advertise on Google. Google has magnetic power because its free services pull users to the service. Once this machine is running, competitors and others disrupted by the business model have to find a way to gum up the works.
Why should a customer pay for information and knowledge if the customer cannot know the value of the information and knowledge? A failure to communicate is easier to correct than a failure to understand. Is this a purloined letter problem or a certain blindness problem? Maybe it is a bit of both? Or, could it be a different class of problems entirely.
More Questions
What if individuals cannot connect the dots in a hyperspace, abstract world of information? Those who “get it” have an advantage in some situations. Those who don’t will find themselves baffled by certain informationized functions. I think an information flow about ways to use social networking for specific purposes like finding a job might be useful. I will have to think about that, of course. I don’t know how to tackle the gap between many dots that must be connected on a broader scale. Traditional education may be able to help some, but what about those who need information about knowledge value and are not in school? Maybe those who “get it” will become a new elite and those who don’t slip to a lower social stratum? If you don’t know what you don’t know, you may be behind the eight ball.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 14, 2010
It pains me to say, “No one paid me to record this ill formed ideas.” I suppose I am under the jurisdictional control of the American Battle Monuments Commission to which I shall report this sad fact.
ConceptSearching and Its Busy January 2010
January 14, 2010
Concept Searching (“Retrieval Just Got Smarter”) has had a busy January 2010.
The company made several announcements about its information retrieval software.
First the company inked a deal with Union Square Software to use the Concept Searching technology in Union Square’s Workspace product. The Union Square Workspace is an email, document, and knowledge management product for the construction industry.
Second, the company announced support for Microsoft Windows Server R2’s File Classification Infrastructure. Like other Microsoft centric solutions, Concept Searching provides a snap in that extends the features of the Microsoft product.
Third, the company landed a deal with the Consumer Products Safety Commission to deliver search and classification to the CPSC’s public Web site and for the corporate Intranet.
The company was founded in 2002 with the goal of developing statistical search and classification products that “delivered critical functionality… unavailable in the marketplace.” The company’s software processes text, identifies concepts, and allows unstructured information to be classified via semantic metadata. The company supports SharePoint and other platforms. The company says:
Concept Searching are the only company to offer a full range of statistical information retrieval products based on Compound Term Processing. Our unique technology automatically identifies the word patterns in unstructured text that convey the most meaning and our products use these higher order terms to improve Precision with no loss of Recall. The algorithms adapt to each customer’s content and they work in any language regardless of vocabulary or linguistic style.
The company’s headquarters is in the UK, and the firm’s marketing operations are in McLean, Virginia. If you want more information, you can download a 13 megabyte video from K2 Underground.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 14, 2010
Oyez, oyez. A freebie. I shall report this public service to Securities House next time I am in London.
Microsoft SharePoint and Word Template Files
January 14, 2010
Short honk: The Beyond Search goslings spotted a document on the Microsoft Support site. Its title is “The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Search service does not full-text index Office Word 2007 template files (.dotx) in Office SharePoint Server 2007.” No big deal but with the hassle over XML, I found the fact interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2010
Another freebie. I think I have to report my not being paid for a SharePoint post to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Is that right? I think the outfit shares office space with the US Postal Museum.
Enterprise Search Deployment Time
January 14, 2010
Our Overflight service snagged a news item in May 2009. The title was “Airbus Licenses Vivisimo Velocity Search Platform”. The release was good news for Vivisimo and straight forward, saying:
Vivisimo (Vivisimo.com), a leader in enterprise search, has entered into a major agreement with aircraft manufacturer Airbus for the license of the Vivisimo Velocity Search Platform. The license covers the corporate-wide intranet for Airbus and some extranet services for Airbus customers, indexing up to two petabytes of data for more than 50,000 users. Vivisimo had already provided search for a group within Airbus before winning the company’s broader corporate business in a competitive setting. In a solution proof of concept, Vivisimo Velocity demonstrated its capability to handle the complexity of Airbus’ many data repositories while respecting the company’s various security parameters.
When I read this, I thought that Airbus made a wise decision. A deployment and an evaluation process was used. That’s smart. Most organizations license an engine and then plunge ahead.
The news item I received in my email this morning was equally clear. “Airbus Lifts Off Vivisimo Velocity to Provide More than 50,000 Users the Power of Search” states:
Vivisimo (Vivisimo.com), a leader in enterprise search, today announced the successful installation of its award-winning Vivisimo Velocity Search Platform with the world’s leading aircraft manufacturer Airbus. Through this deployment, Velocity is powering search across its corporate-wide intranet and its customers, indexing up to two petabytes of data for more than 50,000 users.
After a quote the news release said:
In less than one month since the completed installation of Velocity, search has become the fastest growing application on the customer portal (AirbusWorld) homepage in terms of usage, which has resulted in increased page views.
I think the uptake information is good news for Airbus users and for Vivisimo. The other upside of my having these two statements is that it is possible to calculate roughly the time required for a prudent organization to move from decision to deploy to actual availability of the search service. The deal was signed in May 2009, and the system went online about January 2010. That means that after the trial period, another six months was required to deploy the system.
Several observations:
- Appliance vendors have indicated that their solution requires less time. One vendor pegs the deployment time in a matter of days. Another suggested a month for a complicated installation.
- The SaaS search vendors have demonstrated a deployment time of less than four hours for one test we ran for a governmental unit. Other vendors have indicated times in the days to two week periods, depending on the complexity of the installation. The all time speed champ is Blossom.com, which we used for the Threat Open Source Information Gateway project.
- System centric vendors with solutions that snap into SharePoint, for example, have indicated an installation time of a half day to as much as a week, depending on the specific SharePoint environment.
- Tool kit vendors typically require weeks or months to deploy an enterprise search system. However, in certain situations like a search system for a major publishing company’s online service, the time extended beyond six months.
What’s this mean? Vivisimo’s installation time is on a par with other high profile systems’ deployment times. The reason is that the different components must be integrated with the clients’ systems. In addition, certain types of customization—not always possible with appliances or SaaS solutions—are like any other software set up. Tweaking takes time.
With Google’s emphasis on speed, the Google Search Appliance is positioning itself to be a quicker install that some of the high profile enterprise systems.
What’s this mean? It looks to me that one group of vendors and services can deliver speedier installations. Other vendors offset speed with other search requirements. Beyond that obvious statement, I will have to think about the cost implications of deployment time.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 14, 2010
No one paid me to write this short article. Why would anyone pay me? It’s been 65 years of financial deprivation. I think I have to report this monetary fact to the Social Security folks.
End to End Move from Knowledge Tree and Capsys
January 14, 2010
I continue to think about the information retrieval food chain. I read in CBR Online’s “Knowledge Tree Integrates Document Management Software with Capsys Capture” that two companies have hooked their systems together. The story references a module,which I interpreted as a connector or code shim that permits the handshaking of the systems. In addition, the module:
provides users access to Capture, a browser-based, thin client application that requires no workstation software to be installed or maintained. The software also includes a workflow and design component that allows users to manage their capture processes, without requiring programming or scripting, based on the document requirements specific to their business…
The documents from Capsys, after “characterizing and indexing” are moved to Knowledge Tree’s repository.
My thought is that customers do not want to buy a document scanning and an optical character recognition product and then hook those components into an existing system. The move makes sense, but notice that the search and retrieval function are essentially subsystem or utility services, not the center stage performer.
As end to end solutions find their way into organizations, several questions came to mind:
- How will organizations search their various content objects? In effect, with search working within an application, will an organization end up with even more Balkanization of information?
- What are the cost implications of the licensing organization having multiple search “stubs” or search systems? Won’t inclusion of search in different vendors’ systems create more search systems for employees to learn and more duplication of content, more systems management work, and more costs?
- If search is embedded and a commodity, won’t the logical endpoint be more pressure placed upon organizations to license one super system in order to make the hassles, time, and costs manageable?
I will keep thinking about the food chain and its integration in terms of search and content processing. In the meantime, this tie up looks like a solid tactical move to me.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to the Bureau of Prisons which is in charge of capturing my disclosures about compensation.
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