Hewlett Packard: Never a Dull Moment
April 27, 2014
I read “Watch Out! KILLER HP Firmware Update Bricks ProLiant Server Mobos.” I am not sure if the story is spot on, but I find it interesting that HP seems to generate excitement whether it is the Autonomy dust up, promises to the Wall Street worshipful, or nuts-and-bolts hardware lovers.
The article reports:
Sysadmins who download and install the patch on a vulnerable system will shortly discover that the server cannot detect its network adapter, which will be a pain to fix – especially when trying to subsequently load in replacement firmware. For some, the warning HP tacked onto the service pack’s web page came too late in the day: the firmware was released on 18 April, giving unsuspecting IT departments plenty of time to brick their electronics.
For amusement, I navigated to www.hp.com and entered the query “HP Service Pack for ProLiant 2014.2.0.” The result for the query was:
The good news is that I could leave some feedback. That was less helpful than the links to Windows XP.
Perhaps Autonomy’s content processing system might help those HP customers with non functional servers? One question: “What is HP’s real world expertise in information retrieval?”
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2014
Alternatives to Google Popping up Everywhere
April 25, 2014
It’s a golden era for search alternatives. For a while there folks were worried about Google monopolizing the internet, but it’s not shaking out that way. Far from it, in fact. We are currently living in a golden age of niche search tools, as we discovered from a recent Virtual Strategy Magazine story, “MaxxCAT Raises the Bar for Search Performance with MaxxCAT 5.0.”
According to the story:
The 5.0 performance enhancements really come into their own when you begin looking at the scalability of our appliance in the enterprise…Sure, if you can build an index for a small amount of data in 5 minutes instead of 10, it’s nice, but it’s just 5 minutes. However, if you can index terabytes of data in 5 hours instead of 10 hours, that’s a huge difference.
MaxxCAT isn’t the only boat on this alternative Google sea, in fact, they aren’t even the biggest of the bunch. It’s not tough to find alternates, there are articles everywhere. The trickier part is finding one that fits your needs. Each serves a purpose, whether it is open source technology or privacy protection, that suits someone and repels others. This trial and error period is part of the fun, in our books.
Patrick Roland, April 25, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Yandex Profit Goes Up
April 24, 2014
Bloomberg’s real journalists reported some Web search news I found interesting. Navigate to “Yandex Profit Rises 19% on Russia Internet Advertising Demand.” Google gets the spotlight. Yandex warrants more attention. The English language search service at www.yandex.com is okay. The gem is the Yandex Russian service at www.yandex.ru. Content in this index is not easily available via US Web indexing services without the searcher’s performing some acrobatics. Yandex, however, is doing the me too thing. My hunch is that its usefulness will erode as the advertising revenue gains more traction. Precision, recall—just a distant memory for Bing and Google. Yandex’s utility may decline as the money rolls in. By the way, what happened to the Yandex search appliance?
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2014
New ArnoldIT Search Video: Jargon and Its Impact
April 23, 2014
Stephen E Arnold’s new enterprise search video is no online. You can view the six minute video via YouTube. The lingo and argot generated by enterprise search vendors helps make sales. An unfortunate side effect is confusion and obfuscation. Is a product really a “killer”? Do you need linguistics, semantics, and analytics to find a presentation by the CEO? The short video, based on a talk given by Mr. Arnold at a conference in Boston several years ago, strikes at the heart of a fundamental problem for procurement teams—Figuring out exactly what a system can really do.
Kenneth Toth, April 23, 2014
Hakia Building Momentum Again
April 22, 2014
Hakia has been a little quiet lately, but that doesn’t mean the upstart search engine isn’t still gaining fans. We found a really enthusiastic review in a recent Christiano Kewna post, “Proof! Haika.com Works Better than Google Search on Long Tail Keyphrases.”
According to Kwena:
If you are searching using natural language phrases, then I urge you to check out Hakia.com. You can still revert back to Google for some other searches, but if you have a 10 word phrase that you are searching for, then the big Giant Google will likely take you round and round.
Actually, things aren’t so quiet around Hakia headquarters. According to a recent PR Newswire piece, Hakia partnered with FLOW to work on social media marketing. According to one exec, “We are excited that Flow has chosen to integrate [Hakia] into its social commerce platform. We expect many other technology innovators to move in this direction.” We think the world of Hakia and look forward to them making routine splashes again. This is one of the sharpest enterprise search companies on the block and always worth watching.
Patrick Roland, April XX, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Open Source Search: Just Like Good Old Proprietary Search
April 21, 2014
The last few days have given me some food for thought. I read”Splunk Exec Defects to Tech Disruptor ElasticSearch.” The article points out:
Elastisearch co-founder and chief technology officer, Shay Banon, said the company focus was all about products. “Elasticsearch is building something bigger than any one technology and so I’m excited to have someone like Gaurav [a former Googler] on board, who shares our vision and is going to play an instrumental role in taking our products to the next level,” he said. In the past four months, the company launched its first commercial product, Elasticsearch Marvel….Bloomberg, The New York Times, Facebook, GitHub, Netflix, Yelp, Verizon, McGraw-Hill, WordPress, Atlassian and SoundCloud all use Elasticsearch to store, search and analyze any type of data in real time.
Poor Splunk. The company offers tools to help licensees “listen to their data.” First, Lucid leaves one writer with the impression that felonious behavior is coming down the Information Highway. Splunk was the target of some enthusiastic writer at the IDC combine who apparently became entangled in some Mad Men type of advertising. That article appeared in InfoWorld as “LucidWorks Preps Solr Stack as Splunk Killer.” Now ElasticSearch has allegedly hired a Splunk wizard to herd products down the busy digital trail.
What I find interesting is that open source search is starting to look more like the good old proprietary enterprise search sector. Me too products and executive churn mix with MBA think. The lingering effects of search controversies past like those swirling around Fast Search and Autonomy remain fresh in my mind.
Will ElasticSearch and Lucid Works become the new combatants in the search sector? Today both companies have chosen Splunk as the punching bag.
The more search changes, the more it remains the same it seems. Come to think of it: Most of today’s vendors are following the scripts written for Fulcrum Technologies and Verity who stomped around the C suite in the 1980s. Is the search sector running an endless loop?
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2014
Unlocking The Key To YouTube Success
April 18, 2014
YouTube has its own celebrities that have become famous from their videos. It has long been a mystery about how they obtained their Internet celebrity status and how an individual could attain it. Search Engine Watch explains the history and mystery of YouTube content in “YouTube Reveals The Secret Formula To Content Marketing Success.”
Google’s managing director of brand solutions Suzie Reider has given key insight into how to create YouTube content and the future of advertising in The YouTube Creator Playbook For Brands. The new playbook contains updated information and new insights on the best ways to utilize and create content that will be watched.
It doesn’t stop there. The Google Head of Audience Development YouTube Vanessa Pappas offers advice on how to use YouTube for advertising and branding.
“Pappas then says, ‘To demystify what makes these top channels tick and help you better understand how to create a successful strategy for your brand on YouTube, we developed the new YouTube Creator Playbook for Brands. Similar to the Creator Playbook, which has helped over 2 million of our creators grow their audiences, the Creator Playbook for Brands walks you through the steps to help you create, plan, and implement a YouTube content creation strategy; from tips on how to create videos to video promotion.’”
There is not an exact formula for YouTube success, but there are strategic plans budding YouTube stars and organizations can make to increase their video appeal. The best videos, though, are usually short and funny.
Whitney Grace, April 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IBMs ICAwES Red Book Available
April 17, 2014
The article on IBM.com titled Building Enterprise Search Solutions Using IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search involves IBM rolling out information about ICAwES. That excellent acronym stands for IBM® Content Analytics with Enterprise Search, as you may have guessed. It allows for customized synonym dictionaries for search, annotators, and the integration of diverse kinds of repositories. The abstract explains,
“With ICAwES enterprise search solutions, you can integrate fields from multiple content repositories to create a single, integrated user search experience. In addition, the enterprise search solutions can use fields and facets in various ways to create diverse views of your search result set, thus helping you identify the hidden meaning of your unstructured content. This IBM Redbooks® Solution Guide explains, from a high level, how to build enterprise search solutions using ICAwES.”
A red book is available through IBM Redbooks. It offers information on using the “text classification capability”, the “LanguageWare Resource Workbench” and “IBM Content Assessment”. It is aimed at IT architects and business users interested in expanding their usage and improving customer satisfaction and business operations, all interesting information. The reference to the “billion dollar baby Watson” appears in the footer, but not in the explanation of the ICAwES.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 17, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Litigation Software dtSearch Demo
April 16, 2014
The dtSearch Desktop Demonstration Video on nlsblog.org shows how to setup and search with dtSearch for Windows. The 12 minute video begins with an introduction to dtSearch, which is able to “recognize text in over 200 common file types.” By indexing the locations of words in different files, dtSearch is able to build an almost limitless index of documents. The demo walks through the setup of dtSearch. After naming the index,
“It is important to keep in mind that when we add items here, dtSearch is not creating copies… but links to those files. A good practice is to put the files and folder that we want to run searches on into a single centralized location, before we create the index… all we need to do is add this discovery folder, and the subfolders and files will be automatically included…dtSearch reads the text in the linked files and creates a searchable words list.”
Then you are able to search which index to search through, and limit it to one case, or all cases. The word appears with a number, show how often it appears in the index. Then you can add the keyword to the search request to find the documents in which the word appears. You are able to preview a document, copy a file, and create a search report. The demo goes into great detail about all of the search options, and should certainly be viewed in full to learn the best methods, but it does not provide metrics for the time required to build the initial index or update it. These metrics are useful.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 16, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
ArnoldIT Video: Search Brands Video
April 15, 2014
Whatever happened to Convera and the other four companies comprising the Top Five in enterprise search: Autonomy, Endeca, Fast Search & Transfer and Verity. The video also mentions Exalead and ISYS Search Software. The wrap up to the video points to three open source enterprise search options. For those who want to be reminded of the Golden Age of enterprise search, check out the free, six minute video from Stephen E Arnold, publisher of Beyond Search. Mr. Arnold is converting some of his research into brief, hopefully entertaining and useful free videos. You can access this short search history lesson at http://bit.ly/1etGExr. The next video in the series tackles the subject of buzzword, argot, jargon, lingo, and verbal baloney. What vendor is the leader in the linguistic linguini competition? The video will be available before the end of April. In the meantime, take a walk down memory lane and learn how Cornelius Vanderbilt obtained needed information in the early 19th century.
Kenneth Toth, April 15, 2014
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