Search: So Yesterday, Relevance Seems So Far Away
February 14, 2011
We knew it would happen. Search is no longer trendy.
“Accenture Identifies Eight Trends Driving the Future of Information Technology” had us doing a double take. The consulting / accounting firm identified current trends, and search is not one of them. Are we wasting our time at Beyond Search? Probably.
The article asserts that the use of business technology is fundamentally changing:
We took a look around the corner and saw a world of IT that barely resembles what enterprise computing looks like today,’ said Gavin Michael, managing director of R&D and alliances, Accenture, who supervised the project. ‘The role of technology changing; it is no longer in a support role. Instead, it is front and center driving business performance. . . .’ One of the most significant trends identified in the report finds that the age of ‘viewing everything through an application lens is coming to an end.’ Instead, platform architectures will be selected primarily to cope with soaring volumes of data and the complexity of data management, not for their ability to support applications.
That last point is as it should be. Finally.
Given that the focus is still on data- data in the cloud, big data, data security- search can’t help but permeate the entire field. What good is all that information if we can’t find the bit we need when we need it? I think search is just transitioning from trend to cornerstone.
Cynthia Murrell February 14, 2011
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Google Borrows Visual Inspiration from Bing
February 14, 2011
In the drop off from Google’s accusation that Bing recycles Google search results, we reread “Google Edges Bing for Visual Attention.”
If we understand the article, Google has managed to edge Bing out once again, but this time it may not be for the better. Evidently Google users are spending more time eyeing search results than Bing users. A study shows that the top three organic search positions on Google attract more visual attention than does Bing.
“While more gaze time is good for sponsored results, the opposite is true for organic results,” said Aga Bojko, User Centric’s Chief Scientist.
Basically, what this means is Google users spend more time searching for the right link while Bing users don’t. The Bing search engine is bringing up more relevant search results than is Google. In my opinion, relevancy trumps “organic position.” I’m searching with Bing. Imitation is, we believe, a form of flattery or a short cut.
Leslie Radcliffe, February 14, 2011
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Microsoft and Its Big Quarter in 2011
February 14, 2011
Beta News published an interesting story, “Three Important Takeaways from Microsoft’s $19.95B Record Quarter.” The point of the story is that 2Q 2011 results were about $20 billion in revenue and $6.64 billion in net income. Beta News noted that the big revenue flow from Windows 7 is over. Microsoft’s margins from its entertainment and devices unit were not so good. The word Beta News used was “awful.” Third, Microsoft’s business division revenues were up. The boost is good news for Microsoft and may suggest that Google will have to do a better job in the enterprise.
We wanted to point out that Microsoft’s quarterly reporting of earnings for its online operations, which incidentally equates to the fourth consecutive loss of $543 billion dollars, was the announcement of the newest Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Online Services. Coincidence? According to ZDNet’s blog the retirement of the existing VP Dave Thompson has been known since last year.
The lucky successor to Thompson is Lee Nackman, current Corporate Vice President of Directory, Access, and Information Protection and no stranger to Microsoft’s Online Services division. That’s good news since Nackman will have his work cut out for him in implementing changes that can nudge the current figures out of the red. At least Microsoft seems to have a direction. ZDNet’s post said:
“Microsoft is creating a common platform across its individual and packaged Online services. The goal is to make Office 365 and its component parts — Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, CRM Online — as well as new Microsoft Online services like the Windows Intune PC management service which will be released in 2011, based on a common billing, provisioning and commerce platform. A common dashboard will allow users to manage any/all of the Microsoft Online services, according to the company’s Office 365 roadmap.”
Now there is more executive shuffling with the Bing top dog moving to the server unit. Will Microsoft stabilize its management team and make progress across its business units? If not, stakeholders may push to break up Microsoft. Is the company too big in its present form? We think it is.
Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2011
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Protected: Whose Metadata for Fast Search?
February 14, 2011
OpenText Opens Advanced Content Analytics Market
February 14, 2011
Following in the footsteps of other vendors, Open Text has opened an advanced content analytics market.
“OpenText Licensing Agreement Brings Advanced Content Analytics to Market” reveals a tie up between OpenText and the National Research Council (Canada). The idea is that new Content Analytics innovations will be added to the ECM Suite and made available by spring 2011. The added content analytics to the ECM Suite will improve data mining and analysis. The key point is:
“Content analytics is the key to extracting business value from social media and text-rich online and enterprise information sources, an essential technology for marketing, online commerce, customer service, and improved search and Web experience. Given the mind-boggling growth in information volumes, no wonder uptake is booming, powered by rapid technical advances from leading-edge vendors such as OpenText.”
Content Analytics will perform data mining that will uncover and show relationships between businesses and other facts. It will be able to find information that a normal search engine wouldn’t find. This agreement is the beginning for OpenText to apply Content Analytics to all its enterprise content management Suite products.
Whitney Grace, February 14, 2011
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The Wages of SEO Sin
February 13, 2011
So Google can be fooled. It’s not nice to fool Mother Google. The inverse, however, is not accurate. Mother Google can take some liberties. Any indexing system can. Objectivity is in the eye of the beholder or the person who pays for results.
Judging from the torrent of posts from “experts”, the big guns of search are saying, “We told you so.” The trigger for this outburst of criticism is the New York Times’s write up about JC Penny. You can try this link, but I expect that it and its SEO crunchy headline will go dark shortly. (Yep, the NYT is in the SEO game too.)
Everyone from AOL news to blog-o-rama wizards are reviling Google for not figuring out how to stop folks from gaming the system. Sigh.
I am not sure how many years ago I wrote the “search sucks” article for Searcher Magazine. My position was clear long before the JC Penny affair and the slowly growing awareness that search is anything BUT objective.
Source: http://www.brianjamesnyc.com/blog/?p=157
In the good old days, database bias was set forth in the editorial policies for online files. You could disagree with what we selected for ABI/INFORM, but we made an effort to explain what we selected, why we selected certain items for the file, and how the decision affected assignment of index terms and classification codes. The point was that we were explaining the mechanism for making a database which we hoped would be useful. We were successful, and we tried to avoid the silliness of claiming comprehensive coverage. We had an editorial policy, and we shaped our work to that policy. Most people in 1980 did not know much about online. I am willing to risk this statement: I don’t think too many people in 2011 know about online and Web indexing. In the absence of knowledge, some remarkable actions occur.
You don’t know what you don’t know or the unknown unknowns. Source: http://dealbreaker.com/donald-rumsfeld/
Flash forward to the Web. Most users assume incorrectly that a search engine is objective. Baloney. Just as we set an editorial policy for ABI/INFORM each crawler and content processing system has similar decisions beneath it.
The difference is that at ABI/INFORM we explained our bias. The modern Web and enterprise search engines don’t. If a system tries to explain what it does, most of the failed Web masters, English majors working as consultants, and unemployed lawyers turned search experts just don’t care.
Search and content processing are complicated businesses, and the appetite for the gory details about certain issues are of zero interest to most professionals. Here’s a quick list of “decisions” that must be made for a basic search engine:
- How deep will we crawl? Most engines set a limit. No one, not even Google, has the time or money to follow every link.
- How frequently will we update? Most search engines have to allocate resources in order to get a reasonable index refresh. Sites that get zero traffic don’t get updated too often. Sites that are sprawling and deep may get three of four levels of indexing. The rest? Forget it.
- What will we index? Most people perceive the various Web search systems as indexing the entire Web. Baloney. Bing.com makes decisions about what to index and when, and I find that it favors certain verticals and trendy topics. Google does a bit better, but there are bluebirds, canaries, and sparrows. Bluebirds get indexed thoroughly and frequently. See Google News for an example. For Google’s Uncle Sam, a different schedule applies. In between, there are lots of sites and lots of factors at play, not the least of which is money.
- What is on the stop list? Yep, a list can kill index pointers, making the site invisible.
- When will we revisit a site with slow response time?
- What actions do we take when a site is owned by a key stakeholder?
Google: How Big?
February 13, 2011
Google is an immense enterprise. It’s tendrils touch every corner of the Internet and a website does not exist that has not turned up on the results page. So how big is Google, really? Smashing Apps tried to answer that question: “The Massive Size of Google (Infographic).” Google was conceived as an experimental project back in 1996 and by American dream standards they’ve succeeded beyond ken.
“Till now it gets so many faces and expanded like an open sky. But there are so many of us who love to see the statistics. Here, we have found an infographic in which you can see the massive size of Google in numbers.”
The infographic visualization puts Google in an understandable perspective. If you’re familiar with children’s literature it reads like How Much is a Million? by David M. Schwartz and Seven Kellog. It’ll bring out your internal intellectual child , however, don’t take the information for fact. How are we supposed to determine how accurate the data is, when we can’t conceivably measure the Internet? Google. Big. Real big.
Whitney Grace, February 13, 2011
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Man vs. Machine: IBM against Humanness
February 13, 2011
CNN interviewed author Stephen Baker, for a look Behind-the-scenes with IBM’s ‘Jeopardy!’ Computer, Watson. Receiving attention from computer experts and non-experts alike, IBM will put artificial intelligence to the test on the iconic Jeopardy stage.
“The “Watson” IBM computer, which has been in development for four years, will be matched against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, two of Jeopardy’s champions. The episodes are scheduled to be aired February 14 to 16.”
As viewers tune in to see how Watson fares against America’s brightest, some will be reminded of the game show scandals of the 1950’s. In “The $64,000 Question,” an IBM sorting machine gave the illusion that questions were randomly selected, but behind the scenes some contestants were being favored with questions chosen to compliment their expertise. The quiz show “Twenty-One” was also rigged; all aspects were choreographed to improve ratings and please sponsors.
With these scandals in the cultural memory, many will remain suspicious if Watson bests his foes, wanting proof that it was indeed a fair fight. One thing is certain: It IS television and everything on TV is real, just like reality programming.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 13, 2011
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Greenplum, Big Data, and an Open Source Card
February 13, 2011
Wichita Business Journal has a write-up called “EMC Greenplum Introduces Free Community Edition of ‘Big Data’ Tools for Developers and Data Scientists.” EMC Corporation is one of the world’s leaders in information infrastructure solutions and it is releasing a free edition of the EMC Greenplum Database. This database product offers massively parallel processing, analytic algorithms, and data mining tools. This was announced at the 2011 O’Reilly Strata Conference. The key point was:
“Building on earlier Greenplum “Big Data” breakthroughs, like the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, the new EMC Greenplum Community Edition removes the cost barrier to entry for big data power tools empowering large numbers of developers, data scientists, and other data professionals. This free set of tools enables the community to not only better understand their data, gain deeper insights and better visualize insights, but to also contribute and participate in the development of next-generation tools and solutions.”
EMC Corporation is geared towards first-time users and current Greenplum customers. First-time users will benefit from business analytics environment and experimenting with its tools. Current customers can easily update their older versions. Our opinion, EMC and “free.” We are curious about commercial companies jumping on the “community” bandwagon.
Whitney Grace, February 12, 2011
Omnica Makes a Move
February 12, 2011
The U.K.’s Omnica brings to the U.S. its tools for multichannel management, the process of syncing orders through sources from Web site to storefront. “A Look at Omnica’s Software Suite for the U.S. ” at Multichannel Merchant reviews their offerings in detail.
Among the highlights are tools to support multiple Web site versions with different languages and currencies. Helpful automated processes include upselling, reordering, emailing, and follow- up notations. The reviewers are enthusiastic about the software’s item management and promotions functions, as well as it’s master planning/ forecasting module. See the above link for many more details.
Omnica’s website says of its company:
“Omnica builds solutions for multi-channel retail, based on Microsoft’s impressive Dynamics AX product. . . . No-one better understands software applications for the sector, and no other vendor combines Microsoft Dynamics’ powerful product solution with a single focus multi-channel merchants’ requirements.”
We think this is important because Omnica could move into e-commerce markets that certain search vendors have been working hard to keep in their tent. Omnica could be the camel that pokes its nose into that tent and woos away some significant customers. Warrants watching we think. Brainware has had success moving into the back office business process sector. Omnica may have a play with its strategy too.
Leslie Radcliffe, February 11, 2011
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