Predicting the Future of Search
June 27, 2014
Enterprise search dates back to the 1960s under IBM, but Google has definitely dictated the average user’s expectations regarding modern day information retrieval. So while the past is important, the future is uncertain and inquiring minds want to know what to expect. Docurated turns to the experts in their article, “Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search.”
The article begins:
“We wanted to gain a clearer understanding of current state of the enterprise search industry. Given the steady evolution of enterprise search, we also wanted to gain some insight into what the future may hold. To do so, we gathered a select number of industry experts and asked two simple questions:
1. What is your assessment of today’s enterprise search industry?
2. What do you think the future of ‘search’ will look like?”
The results from the experts are mixed. Few think that the model will change dramatically though many do mention continued innovation in the areas of big data, open source, visual search, and others. And even if all the experts did agree, the future would still be uncertain. Those interested in the future of search should stay tuned in for the latest news as it hits, and just hold on for the ride.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 27, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SonicSearch and EasyAsk: Some Work to Do
June 26, 2014
I read “EasyAsk Helps Sonic Sense Offer Unprecedented Search Flexibility and Accuracy on Magento Site.”
The EasyAsk for Magento solution has allowed Sonic Sense to deliver a much richer user experience with visual Search-as-you-Type, natural language search with highly accurate results and dynamic relevant navigation.
EasyAsk is a better choice than Solr, according to the write up:
“Sonic Sense is another shining example of the dramatic improvements in customer experience that EasyAsk delivers for Magento or any e-commerce site, said Craig Bassin, EasyAsk CEO. “EasyAsk’s solution is head and shoulders above the SOLR option and other third party search solutions for Magento Enterprise which is proven by the results at Sonic Sense and dozens of Magento customers flocking to EasyAsk.”
I navigated to www.sonicsearch.com and ran some queries. I will boil down my experience to one representative query, and invite you to run your own queries to make sure I did not miss a key point.
My test query was “audio mixer recorder.” I received three results pages. The results on the first page did include audio mixer with recording functions. However, the results on pages 2 and 3 were not relevant. This type of query relaxation allows a company to display more results, giving the impression of a hefty line up of products.
However, the faceted navigation function did not work. On page three, when I clicked on the option for the two products between $1 and $100, the system did not return a results page.
Response time struck me as sluggish. I did not expect Amazon-type displays, but I found myself wondering about the suitability of the SonicSense infrastructure to the demands of the search system.
For more information about EasyAsk, a natural language search system once owned by Progress Software, navigate to www.easyask.com.
Stephen E Arnold, June 26, 2014
Elasticsearch Roundup
June 24, 2014
Followers can keep up with what is going on with elasticsearch by following the elasticsearch blog. The latest entry, “This Week in elasticsearch,” is a regular roundup of the latest news and need-to-know items.
The entry begins:
“Welcome to This Week in Elasticsearch. In this roundup, we try to inform you about the latest and greatest changes in Elasticsearch. We cover what happened in the GitHub repositories, as well as many Elasticsearch events happening worldwide, and give you a small peek into the future of the project.”
Moving through the content, lots of code updates are listed, as well as plugin and driver releases throughout the whole elasticsearch ecosystem. New slides and videos are also listed down the page. All in all, this is a helpful one-stop shop for those who follow elasticsearch but cannot commit the time to endless searching and browsing. Updates occur weekly on Wednesday, so set your bookmarks and stay tuned for the latest news.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Trying To Make A Search More Relevant
June 20, 2014
Here is a thought that does not make much sense when taken in the bigger picture scope. PRLog explains the conundrum in “BA Insight To Discuss How To Make Enterprise Search Relevant Through Unified Information Access.” BA Insight’s CTO Jeff Fried and David Schubmehl, a research director at IDC, will host a webinar that shares the same name as the above article. The webinar will discuss how enterprise search technology is lagging:
“Due to the vast explosion of structured and unstructured data, users are experiencing increasing challenges locating and accessing the critical information and expertise needed to excel in their roles. Even the enterprise search technology that has been implemented to resolve these issues is failing to locate relevant information while providing a sub-par user experience. This can have negative consequences, such as the inability to effectively respond to customer queries, widespread duplication of effort, and decreased employee productivity.”
Fried and Schubmehl will focus on how enterprise search is changing, how organizations are driving demand, and how to make enterprise search a killer application. The bigger question is if BA Insight is using this to make their own products more relevant? Has enterprise search really lost its relevancy or is it one observation? The “unified information access” tag is one used by other companies like Sinequa and Attivio. These companies appear to be cut from the same cloth when touting their talents.
Whitney Grace, June 20, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Sindice Support Comes to an End
June 18, 2014
Another semantic system turns out the lights. SemanticWeb hosts a guest post from the founders of Sindice titled, “End of Support for the Sindice.com Search Engine: History, Lessons Learned, and Legacy.” The article delves into a wealth of technical details. It opens, however, with this modest introduction:
“Since 2007, Sindice.com has served as a specialized search engine that would do a crazy thing: throw away the text and just concentrate on the ‘markup’ of the web pages. Sindice would provide an advanced API to query RDF, RDFa, Microformats and Microdata found on web sites, together with a number of other services. Sindice turned useful, we guess, as approximately 1100 scientific works in the last few years refer to it in a way or another.”
The team decided to end support for the specialized search engine in order to focus on serving enterprise users. Besides, they say, their vision has been realized. They write:
“With the launch in 2012 of Schema.org, Google and others have effectively embraced the vision of the ‘Semantic Web.’ With the RDFa standard, and now even more with JSON-LD, richer markup is becoming more and more popular on websites. While there might not be public web data ‘search APIs,’ large collections of crawled data (pages and RDF) exist today which are made available on cloud computing platforms for easy analysis with your favorite big data paradigm.”
The account begins at the beginning, with the team’s first goal of developing a simpler API, and ends with their transition to the startup SindiceTech. In between are interesting details, like a description of their 60-machine “Webstar” operations cluster and details on how they leveraged Hadoop for their RDF analytics. We may be sad to see support for Sindice.com go, but at least the team has shared some of their wisdom on the way out.
Cynthia Murrell, June 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PadMapper Crowned Most Popular Apartment Search Tool
June 17, 2014
If you foresee a new apartment in your future, you may wonder which apartment search tool you should turn to for guidance. Lifehacker is here to help with their article, “Five Best Apartment Search Tools.” The short answer—PadMapper, which uses Craigslist data, won Lifehacker’s poll hands-down with 44 percent of the votes. Writer Alan Henry tells us:
“Not only does PadMapper source data primarily from Craigslist, it packages it—and data from other services—into an attractive format. We’re bundling them together here because honestly, even though Craigslist has their own tool now, PadMapper is, and always was, just better. You can view all of the listings on Craigslist and those other services on your computer, take them with you on the go thanks to PadMapper’s mobile apps, filter to match your preferences, and save leads for later. The whole service is a top-down Google Map, and you can quickly jump between a location’s Street View, WalkScore, and photos without leaving the site. Those of you who nominated and supported PadMapper (including me) noted that the service is essential for today’s busy apartment hunters, and the fact that you can set up alerts for new listings and that the data is updated in real-time is essential to snagging something good before someone else scoops it up.”
Despite this ringing endorsement, the other contenders are worth checking out. The article notes the features that make each special. Hotpads, for example, is said to be trustworthy and easy to use. It is easy to view property and contact landlords through Lovely, and fans of Trulia like the ability to limit a search by neighborhood. WalkScore, as the name implies, is for anyone who wishes to spend less time in cars. Whatever you’re looking for in an apartment, one of these sources is sure to help.
Cynthia Murrell, June 17, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
ISPs and Pay TV, Making Search Vendors Look Good
June 16, 2014
The article on Eweek titled Customer Satisfaction With ISPs, Pay TV the Lowest of Any Industry relates the findings of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index. To start, Samsung has received a higher rating than Apple for the first time ever. Samsung jumped from a 76 out of one hundred to an 81 this year, whereas Apple fell from an 81 last year to this year’s score of 79. The article also notes the other important news from the survey. It states,
“The second, particularly notable as the number of merger proposals in the federal government’s inbox increases, is that customer satisfaction with subscription TV and Internet service providers (ISPs) has sunk to a new low. So low, said the report, that these industries are the worst performing of the 43 industries the ACSI tracks… Specifically, Time Warner Cable (TWC) received the lowest score of any subscription television service, falling by 7 percent to 56 out of 100.”
ISPs and Pay TV have sunk to a new low in customer satisfaction. That makes Time Warner Cable the lowest of the low. (No surprise there if you are a customer.) Compared to these dismal findings, search vendors look pretty darn good.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 16, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Googles Possible Italian Roots
June 12, 2014
The article on Bloomberg titled Meet the Italian Who Beat Google to Web Search—and Gave It Away discusses the possible Italian roots of Google. The article relates the story of a conference in California with a particular talk given. Massimo Marchiori unveiled his Internet search engine, with none other than Larry Page in the audience. The article states,
“Marchiori’s project was called Hyper Search, a system able to scan the Web with a level of accuracy never seen before. Hyper Search was based on an innovative algorithm many developers consider to be an inspiration for PageRank, Google’s magic formula that sorts Web pages by counting the number and quality of links to each from around the Internet… “When I finished my presentation, a gentle boy approached me saying he found it very interesting,” Marchiori says in a phone interview.”
Page promised to “develop” Marchiori’s ideas further, and was later granted $100,000 to pursue Google, while Marchiori’s project was passed over by another grant in Italy. Yet Marchiori claims he bears Page no ill will for his astronomical success, even crediting Page and Sergey with the ability to make a reality out of an idea. Marchiori is not a computer-science and mathematics professor at the University of Padua, Italy.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Huge Bets on Search: Spreadsheet Fever Rages
June 11, 2014
The news of the $70 million injected into Elasticsearch caused me to check out Crunchbase and some other sources of funding data. I looked at a handful of search and content processing vendors in the departures lounge. I am supposed to be retired, but Zurich beckons.
How large is the market for search and content processing software and services. As a former laborer in the vineyards of Halliburton Nuclear and Booz, Allen & Hamilton, the answer is, “You can charge as much as you want when the customer is in a corner.” The flipside of this adage is, “You can’t charge as much when there are many low cost options.”
In my view, search—regardless of the window dressing slapped on decades old systems and methods—is sort of yesterday. One of the goslings posted a list of Hewlett Packard’s verbal arabesques to explain IDOL search as everything EXCEPT search. The HP verbal arabesques make my point:
Search is not going to generate big money going forward.
Is search (regardless of the words used to describe it) a money pit like as the Tom Hanks’ motion picture made vivid?
For that reason, I am wondering what investors are thinking as they pump money into search and content processing companies. The largest revenue generator in the search sector is either Google or Autonomy. Google, as you may know, is in the online advertising business. Search is a Trojan horse. Search is free and the clicks trigger the GoTo/Overture mechanism that caused Google’s moment of inspiration. Before the Google IPO, Google ponied up some dough to Yahoo regarding alleged borrowing of pay to play methods.
Autonomy focused on the enterprise. Between 1996 and October 2011, Sir Michael Lynch grew the company to about $1 billion in revenues. HP’s prescient and always interesting management paid $10.3 billion for Autonomy and then wrote off $8 billion, aimed allegations at Autonomy at the company, and, in general, made it clear that HP was essentially a printer ink business with what seems to be great faith in IDOL, DRE, and assorted rich media tools.
More recently, IBM, the subject of an entertaining analysis The Decline and Fall of IBM by Robert X. Cringely suggested that Watson would grow to be a $10 billion in revenue business. Not a goal to ignore. The fact that Watson is a collection of home grown widgets and open source search technology. I think Watson’s last search contribution was creating a recipe for a tamarind flavored sauce. IBM is probably staffed with folks smarter than I. But a billion dollar bet with a goal of building a revenue stream 10 to 12 times greater than Autonomy’s in one third the time. Wowza.
Let’s do some simple addition in the elegant United lounge.
Let’s assume that IBM and HP actually generate the billions necessary to recover the cost of IDOL and hit the crazy IBM goal of $10 billion in four or five years. To make the math simple, skip interest, the cost of assuaging stakeholders, and the money needed to close deals that total $20 to $25 billion. HP pumps up Autonomy to $10 or $11 billion and IBM tallies another $10 to $12 billion.
So, HP and IBM need or want to build $10 billion or more in revenues from their respective search and content processing ventures. I estimated that the market for “search” was about $1.3 billion in 2006. I am not too sure that market has grown by a significant factor since the economic headwinds began blowing through carpetland.
Now consider the monies invested in some search and content processing companies.
Attensity (sentiment analysis), $90 million
BA Insight (Microsoft centric, search and business intelligence), $14.5 million
Content Analyst (text analysis, SAIC technology, $7.0 million
Coveo (originally all Microsoft all the time, now kitchen sink vendor), $34.7 million
Digital Reasoning (text analysis, no shipping product), $4.2 million
EasyAsk (natural language processing, several owners(, $20 million
Elasticsearch (open source search and consulting), $104 million
Hakia (semantic search), $23.5 million
MarkLogic (XML data management and kitchen sink apps), $73.6 million
Recorded Future (text analysis of Web content), $20.9 million
Recommind (similar to Autonomy method), $15 million
Sinequa (proprietary search and widgets), $5.3 million
X1 (search and new management), $12.2 million
ZyLab (search and licensed visualizations), $2.4 million
Autonomy and Search: A Surprise Regarding Search
June 9, 2014
I was flipping through the Overflight links for HP Autonomy. One item caught my attention. The tweet pointed me to the HP Autonomy Web site at this link http://bit.ly/1hJQXzx. IDOL is now at version 10.5. Keep in mind that the system was rolled out in 1996, so big leaps are not what I expect. HP defines Autonomy in terms of these functions or applications:
- Big Data Analytics
- Compliance Archiving
- Contact Center Management
- Database & Application Archiving
- Document and Email Management
- Enterprise Search
- Knowledge Management
- Legal Hold
- Litigation Readiness Archiving
- Media Intelligence
- Policy-driven Information Management
- Records Management
- Rich Media Management
- SFA Intelligence
- Storage Optimization Archiving
- Supervision & Policy Management
- Video Surveillance
- Voice of the Customer
- Web Experience Management
- Web Optimization
Quite a list of buzzwords. With Elasticsearch toting around $70 million, it might be difficult for HP to get IDOL to pay off the $11 billion purchase price, grow its top line revenues, and generate enough profit to keep stakeholders happy. One thing HP has going for it. HP is explaining IDOL search somewhat more clearly than IBM describes Watson. By the way, what is “SFA Intelligence.” I suppose I could ask Watson if there were a public demo.
Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2014
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