How to Cope with Google: Change Your Name, Just Move
October 26, 2010
I find Math Club folks darned entertaining. I recall learning from someone that Google’s top dog suggested that one could deal with privacy issues by changing one’s name. No problem, but not exactly practical. Today (October 25, 2010) several people mentioned to me Dr. Schmidt’s suggestion regarding Street View’s imaging one’s home. The recommendation was, according to “Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move,” even more impractical than changing one’s name. In today’s real estate market, most folks struggle to make payments. The cost of moving is out of reach even if there were a compelling reason to uproot oneself. The idea of moving because Google is making snaps of one’s domicile is either pretty funny (my view) or pretty crazy (the view of one of the people in my office).
So which is it? Colbert Report material or an answer that could get you stuck in a hospital’s psychiatric ward for observation?
I side with the Math Club. Dr. Schmidt was just joking.
What’s not so funny is the mounting legal friction that Google faces. My concern is that the push back could impair Google’s ability to do deals. The issue is partially trust and partially mind share. With lawyers wanting discovery and depositions, the two Ds can get even the A student in Math Club in academic hot water. That’s bad for Google, its partners, and its stakeholders. Competitors know Google has lots of cash, but with Apple and Facebook surging, Google can no longer rely on controlled chaos to converge on a solution. Lawyers are into procedures and often lack a sense of humor.
Just move. Man, that’s a hoot. Getting a cow on top of a university bell tower will not elicit a chuckle from me. But “just move.” I am in stitches. Absolutely hilarious. But there is that other point of view… the hospital… the observation thing. Hmmm.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2010
Walled Gardens: A Blast from the Dark Ages
October 26, 2010
No self respecting war lord would have a garden and leave it open to the folks who did grunt work. The powerful family wanted a place to chill without the annoyances some people generate. Flash forward to 2010. The war lord at Apple wants to keep the orchard free of pests. Farewell Flash. Java is getting its walking papers soon too. Microsoft likes to keep its SharePoint kids clean and neat. Fees, training, and some sales leads do the job. Get too frisky in a Microsoft centric company, and you and your Linux box get a chance to find your future elsewhere. The Google jaws about open, but I don’t think the Google wants to let Facebook poach Orkut users. In fact, Google does not want a competitor in search or anywhere else for that matter. Great war lords think similar thoughts.
“Facebook Disconnect” may be a third party extension today, but my hunch is that open gates may be equipped with the spike gizmos that rental car companies use to keep me from sneaking out the “In” gate. With the Internet making consolidation an inevitable consequence of the utilization and commoditization of online services, architects and builders of walled gardens are likely to enjoy a business boom.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2010
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Microsoft Corporate Bird: The Ostrich?
October 26, 2010
I know Bill Gates and the person whom I associate with Bob don’t work at Microsoft. I know I should not document the personal preferences of a mom. I know better. Nevertheless, point your browser thingy at “Melinda Gates Bans Apple Products from the Gates Household.” If true, the action reminds me of the way the Middle Kingdom ran its ox cart. Keep stuff outside the wall. Life is easier that way I suppose.
As an addled goose, I am every alert to a metaphorical avian opportunity when I can. If the information in the Business Insider story is spot on, perhaps Microsoft will be inspired to adopt the ostrich as its official corporate bird? Perhaps something like this:
Image source: The Liberal Doomsayer
Nope, no pesky Apple products that my relative, Bob the ostrich, can see.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2010
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Riak Search
October 26, 2010
The azurini have moved from search to some fuzzy wuzzy world of marketing management. No big surprise. Most consultants, like wolves, follow the old and lame animals. Predators do their thing. Azurini think up crazy marketing phrases to make predation palatable. That’s a second and third tier consultant for you: wordsmithing sales poet.
There are some interesting developments in search. At a locked down conference on October 13, 2010, I was reminded about Riak Search. Here’s a synopsis:
Riak Search is a distributed, easily-scalable, failure-tolerant, real-time, full-text search engine built around Riak Core and tightly integrated with Riak KV. Riak Search allows you to find and retrieve your Riak objects using the objects’ values. When a Riak KV bucket has been enabled for Search integration (by installing the Search pre-commit hook), any objects stored in that bucket are also indexed seamlessly in Riak Search. The Riak Client API can then be used to perform Search queries that return a list of bucket/key pairs matching the query. Alternatively, the query results can be used as the input to a Riak map/reduce operation. Currently the PHP, Python, Ruby, and Erlang APIs support integration with Riak Search.
What’s the jargon mean? Another scalable open source search system. You can download the system and then use the useful “sample data” to exercise the system.
The company responsible for the Riak search engine is Basho. In January 2008, Basho Technologies, Inc. was founded by a group of former Akamai Technologies, Inc. engineers. Basho produces Riak, a distributed data store that combines high availability, easily-scalable capacity and throughput, and ease of use. Riak’s complete availability means that applications built using Riak remain both read- and write-available under almost any operational conditions and without requiring intervention. Available in both an open source and a paid commercial version, Riak provides unprecedented read- and write-availability to Web, mobile, and enterprise applications.
You can get more information at www.basho.com. “Basho” is a haiku poet, but I am not sure if this is the association the company intended. What’s poetic is that Riak is another interesting search solution that uses Google-like technology. I could not locate pricing data.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2010
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Open Source Search Run Down
October 25, 2010
“Open Source Search with Lucene & Solr” provides a useful overview of information similar to that presented at the Lucene Revolution in Boston, October 7 and 8, 2010. I found the information useful. Even though I poked my head into most sessions and met a number of speakers, Igvita.com has assembled a number of useful factoids. Here’s a selection of four.
First, the Salesforce.com implementation of Lucene “consists of roughly 16 machines, which in turn contain may small and sharded Lucene indexes. Currently, [Salesforce.com] handles 4,000 queries per second (qps) and provides an incremental indexing model where the new user data is searchable within ~ three minutes.”
Second, iTunes is a Lucene user “said to be handling up to 800 queries per second.” I thought Apple was drinking Google Kool-Aid or was before the friction between the two companies entered into a marital separation without counseling.
Third, I found this description of Lucene/Solr interesting:
If Lucene is a low-level IR toolkit, then Solr is the fully-featured HTTP search server which wraps the Lucene library and adds a number of additional features: additional query parsers, HTTP caching, search faceting, highlighting, and many others. Best of all, once you bring up the Solr server, you can speak to it directly via REST XML/JSON API’s. No need to write any Java code or use Java clients to access your Lucene indexes. Solr and Lucene began as independent projects, but just this past year both teams have decided to merge their efforts – all around, great news for both communities. If you haven’t already, definitely take Solr for a spin.
Finally, this passage opened my eyes to some interesting opportunities.
Instead of running Lucene or Solr in standalone mode, both are also easily integrated within other applications. For example, Lucandra is aiming to implement a distributed Lucene index directly on top of Cassandra. Jake Luciani, the lead developer of the project, has recently joined the Riptano team as a full-time developer, so do not be surprised if Cassandra will soon support a Lucene powered IR toolkit as one of its features! At the same time, Lily is aiming to transparently integrate Solr with HBase to allow for a much more flexible query and indexing model of your HBase datasets. Unlike Lucandra, Lily is not leveraging HBase as an index store (see HBasene for that), but runs standalone, albeit tightly integrated Solr servers for flexible indexing and query support.
Navigate to the Igvita Web site and get the full scoop, not a baby cup of goodness.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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DBSight: More Grief for the Commercial RDBMS Dinosaurs
October 25, 2010
On a phone call last week, the participants were annoyed at the baked in enterprise database. Each upgrade cycle, several of the participants reported that their companies just “paid the bill.” Habit, not critical thinking, keeps some of those giant IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle RDBMS installations pump cash from clients into the corporate coffers.
I learned that DBSight is now at Version 4.x (a J2EE search platform) on the call. I first wrote about the system in April 2008 in “DBSight Search: Worth a Closer Look”. The system offers full text search for information stuffed into relational databases. The system can integrate with other languages via XML, JSON, and HTML. The description was that DBSight included a built in database crawler. The system provided a number of knobs and dials. I noted down such functions as faceted search, support for word lists, multi-threaded searching, and some other goodies. In order to handle big data, the system supports multiple indexes and sharded search as well as a number of other speed up methods.
The company coding DBSight has been around since 2004. DBSight has been engineered as a “re-usable search platform.” License fees begin at about $200 but there is a community edition available from this page. If you want an enterprise license, DBSight will provide a custom price quote. I did some poking around and located a link for a free download at http://www.dbsight.net/index.php?q=node/47.
Could an enterprising coder combine some other bits and pieces and create a system that delivers some of the Blue Stream or MarkLogic functionality?
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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Yahoo Alert Oddity: Files Search
October 25, 2010
I still receive a couple of Yahoo Alerts. On Saturday, October 23, 2010, I reviewed an alert pushed to me on Friday at 11 24 pm. What struck me as peculiar were two hot links to a search service billed as RapidShare but resolved to “Files Search”.
When I clicked on the link, I was sent to the Web site http://www.clminnovacion.com. The specific link for the hit was a more complex url that resisted url shaving. Click this link to see the hit in my Yahoo Alert. From one of my disposable computers, I tried to download a file and was then redirected to Express Downloads. When attempting the download, the system displayed a page for me to select a server near me. A click on the purple download button displayed this page:
The system asked for my credit card. I did qualify for a $2.49 promotional membership. My special offer expires on October 24, 2010. The service for Express Downloads seems to be operating from the US.
No big deal when these types of “search” sites pop up in a Bing.com or Google.com query. The hits in a Yahoo Alert struck me as somewhat unusual. My hunch is that the Microsoft/Yahoo system interpreted the Files Search module as “enterprise search” and happily provided me with a pointer to a service that does little to reassure me.
Well, the new Yahoo. Close enough for horseshoes and a site that some copyright mavens may want to explore.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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Sinequa Harvests Crédit Agricole
October 25, 2010
In January 2010, I reported that Polyspot, a French search and content processing company, landed the Crédit Agricole account. My information source was Communauté Finance Opérationnelle, a publication which most Americans read avidly. I received a news item from the SFGate online publication. What caught my attention was the headline: “Crédit Agricole Deploys Sinequa Business Search for a 360 Degree Customer View.” According to the write up:
To tame its information complexity, the bank deployed Sinequa Business Search: an all-in-one solution for information access that includes customizable enterprise search and search-based applications. Designed specifically for understanding business context, Sinequa navigates and synthesizes information from structured applications, unstructured and social content, and people data to discover hidden correlations for more relevant answers, improving and accelerating the information chain from ask to act. During an initial pilot in the bank’s Atlantique Vendée division, Sinequa was deployed in less than three months. Through the efficiency of Sinequa’s all-in-one solution, the division was able to realize its full ROI in only a month and consolidate five data centers into a single, green data center.
Polyspot seems to have a bedfellow or Polyspot is now sleeping on the floor. I found the reference to “360 Degree Customer View” interesting. I thought it echoed the Exalead phraseology, but I may be mistaken. For more information about Sinequa, visit the firm’s Web site at www.sinequa.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 24, 2010
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Recommind Estimated 2010 Revenues: Fact or Fiction?
October 25, 2010
Last week I heard that Recommind disclosed its revenues. The information I saw surfaced on the e-discovery 2.0 blog in “Recommind Publicly Discloses Its Revenue—and It’s Less than You Might Think.” The write up contained some interesting information, but I don’t know if the figures and factoids are spot on. Nevertheless, I did find the information interesting and in line with what my Overflight model spits out for a privately-held company in the search and content processing business.
Smash cut to the death of the fox in the jaws of the search hounds: Recommind’s estimated 2010 revenue is $23 to $28 million. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Most of the companies chugging along in the search and content processing rendering yard generate less revenue. And even with the outfits with great visibility and a strong client list, the need for cash is growing. Endeca accepted an intravenous drip from Intel and SAP Ventures. High flying Palantir sucked on a $90 million money milk shake this summer. And BA-Insight—a vendor of Microsoft SharePoint snap in systems—palmed $6 million.
The challenge with numbers from privately held companies is that the data are difficult to verify. Heck, try and figure out what publicly traded Amazon spends on R&D and makes on its widely publicized Amazon Web Services product line. Impossible task in my opinion. Move those finances into a private company and figuring out what’s what is tough. Google allegedly used some fancy dancing to trim its tax bill and that arabesque is only now being evaluated.
With regard to finances, a top line revenue figure or a growth rate are handy hand holds for the arm chair analyst or the azure chip consultant. In the real world, some financial types are interest in the company’s long term expenditures for R&D, the debt, the structure of deals’ payouts, executive compensation, etc. Without more numerical grit, who really knows. I recall looking at financial data for one high profile search system and learned that a number of debts had been rolled together, refinanced repeatedly, and the burden was little more than an annoying payment. The approach was similar to the person who buys a new vehicle by looking at the monthly payment, not the cost of the debt. In the Enron and Tyco world, these were old tricks. In the BearStearns Lehman Brothers world, magic accounting is what makes MBA men men and MBA women get a zest for living.
There were some factoids in the write up. Here are ones I noted:
- Recommind is placed on a par with Exterro and kCura. Fascinating to me because Exterro and kCura are what I consider next generation systems.
- Recommind is chasing three markets and according to the write up, Recommind’s revenue from the legal sector is “less than many other companies in the space.” No support but I found this an interesting observation.
- Recommind had a lousy 2009. No big surprise there.
I am not so quick to chastise Recommind for the alleged revenue. Compared to some of the search and content processing vendors I track, that $20 million or so looks pretty good compared to $1.5 to $3.0 million. We don’t know the cost structure or the net, but at least Recommind is still in business. It is, therefore, doing something right which is more than I can say for the search vendors listed on my Death Watch list. I recall I tried to visit the company, but it was too busy to make time for the addled goose. I suppose that’s a marketing ploy of sorts. I still want to understand the difference between the Recommind approach and the Autonomy IDOL approach. But now I am pretty busy and will content myself with recycling the Recommind revenue figures. And as for the “smaller than you might think”, I don’t think too much about Recommind or its revenues. I am a busy goose indeed. For more information about Recommends, navigate to www.recommind.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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Less Chaos and More Control: Google in Italy
October 24, 2010
Google’s controlled chaos is getting dose of Italian control. Is that an oxymoron? Italy was the big dog for a bunch of centuries. On my last trip, I wasn’t sure Italy could organize a pick up soccer game. Oh, well. It’s a big country with great food and wonderful artifacts.
“Italy Demands three Day Warning for Google StreetView Trips” is doing what I thought was impossible. Italy wants the Math Club company to plan what the cute StreetView cars are doing, communicate those plans three days in advance, to the ever efficient Italian governmental authorities. Okay.
In addition to the “this is what I am going to do” reports, Google will have to label its quirky little vehicles with a StreetView decal. If you have ever seen a Google StreetView auto, there’s not much real estate available for a big StreetView label. The colors, the odd gizmos sticking out of the car, and the Math Club driver are the only clues available. When StreetView snapped the goose pond, it captured trees and the kids in the neighborhood pointed at the weird little vehicle. Once spotted, the StreetView car chugged away down the hill and probably to the Natural Foods Restaurant for some Odwalla.
The Math Club coordinating with the masters of planning in Italy will be interesting indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, October 24, 2010
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