Boston Search Engine Meeting and Exalead
April 9, 2010
The Evvie Award recognizes outstanding work in the field of search and content processing. Ev Brenner, one of the original founders of the Boston Search Engine Meeting emphasized the need to acknowledge original research and innovative thinking. After Mr. Brenner died, the Boston Search Engine Meeting, then owned by a company in the UK, instituted the Evvie award. This year, the Evvie is sponsored by Exalead, one of the leaders in search-based applications and ArnoldIT.com, are sponsoring the award. in addition to a cash recognition of $1,000, the recipient receives the Evvie shown below.
For more information about the premier search and content processing conference, navigate to the Search Engine Meeting Web site. You can review the program and pre conference activities.
For more information about Exalead, navigate to the Exalead Web site. You can see a demonstration of the Exalead system on the ArnoldIT.com site here and you can explore next generation search and content processing innovations at Exalead’s “labs” site.
For more information about the award, click here.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2010
This post is sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, Exalead, and Information Today, Inc.
Murdoch and Google: Temperature Rising
April 8, 2010
I read “Rupert Murdoch defiant: ‘I’ll Stop Google Taking Our News for Nothing’” and realized that Google may find the business temperature rising. The period between 2006 and 2008 was a period of relative calm. Since 2009, Google finds itself in the same situation that was going to plague Gulliver. Folks who seemed “small” to Gulliver found ways to tie down Swift’s big boy.
The write up reported that the news industry has to charge for content. For me the most interesting comment in the article was:
“We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing … there is a law of copyright and they recognize it,” Murdoch told a packed audience of students, journalists and other media professionals. He said search engines had tapped into a “river of gold” by aggregating content but that the days of free news had to come to an end. “They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model,” he said.
Interesting to see if this is the shot that escalates the tension among the Googley and non Googley by an order of magnitude.
I thought that newspapers sold advertising. The news was an important part of the mix, but ads carried the freight. Google moved into advertising and now the newspapers have to find something to sell. Content seems to be it. In my experience, the value of content in an online environment is devilishly hard to make pay at the levels associated with the traditional newspaper method in a pre digital era. I worked at a pretty good newspaper, and I have to say that the newspaper’s ability to create original content has deteriorated over the years. Now with the costs of innovating in software added to existing costs, the executives like Mr. Murdoch have their work cut out for them.
Google is a target, but I don’t think Google is the problem. Google is at a tipping point itself. Innovation won’t do the job. Complicated factors are now operating, and I think the next surprise may be an emergent one. Tough to predict too.
Fascinating.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2010
A freebie.
SSN Minute: Fighting Fragmented Attention
April 8, 2010
David Thimme, ArnoldIT.com analyst, talks about how you can fight fragmented attention in the social media space. You can view the SSN Minute here. The SSN Minute will be undergoing a change beginning in May 2010. You will still get the critical commentary about social media plus additional content.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2010
This is an ArnoldIT.com sponsored post.
Google and Its Idiosyncratic Logic
April 8, 2010
“Opinion: Conroy Is Right to Question Google’s Privacy Record” appeared in IT News, an Australian publication. Google is a company with lots of math whizzes. Math requires logic. The article points out that Google is operating in an inconsistent manner. The issue is Google’s compliance with US laws and its posture regarding laws of other counties. For me the key passage was:
Google is thus in a contradictory position to comment on government interference with a citizen’s data. It says, like the government, that it only wants to interfere with a customer’s data in the case of suspected child porn – which sounds straight out of the Minister’s songbook.
Read the article. Make up your mind.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2010
A freebie.
Search Engines Exposed, Well, Not Exactly
April 8, 2010
What a great link bait title! “Search Engines’ Dirty Secret”. The idea in the story is a bit different from the exposé that the addled goose expected. The New Scientist article tackles the burning issue of the cost of a search. The angle is not the costs divided by the number of searches. Nope. The analysis focuses on the information that “Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers.” The source? My benchmark azure chip consulting firm, Gartner Group. With some calculations, the physicist author arrives at the conclusion a search “costs” for 10 million search results per hour as the same as turning on a 100 watt light bulb for an hour.
Do you know the cost of turning on a 100 watt light bulb for one hour? I didn’t. Well, there you go.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
No one paid us to write this article. How much does zero cost cost? Hmmm.
iPad: Wall Street Journal Looks for Silver Lining
April 8, 2010
I don’t want to make big deal of the news story “Ipad Sales Fall Short of Estimates.” For me, the key point is captured is this statement:
…today [April 6, 2010[ the Wall Street Journal published a statement from Apple which said that more than 300,000 Ipads were sold on day one. This would be considered great, but if you take into account the fact the figure included all the pre-sales and the hype that said a million would be flogged on Day One that number is dismal. According to the WSJ, Wall Street took a deep breath when analysts heard the figures.
Those iPads have to sell to generate the money from the publishers’ for fee content. Without lots of iPads, we won’t know if iPad users become big buyers of for fee content. The Wall Street Journal and some other “real” journalistic operations have great expectations for the iPad and its hoped for ability to convert rich media consuming folks into magazine, book, and newspaper readers.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
A freebie.
iPad Search Apps
April 7, 2010
Short honk: At lunch one of the goslings mentioned “8 Search Engine Related iPad Apps.” I took a look at the listings and thought that iPad lovers would want at least one of these. If I were younger, I would probably dive into iPad search. For now, I will float in the goose pond and watch the apples drop from the tree.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
A freebie. No worms. No core. No Apple iPad.
Index Engines Reveals Appliance Costs Savings
April 7, 2010
I am on the look out for information about metrics in enterprise search. I received the Index Engines’ newsletter “Index Engines Update April 2010”. The lead item “Did you know?” contained this set of statements:
Index Engines’ partner, Integreon, recently realized dramatic reduction of 75% cost and 50% time in processing an ESI collection project for their client. Read the white paper and learn how they processed a backup tape collection in 2005 using PowerControls and then again in 2009 using Index Engines. This paper compares the two technologies and presents the impressive cost and time savings.
I could not locate a link to see the access from the company’s Web site. Index Engines has a Web log, but it does not contain the same information that appears in the newsletter.
To get more detail, you can obtain a white paper here.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
The post is not sponsored.
Akibot: Enterprise Microblogging with NLP
April 7, 2010
We received a question about Akibot, a stealth start up in private beta. We have not been able to use the system, but I wanted to snag what information I have in our Overflight system before I head to the airport. Fact is, we don’t know too much about this Twitter-influenced service.
Akibot is a company using smart software to generate business intelligence. The company’s Web site does not contain much information. Here’s the splash screen:
One phrase in “Collaboration with Akibot” provides a good summary of the company’s focus:
Akibot is the first semantic actionable micro-blogging platform for the enterprise. Akibot not only allows real-time group collaboration and awareness through short, instant messages (like a Twitter for the company), but it also understands those messages and, if applicable, takes action.
A July 2009 story in ReadWriteWeb, “Akibot: An Enterprise Twitter Clone Infused with AI” reported:
At first glance, Akibot may look very much like your typical Twitter clone, but it does something very different: it combines the collective intelligence provided by microblogging with an artificial intelligence engine that lets the service take action on the messages posted.
Overflight snared the Akibot Web log at http://akibot.blogspot.com/. The activity on the blog is modest with the most recent post appearing on February 11, 2010. The story “Yet Another New Version” pointed to an article about Akibot by Martin Bohringer, “Ubiquitous Microblogging”. He wrote:
The approach of ubiquitous microblogging has much to do with the search for enterprise use cases of microblogging and a rising number of researchers is thinking about this topic. Michael Rosemann from Queensland University of Technology described how microblogging could be used for business process management. Alexander Dreiling from SAP shows a prototype for collaborative modelling with Google Wave (is Wave microblogging? I am going to discuss this question in a future posting). But the other way round is also possible, as the guys from Akibot show with their microblogging bot using NLP (Natural Language Processing). And finally, our research group is currently involved in several microblogging projects including ‘microblogging for logistics’ (think of tweeting RFID chips). To implement a full ubiquitous microblogging scenario, still lots of work has to be done.
The question asked by Smarter Technology in July 2009 is difficult to answer: “Is there a business purpose for microblogging?” We won’t go beyond, “Stay tuned.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
A freebie.
FileFinda: Not So Good at Math, Good at Finding MP3s
April 7, 2010
An interesting file share search engine will catch the attention of some legal eagles. The service is FileFinda.com. According to the company’s Web site: “This site [www.filefinda.com] is a new but fast growing file share search engine.” You don’t need to register. Type in your search term; for example, a word or a sequence like “MP3” and hit enter. The system generates hits that are spidered by the FileFinda.com crawler. The top search when I checked the service on April 6, 2010, are shown in the screenshot below:
I am not sure who Lil Wayne is, but he is one of the most searched entities. Coming in the top three with one search is “18 Russian teens xxx”. I am not sure how the numbers are generated or how these are ranked, but Lil Wayne is number one with 11,156 users entering the phrase and the number three query is “18 Russian teens xxx” with one person entering the query. Metrics aside. If you enter “MP3 Beatles”, for instance, you get the following display:
My hunch is that this type of service will attract some folks who are willing to overlook the oddities of the service’s “top searches” metrics. Looks like teen spirit to me. Some of the results are ones that may offend your co-workers.
When you try to download a file, you can do it for free or you can become a premium user. A premium user can download files larger than two gigabytes. A year’s subscription to the service is about $80 but you can subscribe on a monthly, 90 day or six month basis.
Who would care about this service? You will figure it out once you run some queries or click on the tag cloud.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
A freebie.
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