More from IBM Watson: More PR That Is
May 19, 2011
IBM keeps flogging Watson, which seems to be Lucene wrapped with IBM goodness. We have reported on the apparent shift in search strategy at IBM; to wit, search now embraces content analytics. Many vendors are trying to spit shine worn toe cap oxfords in an effort to make search into a money machine. Good luck with that.
Network World tells us that “Watson Teaches ‘Big Analytics.’” Ah, more Watson hyperbole.
Skillful big analytics is necessary to make use of big data, of course, and in most cases speed is also a factor. Watson demonstrated proficiency at both with its Jeopardy win. Now, IBM hopes to use those abilities in enterprise products. As well they should; the need for such tools is expanding rapidly.
“Businesses successfully utilizing big analytics can take this process of knowledge discovery even further, identifying questions, exploring the answers and asking new questions based on those answers. This iterative quality of data analysis, rather than incremental exploration, can lead to a deeper understanding of business and markets, and begin to answer questions never before considered.”
Yep, we think we get it: Big data and a robust big analytic product are increasingly necessary to stay competitive. What we want to know, though, is this: when is all this going to change Web or Internet search? When will the Watson product be “a product”? Enough PR. That’s easy. How about a useful service we can test and compare to other systems?
Cynthia Murrell May 19, 2011
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Google and Its Operating Systems
May 19, 2011
Via email I received a spam from Information Week. My goodness the real publishers must be struggling. Spamming me to read articles already identified by my newsreader, various aggregation services, and my own Overflight system. I had seen the story “Google’s Game Changers: Are They Enough”. I just finished my Enterprise Technology Management column for June 2011, and I was surprised at the sharp difference between the “real” journalist’s take and mine.
Here’s what struck me as the core of the big time publication’s approach:
Wise CIOs won’t make bets based on what they desire, but on the desire of their customers–both internal and external. Employees and customers want iPads and iPhones, CIOs want BlackBerries–though maybe that’s less true today, as evidenced by the explosion of the mobile device management market. Today, Google falls somewhere in between.
The article mixes up technology, users, and “desires”.
Not me. I think the Google play at its Google I/O conference revealed three things. None of these was the pivot point of the Information Week write up.
First, Google is throwing lots of stuff against the wall. The problem is that much of the “stuff” is like a poorly baked cupcake. The surface looks good but the center is a moist sticky mess. How much of the “new” is ready for use by consumers or professionals in an organization. Most of the announcements are in the “will be coming soon” category. The reality is more of the creative chaos that has cost Google its brand leadership and its cachet.
Second, the cloud which Google makes as the centerpiece of its “coming soon” or “to be” services is not ready for prime time. Didn’t Blogger.com, Google’s cloud based blogging service, crash during the Google I/O conference? Didn’t cloud leader Amazon fail a week earlier. The fallout from the Sony fiasco and the flame out of the Microsoft hosted Exchange service take place during the Google I/O conference. If these events did not bring a dose of reality to the “to be” services, I missed it.
Finally, the momentum in online is, in my opinion, not Google’s. Sure, Google is a big company, but the action is not the Wal-Mart type of bargain hunting or the frantic attempt to catch up with Apple. The direction is for organizations to look for a balance of open source, hosted, and traditional on premises and proprietary services. The key is “balance”. A massive knee jerk shift toward the future or away from the past is not in the cards in the next 12 months, maybe even longer. The reason: risk and concern about costs.
The fact that Google is competing with itself is of little interest to me. Google, like Microsoft, is less like a battleship and more like 10,000 sail boats generally trying to go in the same direction. Collisions are inevitable. The important issue to me is the context in which companies and consumers operate.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2011
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Squabbling over Categorized Search
May 19, 2011
Retention JackJacks published an interesting article called “In 2006, Hakia’s Categorized Search, Hakia Galleries Was Introduced. Bing Introduces Similar Feature” seems to provide another example of me-too innovation in search.
We don’t know who invented categorized outputs. Maybe the prototype I saw at Lycos two decades ago? The text only outputs from SDC Orbit in the late 1970s? Gone are the days of searching books for information, the Internet is the first place people turn when searching for facts. Realizing this, search engines have become more advanced to expedite the search process. One such advancement is categorized search, a feature introduced by Hakia in 2006 and now being used by Bing.
The CEO of Hakia stated, “Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” in regard to Bing’s new feature. Hakia received many accolades for the introduction of categorized search, which has proven to be a popular and useful feature. Hakia was founded in 2004 and continues to develop new technology with “potential to revolutionize the search industry.”
The article on this website was nearly impossible to decipher as nearly every sentence had some sort of typo or grammatical error. The content of this article certainly had the potential to be interesting and helpful information, but the lack of editing completely tarnishes the appeal of the article.
Robert Fanning, May 19, 2011
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Google the Builder of Buildings
May 19, 2011
Google has many interests. These range from alternative energy to streaming first run movies. We found Google’s push into construction interesting and probably long overdue.
The San Jose MercuryNews.com reveals “Google to Build Its Own Office Space” in order to accommodate a wealth of new hires. This is an unprecedented experience for the company, and they are thinking big:
“Google has hired Ingenhoven Architects, a German firm that specializes in sustainable architecture and has completed award-winning green designs from Sydney to Stuttgart, to develop plans for what could total nearly 600,000 square feet of space.”
The choice of Ingenhoven shows the company is serious about both sustainability and visual impact. Oh, and that they don’t plan to skimp on costs.
In fact, Google has already plunked down plenty of money for land in the Mountain View, California, area. All this to pave the way for an unprecedented number of employees the company plans to add this year, “surpassing the 6,131 people it added in 2007.” Roughly a third of them are expected to work at the home location. Now if only the governments of China, Germany, and Switzerland were as accommodating at the officials responsible for building permits in Mountain View, California, and adjacent municipalities. Construction could begin as early as next year. Convincing nation states? Might take longer.
Cynthia Murrell, May 19, 2011
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The SharePoint Skeleton Exposed
May 19, 2011
Short honk: I absolutely love diagrams that explain SharePoint. First, end users do not want to look at this diagram. Second, chief financial officers must be distracted so that knowledge of this diagram does not reach their eyes. Consultants, certified SharePoint experts, and assorted SharePoint experts—You folks can wallow in this diagram all day long.
Here’s the “SharePoint 2010 Development Platform Stack.”
Elegant, clear, and inter-dependencies galore. Now what happens when you toss in Fast Search, its hundreds of configuration settings, and the bits and pieces needed to make Fast Search the lean, mean retrieval machine of your dreams? Well, you get to spend lots of time, brain cycles, and money to get everything humming right along.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2011
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Protected: Do You Need Requirements for SharePoint Projects?
May 19, 2011
Search: An Information Retrieval Fukushima?
May 18, 2011
Information about the scale of the horrific nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is now becoming more widely known.
Expertise and Smoothing
My interest in the event is the engineering of a necklace of old-style reactors and the problems the LOCA (loss of coolant accident) triggered. The nagging thought I had was that today’s nuclear engineers understood the issues with the reactor design, the placement of the spent fuel pool, and the risks posed by an earthquake. After my years in the nuclear industry, I am quite confident that engineers articulated these issues. However, the technical information gets “smoothed” and simplified. The complexities of nuclear power generation are well known at least in engineering schools. The nuclear engineers are often viewed as odd ducks by the civil engineers and mechanical engineers. A nuclear engineer has to do the regular engineering stuff of calculating loads and looking up data in hefty tomes. But the nukes need grounding in chemistry, physics, and math, lots of math. Then the engineer who wants to become a certified, professional nuclear engineer has some other hoops to jump through. I won’t bore you with the details, but the end result of the process produces people who can explain clearly a particular process and its impacts.
Does your search experience emit signs of troubles within?
The problem is that art history majors, journalists, failed Web masters, and even Harvard and Wharton MBAs get bored quickly. The details of a particular nuclear process makes zero sense to someone more comfortable commenting about the color of Mona Lisa’s gown. So “smoothing” takes place. The ridges and outcrops of scientific and statistical knowledge get simplified. Once a complex situation has been smoothed, the need for hard expertise is diminished. With these simplifications, the liberal arts crowd can “reason” about risks, costs, upsides, and downsides.
A nuclear fall out map. The effect of a search meltdown extends far beyond the boundaries of a single user’s actions. Flawed search and retrieval has major consequences, many of which cannot be predicted with high confidence.
Everything works in an acceptable or okay manner until there is a LOCA or some other problem like a stuck valve or a crack in a pipe in a radioactive area of the reactor. Quickly the complexities, risks, and costs of the “smoothed problem” reveal the fissures and crags of reality.
Web search and enterprise search are now experiencing what I call a Fukushima event. After years of contentment with finding information, suddenly the dashboards are blinking yellow and red. Users are unable to find the information needed to do their job or something as basic as locate a colleague’s telephone number or office location. I have separated Web search and enterprise search in my professional work.
I want to depart for a moment and consider the two “species” of search as a single process before the ideas slip away from me. I know that Web search processes publicly accessible content, has the luxury of ignoring servers with high latency, and filtering content to create an index that meets the vendors’ needs, not the users’ needs. I know that enterprise search must handle diverse content types, must cope with security and access controls, and perform more functions that one of those two inch wide Swiss Army knives on sale at the airport in Geneva. I understand. My concern is broader is this write up. Please, bear with me.
New Landscape of Enterprise Search Details Available
May 18, 2011
Stephen E Arnold’s new report about enterprise search will be shipping in two weeks. The New Landscape of Enterprise Search: A Critical Review of the Market and Search Systems provides a fresh perspective on a fascinating enterprise application.
The centerpiece of the report are new analyses of search and retrieval systems offered by:
Unlike the “pay to play” analyses from industry consultant and self-appointed “experts,” Mr. Arnold’s approach is based on his work in developing search systems and researching search systems to support certain inquiries into systems’ performance and features.
, to focus on the broad changes which have roiled the enterprise search and content processing market. Unlike his first “encyclopedia” of search systems and his study of value added indexing systems, this new report takes an unvarnished look at the business and financial factors that make enterprise search a challenge. Then he uses a historical base to analyze the upsides and downsides of six vendors’ search solutions. He puts the firm’s particular technical characteristics in sharp relief. A reader gains a richer understanding of what makes a particular vendor’s system best suited for specific information access applications.
Other features of the report include:
- Diagrams of system architecture and screen shots of exemplary implementations
- Lists of resellers and partners of the profiled vendors
- A comprehensive glossary which attempts to cut through the jargon and marketing baloney which impedes communication about search and retrieval
- A ready-reference table for more than 20 vendors’ enterprise search solutions
- An “outlook” section which offers candid observations about the attrition and financial health of the hundreds of companies offering search solutions.
More information about the report is available at http://goo.gl/0vSql. You may reserve your copy by writing seaky2000 @ yahoo dot com. Full ordering information and pricing will be available in the near future.
Donald C Anderson, May 18, 2011
Post paid for by Stephen E Arnold
The Panda Attacks Again: An Epidemic Signals a Relevance Crisis
May 18, 2011
“The Second Wave of Google’s Panda” from Digital Trends, via Yahoo News, takes Google to task for the Panda aftermath, complete with screenshot examples.
The article points to several key Panda problems, in this wave as well as the prior one. First, “scraper sites” are still making it through. Secondly, it seems that U.K. sites get preferential treatment even in the U.S.
The third point is the most sinister. Following mention of Google’s list of questions for webmasters about site quality, writer Molly McHugh states:
“There’s ample concern that Google’s control over search means that it gets to determine the answers to these questions, many of which can vary widely due to personal opinion. And some sites have questioned the fact that no Google-owned properties have been negatively impacted.”
McHugh also points to a lack of response from Google to complaints from affected sites. Many eyes are on Google, which is warranted given its search stranglehold. Stephen E Arnold, the owner of this blog, has just completed his draft of his June 2011 Information Today column. For that interview, he spoke with Web masters who have suffered severe Panda bites. Bottom line: PageRank seems to be wrapped in layers of code which now reduces relevance to a lottery bet. Look for the column in Information Today Magazine sometime in the next three months. Ah, print! I think the Panda epidemic will still be with us then, however.
Cynthia Murrell May 18, 2011
Search, Sharing, and a Shift in Content
May 18, 2011
Sharing is caring, and Digital Inspiration’s “How People Share Content Online and with Whom?” has the numbers to prove it.
When folks want to share content with friends, 92 percent use social networks. When it comes to family, that number dips to 76 percent. Other popular ways of sharing content with friends and family are via e-mail and blogs.
So the survey begs the question, why search when you can quickly and easily ask your friends and family – people you know and trust? The implications for Google should not be underestimated. It isn’t enough to be a search engine anymore. How far behind Facebook is Google. You be the judge. Here are five Google social media efforts as noted in March 2010 by TopRank’s “Google the Social Media Company”: Google Social Search, Google Buzz, Twitter and Facebook feeds in search results, various social acquisitions, and Google Wave. The clock is ticking as market and mind share slips away.
What’s this mean? Brute force search is not likely to work in this new information sharing space.
Rita Safranek, May 18, 2011
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