Search Exposes Hackers
September 22, 2014
Hackers get their boldness from their anonymity and it encourages them to do malicious acts. Engadget has an interesting article that will strike fear into hackers: “Search Engine Turns The Tables On Hackers Exposing Their Info.” Indexeus is a search engine that shares hackers’ information in the same kind of data breaches they create. The search engine’s original purpose was to force the hackers to pay one dollar for every record they wanted to purse from the engine’s index. It is funny, because they had to pay safety money.
Indexeus was accused of extortion, so they had to waive that rule. The new law in the EU might mean something new for the hackers:
“Indexeus founder Jason Relinquo tells security guru Brian Krebs that blacklisting is now free due to the EU’s “right to be forgotten;” he can’t charge for a service that’s supposed to be gratis. That purported desire to obey the law is rather odd when the indexed content is illegal by nature. Look at it this way, though — if any targeted hackers are having second thoughts about their paths in life, this may be the excuse they need to make a clean break.”
Get a clean record? It could work, but it can also be used to cover their tracks. It still is wonderful that search is being used for the powers of good.
Whitney Grace, September 22, 2014
Lucid Works: Really?
September 21, 2014
Editor’s Note: This amusing open letter to Chrissy Lee at Launchsquad Public Relations points out some of the challenges Lucid Imagination (now Lucid Works) faces. Significant competition exists from numerous findability vendors. The market leader in open source search is, in Beyond Search’s view, ElasticSearch.
Dear Ms. Lee,
I sent you an email on September 18, 2014, referring you to my response to Stacy Wechsler at Hired Gun public relations. I told you I would create a prize for the news release you sent me. I am retired, but I don’t have too much time to write for PR “professionals” who send me spam, fail to do some research about my background, and understand the topic addressed in your email.
Some history: I recall the first contact I had from Lucid Imagination in 2008. A fellow named Anil Uberoi sent me an email. He and I had a mutual connection, Mark Krellenstein who was the CTO for Northern Light when it was a search vendor.
I wrote a for fee report for Mr. Uberoi, who shortly thereafter left Lucid for an outfit called Kitana. His replacement was a fellow named David. He left and migrated to another company as well. Then a person named Nancy took over marketing and quickly left for another outfit. My recollection is that in a span of 24 months, Lucid Imagination churned through technical professionals, marketers, and presidents. Open source search, it seemed, was beyond the management expertise of the professionals at Lucid.
Then co founder Mark Krellenstein cut his ties with the firm, I wondered how Mr. Krellenstein could deliver the innovative folders function for Northern Light and flop at Lucid. Odd.
Recently I have been the recipient of several emails sent to my two major email accounts. For me, this is an indication of spam. I knew about the appointment of another president. I read “Trouble at Lucid Works: Lawsuits, Lost Deals, and Layoffs Plague the Search Startup Despite Funding.” Like other pundit-fueled articles, there is probably some truth, some exaggeration, and some errors in the article. The overall impression left on me by the write up is that Lucid Works seems to be struggling.
Your emails to me indicate that you perceive me as a “real” journalist. Call me quirky, but I do not like it when a chipper young person writes me, uses my first name, and then shovels baloney at me. As the purveyor of search silliness for your employer Launchsquad, which seems Lucid Works’ biggest fan and current content marketing agent. Not surprisingly, the new Lucid Fusion products is the Popeil pocket fisherman of search. Fusion slices, dices, chops, and grates. Here’s what Lucid Works allegedly delivers via Lucene/Solr and proprietary code:
- Modular integration. Sorry, Ms. Lee, I don’t know what this means.
- Big Data Discovery Engine. Ms. Lee, Lucid has a search and retrieval system, not a Cybertap, Palantir, or Recorded Future type system.
- Connector Framework. Ms. Lee licensees want connectors included. Salesforce bought Entropy Soft to meet this need. Oracle bought Outside In for the same reason. Even Microsoft includes some connectors with the quite fragile Delve system for Office 365.
- Intelligent Search Services.Ms. Lee, I suggest you read my forthcoming article in KMWorld about smart software. Today, most search services are using the word intelligent when the technology in use has been available for decades.
- Signals Processing.Ms. Lee, I suggest you provide some facts for signals processing. I think in terms of SIGINT, not crude click log file data.
- Advanced Analytics.Ms. Lee, I lecture at several intelligence and law enforcement conferences about “analytics.” The notion of “advanced” analytics is at odds with the standard numerical recipes that most vendors use. The reason “advanced” is not a good word is that there are mathematical methods that can deliver significant return. Unfortunately today’s computer systems cannot get around the computational barriers that bring x86 architectures to their knees.
- Natural Language Search.Ms. Lee, I have been hearing about NLP for many years. Perhaps you have not experimented with the voice search functions on Apple and Android devices? You should. Software does a miserable job of figuring out what a human “means.”
So what?
Frankly I am not confident that Lucid Works can close the gap between your client and ElasticSearch’s. Furthermore, I don’t think Lucid Works can deliver the type of performance available from Searchdaimon or ElasticSearch. The indexing and query processing gap between Lucid Works and Blossom Software is orders of magnitude. How do I know? Well, my team tested Lucid Works’ performance against these systems. Why don’t you know this when you write directly to the person who ran the tests? I sent a copy of the test results to one of Lucid Works’ many presidents.
Do I care about Ms. Lee, the new management team, the investors, or the “new” Lucid?
Nope.
The sun has begun to set on vendors and their agents who employ meaningless jargon to generate interest from potential licensees.
What’s my recommendation? I suggest a person interested in Lucid navigate to my Search Wizards Speak series and read the Lucid Imagination and Lucid Works interviews. Notice how the story drifts. You can find these interviews at www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak.
Why does Lucid illustrate “pivoting”? It is easy to sit around and dream about what software could do. It is another task to deliver software that matches products and services from industry leaders and consistent innovators.
For open source search, I suggest you pay attention to www.Flax.co.uk, www.Searchdaimon.com, www.sphinxsearch.com, and www.elasticsearch.com for starters. Keep in mind that other competitors like IBM and Attivio use open source search technology too.
You will never have the opportunity to work directly for me. I can offer one small piece of advice: Do your homework before writing about search to me.
Your pal,
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2014
Russian Content: Tough to Search If Russia Is Not on the Internet
September 20, 2014
Forget running queries on Yandex.ru if Russia disconnects from the Internet. Sure, there may be workarounds, but these might invite some additional scrutiny. Why am I suggesting that some Russian content becomes unsearchable. Well, I believed the story “Russia to Be Disconnected from the Internet.” Isn’t Pravda a go to source for accurate, objective information?
The story asserts:
This is not a question of disconnecting Russia from the international network, yet, Russian operators will need to set up their equipment in a way to be able to disconnect the Russian Internet from the global network quickly in case of emergency, the newspaper wrote. As for the state of emergency, it goes about both military actions and large-scale riots in the country. In addition, the government reportedly discusses a possibility to empower the state with the function to administer domains. Currently this is a function of a public organization – the Coordination Center for the National Domain of the Internet. The purpose of the possible measure is not to isolate Russia from the outside world, but to protect the country, should the USA, for example, decide to disconnect Russia from the system of IP-addresses. It will be possible to avoid this threat, if Russia has a local regulator to distribute IP-addresses inside the country, rather than the ICANN, controlled by the United States government. This requires operators to set up “mirrors” that will be able to receive user requests and forward them to specific domain names.
Interesting. Who is being kept in the information closet? I suppose it depends on one’s point of view. Need an update for Sphinx Search? There will be a solution because some folks will plan ahead.
Stephen E Arnold, September 20, 2014
Hakia Down
September 18, 2014
We ran a check on the search and content processing vendors in our file. The Hakia.com site appears to be down.
Hakia was a developer of semantic search and offered several demonstrations of its technology. To learn about the company, the interview with Riza C. Berkan, navigate to this Search Wizards Speak issue.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2014
BA Insight New Hire Likes His Job
September 17, 2014
Navigate to “My BA Insight Enterprise Search Adventure Begins.” The enthusiasm, confidence, and Super Bowl winning attitude rips off my screen. With new executive and venture funding, BA Insight seems to be a go to solution. But is the company too closely allied with Microsoft and the aging SharePoint product? Will the forthcoming Delve (a variation on the vision for Fast Search & Transfer revealed during a talk at CERN in 2007) put pressure on the SharePoint centric outfits? I just don’t know.
Here’s the passage I find interesting. I did not have one of the goslings “fix up” the capitalization errors or add links.
As I’ve been ramping up I’ve been learning a lot about their products and solutions. BA Insight use to be known as the connector company. The BA Insight Longitude Connectors can connect Microsoft SharePoint to more than 30 enterprise systems for information access and cross-platform search. They have so many connectors that allow SharePoint 2013, 2010, FAST and previous versions of SharePoint connect to a huge variety of backend systems. Here are a few examples: Documentum, eRooms, Websphere, Hummingbird, LiveLink, SAP, Siebel, Notes, Autonomy, FileNet, Connections, Opentext, SalesForce, Netdocs, SQL, Docushare, and a bunch of different legal systems… I heard they recently setup a connector for Jive and are open to building a connector for companies that need one to other systems not listed. Even with all of that, I find they don’t want to be known as simply a connector company since they really have a platform for enterprise search. The autoclassify stuff is brilliant. It helps set properties on your content based on your managed metadata and with a set of rules for both content already in SharePoint and for the content that will stay in these other systems. You really need to have good metadata so you can drill down and filter your search results quickly and easily and that’s where their rich search UI comes in providing search parts that give you the ability to drill in without needing to know boolean search. At that point it’s the smart previews that save you time. On top of the Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013, you get previews for PDF, ZIP, and a huge variety of other formats including the old office formats that you’d otherwise miss including to all of those systems I mentioned. There’s even more, but I think this is a good start for understanding a few of the top products. As an example they’ve been doing some really innovative work on hybrid search and real federation where the results are in one stream.
My question is, “Why would anyone use SharePoint when BA Insight can fill the bill as “enterprise search experts”? I think Fast Search had a good sense of what it had to do to address the limitations of its technology. The question is, “Will Microsoft want partners to siphon off revenue from the mother ship?”
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2014
Sir Thomas Bayes Does Art. Versatile Guy.
September 17, 2014
Navigate to FindMeLike. Click on “Try this demo.” You will have access to a Bayesian-centric visual search tool. The idea is that you click on an image you like. The system then locates similar images.
The click narrows the result set. Each poster is available for sale. But I could not figure out how to move to the shopping cart.
How well does a Bayesian-centric system work? Try and use the comments section of this blog to share you opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2014
Microsoft Azure Search is the Search of the Future
September 17, 2014
For a preview of Azure Search, visit Microsoft Azure. The article promises that Azure search is a breakthrough in “search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development.” For fast search, the future is Azure Search, the cloud platform that allows for the building, deployment and management of applications. Developers will be pleased at the ability to incorporate search without the infrastructure to worry about. The Azure client libraries are open source and available through GitHub. The article includes this information,
“Azure Search boosts development speed thanks to support for familiar tools and a consistent global cloud platform. Quickly provision search and start populating the index to get up and running quickly. Like other Azure services, Search uses familiar REST API calls. The worldwide network of Azure datacenters means reduced search latency no matter where your application is located.”
Pricing details are also available here. The pricing details include this information,
“Azure Search is sold in combinable “search units” that have a defined queries-per-second (QPS) benchmark and document count (index storage) benchmark associated with each unit.”
By combining units, users can achieve higher QPS and/or higher document count. Currently Microsoft is offering a month-long free trial, which should be enough time for anyone to ensure that it is worth the investment.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 17, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Xooglers Craft a New Search Engine
September 16, 2014
If you are interested in searching for off color content, you will be thrilled to learn that Boodigo awaits your input. Gizmodo reports that the system surfaces off color content on Tumblr. Now a Yahoo property, the Xoogler running that show wanted to suppress off color content. Well, now another Xoogler has made it easy to surface Tumblr’s seamier and steamier content. We have not run queries on Boodigo. We will leave that to your discretion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2014
Alternatives to Windows Search
September 16, 2014
For some common searches, Windows’ built-in desktop search function works just fine. Other times, though, our hard-drive hunts call for something more. Reporter Martin Brinkmann at ghacks.net shares his list of “The Best Free Desktop Search Programs for Windows.” He writes:
Desktop search tools offer faster searches, better options and filters, and a better user experience as a consequence. These tools can be sorted into two main categories: programs that require indexing before they can be used, and programs that work right out of the box without it. Let’s take a look at the requirements for this top list.
Requirements
*A free version of the program needs to be available.
*Search all files and don’t limit results.
*Compatibility with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions and versions of the Windows operating system.
*Top list of desktop search programs
The list takes a quick look at each application so that you know what it is about. Below that is a table that you can use to compare the core functionality followed by our recommendations.
Brinkmann describes 11 services and tacks on four more suggested by readers. Curiously, absent is one of our recommendations, Sowsoft Effective File Search. For the rest, see the ghacks article for Brinkmann’s observations, and don’t forget to scroll down for his handy-dandy comparison table.
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bilingual Search Engine YaSabe Sees Growth through Word of Mouth and Media Partnerships
September 11, 2014
The article on Elevation DC titled Herndon-Based Bilingual Search Engine Expands Reach covers the growth of YaSabe, the Spanish and English search engine helping Spanish-speaking Americans find the information they need. The search engine actually finds data that is English and translates it into Spanish before tagging it. The article states,
“Its categories are geared toward the information Spanish speakers might need: bilingual service providers, jobs for people fluent in more than one language, 18 different types of Latin cuisine. Azim Tejani, the company’s executive vice president, says that 20 percent of YaSabe’s traffic comes directly to the site, 50 percent comes from search engines where users search for terms like “pedicura” instead of “pedicure” and the remaining traffic comes from its partnerships with media companies serving Spanish-speaking Ameri[cans].”
Tejani is also quoted in the article as saying that YaSabe is mobile-centered as opposed to web-centered. According to Tejani, some 30% of YaSabe users rely mainly on their mobile phones to access the internet. He credits the growth of YaSabe both with community guides as well as strengthened relationships with Spanish-language media partners such as Univision and Mundo Hispanico. Univision in particular has seen great success since YaSabe began running the TV network’s search engines in 2013.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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