Instagram Promises Improved Search
June 15, 2015
Frustrated with the abysmal search functionality at Instagram? Rejoice, for Wired tells us that, soon, “Better Search Will Transform How You Use Instagram.” Instagram’s cofounder Mike Krieger admitted that it is currently difficult for users to discover many photos that would interest them, but also asserted the company knows it must do better. Why, then, wasn’t search a priority earlier in the company’s history, and why are they talking about this now? Writer Julia Greenberg informs us:
“All that could soon change, given that Instagram has Facebook on its team. The social media titan, which acquired Instagram in 2012, is targeting Google itself as it develops a robust search system to make both its own platform and the whole web searchable through its own app. But while Facebook users post links, status updates, news, opinions, and photos, Instagram is almost completely visual. That means Instagram needs to teach its search engine to see. Krieger said his team has worked on a project to better understand how to automate sight. ‘Computer vision and machine learning have really started to take off, but for most people the whole idea of what is a computer seeing when it’s looking at an image is relatively obscure,’ Krieger said.”
Ah, prodded by their Facebook overlords; makes sense. Instagram isn’t ready to hand the site over to algorithms entirely, though. Their human editorial team still works to help users find the best images. Apparently, they feel humans are more qualified to choose photos with the most emotional impact (go figure). Krieger sees Instagram developing into a “storytelling” destination, the place users to go connect with world events through images: “the real-time view into the world,” as Krieger puts it. We agree that implementing an effective search system should help toward that goal.
Cynthia Murrell, June 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Solcara Is The Best! Ra Ra Ra!
June 15, 2015
Thomson-Reuters is a world renowned news syndication, but the company also has its own line of search software called Solcara Federated Search also known as Solcara SolSearch.” In a cheerleading press release, Q-resolve highlights Solcara’s features and benefits: “Solcara Legal Search, Federated Search And Know How.” Solcara allows users to search multiple information resources, including intranets, databases, Knowledge Management, and library and document management systems. It returns accurate results according to the inputted search terms or keywords. In other words, it acts like an RSS feed combined with Google.
Solcara also has a search product specially designed for those in the legal profession and the press release uses a smooth reading product description to sell it:
“Solcara legal Search is as easy to use as your favorite search engine. With just one search you can reference internal documents and approved legal information resources simultaneously without the need for large scale content indexing, downloading or restructuring. What’s more, you can rely on up-to-date content because all searches are carried out in real time.”
The press release also mentions some other tools, case studies, and references the semantic Web. While Solcara does sound like a good product and comes from a reliable new aggregator like Thomson-Reuters, the description and organization of the press release makes it hard to understand all the features and who the target consumer group is. Do they want to sell to the legal profession and only that group or do they want to demonstrate how Solcara can be adapted to all industries that digest huge information amounts? The importance of advertising is focusing the potential buyer’s attention. This one jumps all over the place.
Whitney Grace, June 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
What Twitter Should Do: The New York Times Opines with Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Ideas
June 14, 2015
Well, advice from the gray lady about what a digital company should do is fascinating. Frankly, I would be more inclined to go with Snoop Dogg than a newspaper which seems to have made floundering and gesticulating its principal business strategy since Jeff Pemberton walked out the door 40 years ago.
Wowza.
Navigate to “for Twitter, Future Means Here and Now.” Keep in mind that this link may require you to pay money or go on an Easter Egg Hunt for locate a hard copy of the newspaper. Not my problemo, gentle reader. It is the dead tree New York Times’ approach to information.
Here’s one of the passages I circle in yellow and then put a black Sharpie exclamation point next to the sentences:
Twitter, as a service, is many things to many people at different times. It is one of the world’s best sources for news and for jokes about news, a playground for professional networking, and a haven for that most human of pastimes, idle gossip. But because the service offers so many uses, Twitter, as a company, has had trouble focusing on one purpose for which it should aim to excel. The lack of concentration has damaged its prospects with users, investors and advertisers. Choosing a single intent for Twitter — and working to make that a reality — ought to be the next chief’s main task. Among the many uses that Twitter fulfills as a social network, there is one it is uniquely suited for: as a global gathering space for live events. When something goes down in the real world — when a plane crashes, an earthquake strikes, a basketball game gets crazy, or Kanye West hijacks an awards show — Twitter should aim to become the first and only app that people load up to comment on the news.
There you go. Make Twitter into a human intermediated version of the New York Times, lite edition. More data, less filling, and you trim your IQ as well.
I find that journalistic enterprises in the midst of revenue, profit, and innovation swamps have advice to give to digital companies fascinating. I wonder if the gray lady assumes that the stakeholders, Twitter management, and the advisers to the firm have failed to craft options, ideas, tactics, and strategies.
My hunch is that like many Internet centric communication services one rides a curve up due to novelty and apparent utility. Then a new thing comes along like WhatsApp or Jott, and the potential users of the older service just surf newness. Once the cachet fades, a phenomenon with which the New York Times may be familiar, the options just don’t deliver.
Amusing to me, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2015
Forget Oracle. Think about Vendors of Proprietary Enterprise Search Systems.
June 14, 2015
Database revenue doom looms for Oracle. Who did not know that, Mr. BigTable and Ms. Spark? Navigate to “Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Souped-Up Free Software.” The write up makes this point:
The impact [use of proprietary software] shows up in Oracle’s sales of new software licenses, which have declined for seven straight quarters compared with the period a year earlier. New licenses made up 25 percent of total revenue in fiscal 2014, down from 28 percent a year earlier — a sign the company is becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from supporting and maintaining products at existing customers and having a harder time finding new business. Oracle reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings next week. To blunt this, the Redwood City, California-based company is expanding efforts in cloud computing, which will let it sell packaged high-margin services to customers. That may help balance the slowdown in the basic business. It also operates an open-source database called MySQL.
The unarticulated issue is the word “startup.” Research we conducted and which was verified by various third party sources revealed in 2012 that open source software was getting more attention from Fortune 1000 companies. The reason was that these outfits had the resources to deal with the excitement open source software provides in a Blue Apron type package.
If this Bloomberg write up is correct, the startup crowd is stepping away from Microsoft software and other well known brands toward open source. One can raise prices in the Fortune 1000 arena for a short time. Then, as Thomson Reuters- and Reed Elsevier-type companies have learned, the big boys just go a different direction. Thus, the start up and mid sized market become more and more important to proprietary software vendors.
When the small folks head for the hills, where’s the growth? Price increases? Me too plays? Marketing two steps?
I don’t think so.
Ergo. Trouble ahead for Oracle, but the challenges facing the down market and up market proprietary enterprise search vendors are going to become more severe if Bloomie is on the beam.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2015
LinkedIn: A Pinot for a Flavor Profile with a Narrow Market
June 13, 2015
LinkedIn is the social network for professionals. The company meets the needs of individuals who want to be hired and companies looking to find individuals to fill jobs. We use the system to list articles I have written. If you examine some of the functions of LinkedIn, you may discover that sorting is a bit of disappointment.
LinkedIn has been working hard to find technical solutions to its data management challenges. One of the company’s approaches has been to create software, make it available as open source, and then publicize the contributions.
A recent example is the article “LinkedIn Fills Another SQL-on-Hadoop Niche.” What is interesting in the write up is that the article does not make clear what LinkedIn does with this software home brew. I learned:
Pinot was designed to provide the company with a way to ingest “billions of events per day” and serve “thousands of queries per second” with low latency and near-real-time results — and provide analytics in a distributed, fault-tolerant fashion.
On the surface, it seems that Hadoop is used as a basked. Then the basket’s contents is filtered using SQL queries. But for me the most interesting information in the write up is what the system does not do; for example:
- The SQL-like query language used with Pinot does not have the ability to perform table joins
- The data is (sic) strictly read-only
- Pinot is narrow in focus.
Has LinkedIn learned that its internal team needs more time and money to make Pinot a mash up with wider appeal? Commercial companies going open source is often a signal that the assumptions of the in house team have collided with management’s willingness to pay for a sustained coding commitment.
Stephen E Arnold, June 13, 2015
Is Time Running Out for Non Performing, Venture Funded Enterprise Search Vendors?
June 12, 2015
Gee, impatient venture capital firms, grousing partners hungry for a payday, and agitated stakeholders, are these usually cheerful folks worrying about getting their money back with a hefty profit? My hunch is that some who wrote checks might be thinking about a vacation at WalMart instead of a couple of weeks bouncing around Europe or looking at animals in Africa from a Land Rover.
Navigate to “Something Is Rotting under Silicon Valley.” The point of the write up is that the sunshine and unicorn crowd may be getting nervous. The write up points out:
Only seven VC-backed tech companies have gone public so far this year, with just one more (Fitbit) currently on the pricing calendar for June. At this rate, 2015 could go down as the slowest year for VC-backed tech IPOs since the throes of the financial crisis. Moreover, there have been only two strategic sales of VC-backed tech companies valued at over $1 billion (Lynda.com to LinkedIn and Virtustream to EMC).
Forget training (online and walking around the parking lot). The worry may be that some outfits which have sucked in tens of millions of dollars may have — gasp! — liquidity issues and a downward valuation.
The article states:
A less charitable rationale is that too few of these companies [VC bets] have imposed the tough internal discipline — particularly in terms of burn rate — that public equity investors demand. Either way, limited partners in VC funds aren’t getting paid.
What about search? With the implosion of the proprietary search sector and the vaporization of substantive news reports about bubbling sales and profits, the enterprise search sector looks like a The Man with No Man desert scene. The LinkedIn enterprise search groups are somewhat low key. Hello, is anyone there? The automated Paper.Li enterprise search paper is stuffed with information about Big Data. More importantly, Attivio has pivoted… again. Coveo whips the customer support thing. Lucidworks is promising to have a mission. The European enterprise search vendors are making little noise. When did you hear about Exalead, Intrafind, or the stub of Fast deep in the folds of Microsoftland?
My hunch is that this Fortune Magazine article has identified what may be a “Houston, we have a problem” moment for venture funded search vendors. Is there a fix? Nah, just use Elastic or another open source solution. Good news for those who need utility search. Bad news for the bankish MBAs who bet that certain investments would just spin cash.
Here’s another passage I noted in the article:
If I’m a venture capitalist, it might be time to stop staring at the sun and take a peek at the darkening clouds.
Yep, might be time to check out the actual weather, not the pretend environment in those PowerPoints.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2015
Short Honk: Snowden Document Inventory
June 12, 2015
Short honk: Curious about Snowden documents? If so, navigate to “Snowden Doc Search.” The site provides a snippet and some tags. We have seen other Snowden collections, but we view these with skepticism and indifference. You, gentle reader, may find the approach just what you need as a source of jargon and milspec graphics.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12 2015
Mongo the Destroyer and JSON and the Datanauts Team Up
June 12, 2015
Hadoop fans, navigate to “A Better Mousetrap: A JSON Data Warehouse Takes on Hadoop.” There are a couple of very interesting statements in this write up. Those who do the Hadoop the loop know that certain operations are sloooow. Other operations are not efficient for certain types of queries. One learns about these Hadoop the Loops over time, but the issues are often a surprise to the Hadoop/Big Data cheerleaders.
The article reports that SonarW may have a good thing with its Mongo and JSON approach. For example, I highlighted:
In other words, Hadoop always tries to maximize resource utilization. But sometimes you need to go grab something real quick and you don’t need 100 nodes to do it.
That means the SonarW approach might address some sharp focus, data analysis tasks. I also noted:
What could work to SonarW’s advantage is its simplicity and lower cost (starting at $15,000 per terabyte) compared to traditional data warehouses and MPP systems. That might motivate even non-MongoDB-oriented companies to at least kick the tires.
Okay, good. One question which crossed my mind, will SonarW’s approach provide some cost and performance capabilities that offer some options to XML folks thinking JSON thoughts?
I think SonarW warrants watching.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2015
Google Information Retrieval: Not Just Acceptable. Insanely Better
June 12, 2015
Like the TSA’s perfect bag, Google’s search is the apex of findability, according to “Google Now Has Just Gotten Insanely Better and Very Freaky.” What causes such pinnacles of praise? According to the write up:
Google announced at an event in Paris a Location Aware Search feature that can answer a new set of questions, without the user having to ask questions that should include addresses or proper place names. Asking Google Now questions like “what is this museum?” or “when was this building built?” in proximity of the Louvre in Paris will get you answers about the Louvre, as Google will be able to use your location and understand what you meant by “this” or “this building”.
How does the feature work when one is looking for information about the location of a Dark Web hidden services server in Ashburn, Virginia? Ah, not so helpful perhaps? What’s the value of a targeted message in this insanely better environment? Good question.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2015
Search Cheerleader Seeks Text Analytics Unicorns
June 12, 2015
The article on Venture Beat whimsically titled Where Are the Text Analytics Unicorns provides yet another cheerleader for search. The article uses Aileen Lee’s “unicorn” concept of a company begun since 2003 and valued at over a billion dollars. (“Super unicorns” are companies valued at over a hundred billion dollars like Facebook.) The article asks why no text analytics companies have joined this exclusive club? Candidates include Clarabridge, NetBase and Medallia.
“In the end, the answer is a very basic one. Contrast the text analytics sector with unicorns that include Uber — Travis Kalanick’s company — and Airbnb, Evernote, Flipkart, Square, Pinterest, and their ilk. They play to mass markets — they’re a magic mix of revenue, data, platform, and pizazz — in ways that text analytics doesn’t. The tech companies on the unicorn list — Cloudera, MongoDB, Pivotal — provide or support essential infrastructure that covers a broad set of needs.”
Before coming to this conclusion, the article posits other possible reasons as well, such as the sheer number of companies competing in the field, or even competition from massive companies like IBM and Google. But these are dismissed for the more optimistic end note that essentially suggests we give the text analytics unicorns a year. Caution advised.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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