Google, Microsoft: Digital Hatfields and McCoys
June 15, 2010
I live in Kentucky. At various meetings I have picked up some unsubstantiated observations about the shooting war between the Hatfields and McCoys. One problem, as I understood it, was that it was difficult for an outsider to figure out who was a Hatfield and who was a McCoy. Glance at this image. Who is a nefarious Hatfield? Who is an evil McCoy? I couldn’t figure it out either and on a cloudy day, my thought is to avoid both of these interesting families.
Source: http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08eUbiS0n85R2/610x.jpg
When I read “Google, Bing Ranking Practices ‘Remarkably Similar’ under Hood”, I learned that
Google and Bing are remarkably similar — building two different sites/pages to separately target the two engines would appear to be a waste of energy,” Fishkin wrote in the conclusion of his related blog post. He added that “Bing seems to be moving much closer to Google over time.”
No big surprise to me.
Stephen E Arnold, June 15, 2010
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EDS and CRM: A Price on a Flub
June 15, 2010
The likelihood of an enterprise software flop seems to be inching upwards. Busy 30-something MBAs are so busy. Accountants eager to manage costs see a programmer shooting USB rockets from his cubicle and chop some heads. Overworked chief technology officers quit returning phone calls and ignore email. Welcome to information technology in the last half of 2010.
Search and content management have become potential career sink holes. I wanted to capture this anecdote about another red ink inducing enterprise application, CRM or customer relationship management. We know what CRM means, right? No humans at the end of the line. Phone menu trees that are unworkable except for a person specifically paid by me to sit there and press buttons until we can get a human to answer a question about a financial transaction.
Navigate to this fascinating news story, which if true, makes clear how perilous short cuts and azure chip assertions can become: “ESA to Pay $460 Million over CRM Failure.” Even in today’s trillion dollar deficits, a company spitting out a half a billion dollars catches my attention. The idea is that Hewlett Packard, the ink company, wants to be an azure chip consultant. To achieve that goal, the company bought the econo-consultant, EDS, the progeny of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur and would-be president of the United States, Ross Perot. HP, the ink company, has learned that talking is much easier than doing.
Here’s the key passage in the write up, which if true, makes it clear that HP may want to stick with ink and toner:
System integrator, EDS, now owned by Hewlett-Packard, agreed to pay UK-based broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) a total of $460.3 million to settle its lawsuit over a failed CRM project.
My hunch is that the azure chip crowd will say, “Not us.” We’ll see.
Stephen E Arnold, June 15, 2010
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BA Insight Announces Longitude V4
June 15, 2010
I get quite a bit of information about snap in search and content processing systems designed specifically for Microsoft SharePoint. Many organizations find SharePoint and its components, add ins, and third party enhancements exactly what is needed to crack tough information management problems.
Make your SharePoint search as quickly as a Bugatti Veyron accelerates.
BA Insight – along with Fabasoft Mindbreeze, SurfRay, Coveo, Exalead, and other vendors – offers a search solution for SharePoint licensees. You can read about the “state-of-the-art search features” in “BA-Insight Announces Next-Generation Search Technology for SharePoint and FAST Search 2010 at Microsoft TechEd 2010 Conference. BA-Insight’s Longitude Version 4 Provides Automatic Optimization of Microsoft’s 2010 Enterprise Search Products.”
Among the state-of-the-art features are, according to the write up:
- Highly scalable performance, superior to Flash/Java in speed of rendition
- More efficient engine for rendering complex pages and 3D animation
- Linking of structured and unstructured data
- Text recognition within an image format, where OCR is executed on the fly
- Translation from foreign languages
- Strong .Net integration – customer ability to embed existing custom .Net extensions into the Silverlight viewer
- Full use of all existing Longitude Search Connectors
- Indexing of email including attachments
- Parametric search.
The description of this product might bring tears to the eyes of BA Insight’s competitors and smiles of joy to SharePoint licensees who struggle to get a distributed SharePoint system humming like a Bugatti Veyron.
You can get more information about the BA Insight “state of the art” system at www.ba-insight.com. Each time I read about a search solution for SharePoint I wonder what creates such a thriving business in SharePoint search now that Microsoft owns the Fast Search & Transfer technology.
Stephen E Arnold, June 15, 2010
Another Country Gets Slapped by Google
June 15, 2010
I am going to have to create a map with those colored pin thingies. I cannot remember the countries that have annoyed Google. When IIT was concerned about a South American country, I heard a rumor that the company took MBA action. Will Google move beyond rhetoric. The most recent dust up was reported in Boing Boing. “Vietnam to Require Surveillance App at ‘Net Cafés, Google Protests” said:
A new law in Vietnam law requires all “retail Internet locations” (including ‘net cafés, hotels, airports, even offices) to install a government-approved, server-side filtering and surveillance application by 2011. In a blog post expressing concern about the new regulation, Google says this will allow the government to monitor user activities and block access.
Fascinating. I wonder if Vietnam’s authorities are quivering in fear?
Stephen E Arnold, June 15, 2010
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McKinsey to Squeeze the Azure Chip Consultants in Social Media
June 14, 2010
The azure chip crowd is going to have to up their game. I read “Nielsen Partners with McKinsey to Create Social Media Consultancy” and chuckled. The blue chip firms don’t twitch and jump. Their business is predicated on 80 percent plus repeat business from Fortune 500 firms. The new work comes from the churn and drama of business activities. The azure chip crowd usually lacks the luxury of the blue chip firms’ momentum.
Social media intelligence is one of those odd little markets which overlap traditional competitive analysis, the whizzy new “voice of the customer” baloney, and the Google-like “big data” approach to decision making.
According to the write up:
Research firm Nielsen has partnered its social monitoring service BuzzMetrics with management consultancy McKinsey to form NM Incite, a social media consultancy…In January, Nielsen announced it would extend its partnership with Facebook to measure the impact of online branding ads on Facebook.
What happened to comScore and other firms with a “core competency” in social media metrics? McKinsey has chosen its partner for the first dance in the social media waltz. What will the azure chip crowd do? Probably launch a Twitter campaign and cook up more white papers. The big money jobs will now be more exciting for the azure chip folks. Just my opinion. Ah, don’t know what makes the blue chip consulting firms different? There’s a useful data point, gentle reader. Some tips are here.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2010
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Google Logic and Authorities
June 14, 2010
I chuckled when I read “Google Seeks Consolidation of Wi-Fi Snooping Cases.” The story said:
Seeking consolidation is a logical move that the plaintiffs and courts would likely also welcome, said Eric Goldman, associate professor of law at Santa Clara University’s School of Law. A less clear but more interesting issue will be in which court the consolidated case gets heard, he said. It’s no surprise that Google is requesting California’s Northern District. Judges there are comfortable with technology matters and familiar with the company and the importance of its services, Goldman said. “It’s very favorable for Google to be in a place where the judges understand what’s at stake,” he said.
I wonder if the legal eagles involved in this unhappy situation will take kindly to a “logical” request. Probably not.
On a related matter, I found “Google Tells Lawmakers It Never Used Wi-Fi Data” intriguing. The article said:
“Google now confesses it has been collecting people’s information for years, yet claims they still do not know exactly what they collected and who was vulnerable,” [Rep Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee] said in a statement. “This is deeply troubling for a company that bases its business model on gathering consumer data.”
I don’t think Rep. Barton buys Math Club thinking. Much ado for something that is “no harm, no foul” in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2010
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Endeca and Business Intelligence
June 14, 2010
We are ready for a long vacation here at the goose pond. Most search and content processing companies are plotting their fall marketing campaigns. For Endeca, the time is right for cranking the knob on the firm’s marketing activities. A recent example is “One on One with Paul Sonderegger”. Mr. Sonderegger is an Endeca executive who makes frequent appearances at conferences and in some cases represents the public face of the company.
There were several interesting points that emerged in the interview. Let me highlight several and urge you to read the original interview.
First, Endeca has more than 600 customers, including Boeing, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Ford Motor Company, Texas Instruments, and Walmart. (I had heard that Walmart was using Google search technology. That’s not surprising since most organizations have five or more search systems each working happily away.)
Second, Endeca like Attivio and a number of other search vendors are doing what the 20 somethings call “up leveling”. The idea is that selling search is less lucrative than selling an enterprise solution that the Board of Directors, the CEO, and the CFO perceiving as delivering “value” to the organization. Mr. Sonderegger said:
Traditional BI tools are very good at reporting on structured data and answering questions the company knew to ask ahead of time. But today there is a greater need for information discovery so that people can answer the questions they just discovered mattered, in the moment, and make it part of the decision-making process. Endeca’s search capabilities facilitate this type of self-service discovery on both structured and unstructured or jagged data sources – such as documents or e-mails, empowering users to ask and answer questions of all types of data.
Third, the notion of “dashboarding” is now a hook on which Endeca and other vendors hang licensing deals. A “dashboard” displays essential information in one interface. When I hear the word “dashboard” I think of the crazy information system in a big BMW, but I get the idea. Mr. Sonderegger noted:
Our technology complements existing BI systems. Every one of our customers already has at least one reporting platform in place and it reliably publishes valuable reports. However, each of those reports inspires follow-on questions. And those questions change depending on what matters to that person right then. The convergence of BI and search technologies reveals relationships in the data that lead to unanticipated answers or new insights – even if no one knew ahead of time those exact questions would be asked.
The idea is that Endeca does not require a rip-and-replace approach. Endeca’s method adds value and delivers a dynamic dashboard.
When I think of Endeca, I think about eCommerce. The business intelligence capability of Endeca, as I seem to recall, have been part of the system for a number of years. In today’s market, Endeca may be reminding prospects that it has more capabilities than powering online shopping.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2010
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Bing Social Search
June 14, 2010
Short honk: You can use the Bing social search feature by navigating to Bing.com/social. The new incarnation adds some functionality to the separate service that was previously available at Bing.com/Twitter. The default shows the Summary page. There are tabs for other functions as well. Shown below is the search results for “Jesse James” on the Public Updates tab.
How useful is the new service? The answer, “That depends.” In my column last month for Information World Review, I pointed out some of the latency issues with the earlier incarnation of Bing social. Since early May 2010, I have learned that some users ignore social results embedded in a “standard” search results list. When I need social content, I turn to one of the specialized services such as Collecta.com. As I will point out in my SLA lecture on June 15, 2010, context is needed to make sense of most social content.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2010
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IBM Wants You to Have an Information Agenda
June 14, 2010
I read “An Information Agenda Is a Comprehensive, Enterprise-Wide Plan that a CIO Can Use to Achieve Short and Long Term Strategic Changes.” Then I realized that this was not an article. Item was a pitch to download a white paper that would explain an Information Agenda. If you want to read this gem, you can navigate here and snag a copy. I flipped through the document and realized that IBM speak is an example of the importance of synonym expansion. An “agenda” is a plan. Marketers also use such five dollar words as “road map”, “horizon document,” and – my favorite — “Action Scenarios”. My hunch is that in today’s financial climate, CIOs are not exactly sure what problem is going to be solved by a “short term and long term strategic change.” The focus seems to be on controlling costs, keeping systems working, and figuring out how to deal with moving targets. Just my view from the goose pond, or as more properly described by an IBM marketing professional a “strategic analysis point”. I wonder where mainframes fit into an information agenda?
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2010
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Exalead Featured on ArnoldIT Podcast
June 14, 2010
Exalead’s Paul Doscher talks about Exalead’s search-based applications on the June 14, 2010, ArnoldIT Beyond Search podcast. Exalead has been growing rapidly, landing blue-chip accounts with the largest technology company in North America, the French postal service, and Canada’s Urbanizer.com. In this podcast, Mr. Doscher talks about Exalead’s origins and its focus on solving information problems that have slowed an organization’s growth using traditional search systems. You can listen to the podcast on the ArnoldIT.com Web site or click this link to access the podcast directly. More information about Exalead is available from www.exalead.com.
The ArnoldIT podcast series extends the Search Wizards Speak series of interview beyond text into rich media. Watch this blog for announcements about other rich media programs from the professionals who move information retrieval beyond search.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2010
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