Google WiFi Issue Has Legs
August 5, 2010
The cars used to gather the Street View pictures may be gathering some of your private Wi-Fi network information, and a majority of Americans are concerned. In ‘Google Wi-Fi Scandal Concerns Most Americans,’ Webpronews.com recently reported that in a poll from Consumer Watchdog, 74 percent of Americans view Google favorably, but 65 percent say the Wi-Fi scandal is one of the things that “worries them most” or a “great deal” while another 20 percent saying it “raises some concern” when considering online issues. Google is cooperating with the National Security Agency without saying what information is being shared, and that’s causing an uproar from consumer groups who are eying voter ballot initiatives if Congress and state houses don’t act, says Consumer Watchdog advocate John M. Simpson.
Brett Quinn, August 5, 2010
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Will People Type Questions, Not Keywords?
August 5, 2010
In ‘Consumer Beware, Innovation in Search Benefits Google’ econsultancy.com reports that although Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been making waves in the search market and slowly nibbling at the edges of Google’s search dominance, smaller engines still have an uphill battle when it comes to toppling Google in search. Ask.com’s Barry Diller pointed out that innovation in search often works toward Google’s advantage, regardless of whether Google does the innovating. Ask.com made headlines recently with some user interface changes that reverted the site back to its earlier question and answer format, and the site grew 18 percent, beating expectations. Will this new format continue to grow the company’s audience? Will people take the time to type in their questions or will they revert to Google’s catch-phrase entry method? We don’t want to type questions, and we think we not be lone geese.
Brett Quinn, August 5, 2010
Language Weaver Gobbled by SDL
August 5, 2010
Tradingmarkets.com reports that SDL, a UK-based provider of information management solutions with the tagline “Your content, their language”, has acquired Language Weaver, Inc, a US-based provider of automated translation solutions for $42.5 million. SDL specializes in global audience content delivery to multiple language bases, and offers authoring, terminology management and multilingual content translation management and delivery. SDL says that the addition of Language Weaver’s machine translation technology to the SDL product array delivers automated translation technology into SDL’s Global Information Management Platform, and integration of secure machine translation technology into the supply chain at all levels will allow enterprises and governments to translate significantly larger volumes of content faster and more efficiently to meet the global needs of today’s increasingly online world.
Brett Quinn, August 5, 2010
Scaling with Solr, Python and Django
August 5, 2010
Scaling is tough problem. Gmail has had its share of hiccups. Reddit has recently made a switch in its search system to deal with latency. Twitter is embarking on an infrastructure project to cope with getting bigger. Toby White’s scaling tips are useful in my opinion. His Timetric Blog included a useful write up called “Scaling Search to a Million Pages with Solr, Python, and Django.” The article references a slide deck, which contains code snippets and explanatory details. You can locate an instance of the file at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1942316/SolrMillionsOfDocs.pdf. In my opinion, one of the key points in the write up in the Timetric Blog is:
On the large scale, each installation will have its own problems, but three things you’ll almost certainly need to pay attention to are:
- Decoupling reading from and writing to the index. They have very different performance characteristics (and writing presents special problems if you’re updating documents as well as adding brand new documents).
- Working out the right balance of adding/committing/optimizing data. This will be driven by the frequency with which you add data, and how soon you need to be able to serve results from newly-added data. Must it be immediate, or can you wait seconds/minutes/hours?
- Fine-tuning your tokenizers/analyzers. Although small and fiddly, this is an issue which will bite you more and more as a corpus of data grows. You’ll need to tweak your indexing algorithms away from the defaults; extracting relevant results from a pile of a million documents is much harder than from a few thousand.
You may want to check out Toby White’s Python/Solr library sunburnt. Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2010
The Future of Search Revealed
August 5, 2010
Interested in the future of search? If so, you will want to point your browser to “TEDxBoston: The Future Of Search vs. Seeing The Future With Search.” The forum was a TED conference held in Boston. Among the highlights of the summary, in my opinion, were these three points.
First, search is broad; specifically, “the human activity of seeking out information and applying it to decisions”. No problem on my end with this statement.
Second, search embraces “Social graphs, location-based search, semantic web, the convergence of search and analytic technologies, and richer content aggregation.”
Finally, search has morphed into “facets”, business intelligence, and user experience.
After reading the summary, I wondered about the impact of Lucene/Solr on the commercial search vendors. My hunch is that a shift to open source may have some ramifications for those participating in the future of search panel.
I am not sure that “business intelligence” is what search is becoming. My view is that search is a commodity. Fractionalization and niche functions seem to be increasingly evident. Examples range from in the back up stream search, mobile search which means letting algorithms do the heavy lifting, the social search stuff which relies on humans knitted together by some wacky “glue”, and embedded search which operates behind the scenes, spitting out information without the user have to do much more than touch a device. The challenge of real time content processing is an important one, and I think that some commercial vendors have a lot of work to do to handle the new data realities. Running a search, regardless of type, on a stale index is not business intelligence; it is a recipe for error.
I know that in a short time slot it is tough to mention the streams that are flowing from the “old search mountain”, but when these streams come together, a new river may cut a canyon through some established precepts.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2010
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Amazon and Its New BFF, Facebook
August 4, 2010
Microsoft expressed its love for Facebook with an investment of $240 million in late 2007. That is public information. Less well known is the on-again, off-again relationship between Amazon and Microsoft. Cross town rivals, both companies eye one another’s database innovations, business methods, and products.
Amazon’s interest in Facebook seems to be rising. “Amazon Now Taps Into Facebook for Social Product Recommendations”, if on the money, reported that cloud-computing giant Amazon has added a nifty Facebook feature. Now you can integrate Facebook into your personal Amazon recommendations.
To use the feature, navigate to your Amazon recommendations. Amazon uses Facebook Connect to provide you with social recommendations based on information in your Facebook profile.
After you activate this feature, Amazon will display a dedicated page within the recommendations section of your Amazon account. You will see which of your friends also like the same books, bands, videos, and other media.
Too much big brother? Is Amazon nosing into Microsoft’s territory? Is Amazon working with Microsoft on other social integration services? Something is up. We don’t know what, but the move is interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
Paid Content Portal Partiers
August 4, 2010
News Corp. is rumored to be signing up UK publishers for its for-fee content portal. The New York Times has the same idea. According to “NYT Begins Marketing Mobile Content Platform to Other Publications” reveals that the Gray Lady is gunning for the burgeoning smart phone and netbook segments. The story reported these early licensees:
In addition to the AH Belo papers, which include The Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal and The Press-Enterprise, several NYTCo-owned dailies, namely the International Herald Tribune, The Gainesville Sun and The Lakeland Ledger, will also participate in the product launch.
These strike us as an insiders’ club, but, heck, what do we know in Harrod’s Creek? Well, we did read “Reminder to Publishers: Steve Jobs Hates the New York Times iPad App.” The article reminded the goose that publishers are struggling in their area of core competency. Software seems to be a discipline that requires somewhat different skills. Mr. Jobs’s viewpoint strikes the addled goose as on the money.
The Beyond Search view is that keeping Mr. Jobs happy is a good idea.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
WAFs Arrive and Plug In
August 4, 2010
Wolfram/Alpha Widgets or WAFS have arrived. WAFs are free, personalized mini-apps that leverage the depth and breadth of the Wolfram/Alpha computational knowledge engine. If you haven’t tried it, give it a spin at www.wolframalpha.com. Work through the tutorials so you can avoid the message “I don’t understand your question.” The widgets can do everything from kitchen recipe calorie converters to Calculus-based integration solvers (although, I must admit, I’m an old-school holdout on the integration widget.) You can build your own widget or browse Wolfram/Alpha’s gallery.
Developers will love WA’s Beta Widget builder. You can create your own widget for your personal application, then, if you choose, you can publish your widget in Web sites, blogs, or social networking platforms, and with uses ranging from nationwide salary comparison to human growth charts, if spend more time at http://developer.wolframalpha.com/widgets/ than on social network sites, you will be ready for the problems at Wolfram Science.
Brett Quinn, August 4, 2010
4 August Ultrasaurus on Lucene/Solr
August 4, 2010
I quite like the image “ultrasaurus” evokes. A goose, in comparison, lacks oomph. Nevertheless, you will want to navigate to “Lucene/Solr Meet Up, July 28, 2010.” There are some interesting factoids in the thorough summary of the presentations and remarks.
Let me highlight four that struck me as interesting, and you can work your way through the original post to get the rest of this meetup’s flavor.
First, Salesforce.com seems to sporting a Lucene/Solr T shirt under the firm’s business casual garb. Bill Press, according to Ultrasaurus, offered some metrics about the scale of the firm’s operation; for example, eight terabytes of searchable information. The incremental indexing zips along with 70 percent of new content and deltas crunched in less than one minute.
Second, Lucid Imagination’s Grant Ingersoll provided some case examples. One sequence jumped out at me; that is: his suggested links for more information:
Lucid Imagination is the go-to outfit for Lucene/Solr engineering and professional services.
Finally, Jon Gifford from Loggly said:
Solr is awesome at what it does, but not so good for data mining. [So] plan to plug in Hadoop for large-volume analytics.
Possible logo for open source search solutions? Image source: http://wargames.spyz.org/convSALAMANDER.html
Will Lucene/Solr abandon their present logotypes and go for something along the line of a Spinosaurus. With Lucene/Solr adoptions moving upwards, a Spinosaurus might have easy pickings from clients of somewhat marginalized commercial search systems in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and other European Commission member states. Snack time may be approaching. SharePoint nibbles, anyone?
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
Ah, Now We Are Really Beyond Search
August 4, 2010
I love it when Fortune Magazine makes a brilliant business breakthrough. I don’t mean record setting revenues or surging subscriptions. Nope. I refer to Fortune’s article “Google: The Search Party Is Over.” The London newspapers have been nibbling on this dog bone for a year or so. The entire publishing industry has been howling in their kennels when it realized that Google was sucking money from ads and providing a road map for other tech-savvy entrepreneurs to exploit the traditional information industry. In my “domains collide” essays and talks, I pointed out that upstarts like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were pulling meta-plays, leaving those engrossed in checkers at the mercy of the 3-D chess players. The strategy for linear tactics allowed a number of multi-billion dollar outfits to poke their noses into a lousy financial climate. To make matters worse, the children of the “media establishment” were embracing the upstarts’ methods, not mommy and daddy’s.
What makes the Fortune article fascinating is that Fortune is now asserting that the miserable Googlers are going to face some tough sledding. The examples on offer range from Facebook (which is more like Google than most New Yorkers care to admit) to the New Age Apple. I mean black T shirts and blue jeans! Gasp. None of that in the Yacht Club on 44th, thank you.
Please, read the original. Get it on paper if you can. That will provide a gentle stroke to the money people at Time Warner. Who cares about that environmental, eco-thing. I used to work in Manhattan. Once you cross the river into New Jersey, who cares about the rest of the world, right?
Here’s a passage that caught my attention:
Amazingly, Google’s biggest and most promising opportunity to date, its successful Android operating platform for mobile phones, doesn’t produce much revenue or profit for Google — by design. The company in 2007 made the technology available to all comers in a bid to make the web more accessible on smartphones and in turn to encourage consumers to do more Google searches on their mobile devices. The strategy worked. Encouraged by this easy access to Android, handset makers began churning out multimedia phones, and the Android platform has been a consumer success: Google says some 160,000 new Android devices are activated each day, and device makers from Motorola (MOT) to HTC have all released popular phones on the Android platform. But Google doesn’t make gobs of money on those devices. (Google dabbled in phones but discontinued its Nexus One after only six months.) Apple, on the other hand, also stoked the smartphone market with its iOS, but with very different financial results: Last year the company posted an estimated $15 billion in iPhone sales, a benefit of making the hardware and the software.
There are four issues in this addled goose mind about the Fortune analysis:
First, Google has momentum. Just like Microsoft, complaining is not likely to stop the revenue flow. Sure the Web is “ever changing” – unlike the magazine business/ As a result, in course corrections are easier and the Google will make them. Will each adjustment be a home run? Nope. Will these modifications keep the company on track? In my opinion, yep.
Second, the problems Google faces plague its competitors and the many Xooglers in these companies. The legal hassles are just beginning, and I think that Google has been able to pull a Ronald Reagan. Some of its competitors won’t be so lucky. A single Microsoft-style anti-trust decision can trigger some interesting changes without much warning.
Third, the companies that are winning are increasingly monopolistic. A single problem within these constructs can have unexpected consequences. For example, as wonderful as Amazon and Apple are, both find themselves heading for a head on collision with regard to digital content. When monopolies collide, the impact will be quicker and more severe than when new methods of performing certain work intersect. In short, I see upheavals ahead. Big upheavals.
Finally, the problems at Google began in the pre-IPO period from 2002 to 2004. The Google got caught with its paw in the Yahoo-Overture-GoTo advertising method cookie jar. In 2006, Google was at its peak. The company could do no wrong. But after 2006, the company’s “culture” began to shift and the firm became careless. Betas were no longer tests; betas were outright mistakes. From the little known Web Accelerator tizzy to the spectacular Buzz flop, the caution signal was activated in late 2006. Hmmm. four years ago.
We’ve been beyond search for several years. In fact it is going on five years since I wrote in Searcher Magazine that search was dead. Slow reaction time works on Sixth Avenue. Doesn’t work in Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
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