Whither the Bing Thing in 2014
December 18, 2013
I found the data in the “2013 Bing Infographic” surprising. I continue to think of Bing as a search and retrieval system. I don’t use the system directly. I prefer to run queries on metasearch systems that use Bing as one source of content. The reason for my indirect access is that I don’t want distractions, social media content, and videos. In case you, gentle reader, have forgotten, I prefer to read. I read more rapidly than I can watch a video unfold in real time. I understand that some people find videos just the best possible way to locate information. I don’t.
The infographic has a number of data points. Let’s look at three in the context of locating a white paper, information about a person of interest, and a fact.
First, Bing reports that if people looking at a Bing home page each month were to hold hands, the length of that “chain” would be the circumference of the earth. Got it. What’s that go to do with precision, recall, and access to information? Nothing. Okay. That’s fact one.
Next, Bing has more video. That is super. I don’t want video. Period. Well, Bing had twice as much video search in 2013 than in 2012. Got it. I don’t care.
And Bing is the search engine for Facebook (really?), Yahoo (ah, that’s the problem with Yahoo search), and the Kindle Fire (I don’t use a Kindle Fire).
What does the infographic reveal about search at Microsoft?
- Search is not the point of Bing. I thought Powerset and Fast Search were going to improve Bing search? Guess not.
- Why is it getting * more * difficult to locate information instead of easier? Maybe the vastness of the Web and economic pressures are forcing Microsoft to shift from search to some other type of service? That’s okay, just knock off the use of the word search.
- How do professionals at Microsoft locate information? I don’t have any hard data, but I think that Google (an outfit doing a rather questionable job in search) may be good enough. That is indeed chilling to think that Microsoft professionals trust Google to point them to hard to find Microsoft research papers and obscure FAQs about Microsoft products.
Bing had a shot and spent some money shooting blanks in my view. So for 2014 I don’t expect much improvement. I hope libraries in my area have enough money to remain open and provide access to commercial online information resources. The free Web stuff does not strike me as getting better. Oh, if you want video and social media, you may be in business.
How often do I run a query on a Windows 8.1 laptop and want Web hits and not a list of documents on my local hard drive matching my key word query? Never. There you go.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2013
The Future of Semantic Search
December 18, 2013
The article titled The Stealthy Rise of Semantic Search on Search Engine Journal relates the outmoding of SEOs with natural language search. The article explains that Boolean expressions leaped search forward with the abilities of query modifiers. Many people use semantic search without realizing it, but it works nonetheless to determine intent instead of just matching search terms.
The article explains:
“Vertical search engines such as Hakia, Lexxe, and VSW were at the forefront of semantic technology long before Bing, Facebook, and Google. These engine providers built their business around that potential and are using it to create new distribution and business models to deliver options for content makers well beyond keyword search and SEO.
Advertisers will reap huge benefits from semantic search because it increases the relevance of all forms of advertising.”
Semantic search will also decrease the likelihood of ads being paired with unsuitable content. Soon, users will be presented with information they “didn’t even know they wanted.” This may even lead to interconnected devices within the home. The article offers the possibility of the refrigerator notifying the homeowner that they are running low on milk. (Smart House, anyone?) Whether scary or exciting, the article would have us believe that these developments are inevitable.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Non Search Person Explains Why Search Is a Lost Cause
December 16, 2013
The author of “2013: the Year ‘the Stream’ Crested” is focused on tapping into flows of data. Twitter and real time “Big Data” streams are the subtext for the essay. I liked the analysis. In one 2,500 word write up, the severe weaknesses of enterprise and Web search systems are exposed.
The main point of the article is that “the stream”—that is, flows of information and data—is what people want. The flow is of sufficient volume that making sense of it is difficult. Therefore, an opportunity exists for outfits like The Atlantic to provide curation, perspective, and editorial filtering. The write up’s code for this higher-value type of content process is “the stock.”
The article asserts:
This is the strange circumstance that obtained in 2013, given the volume of the stream. Regular Internet users only had three options: 1) be overwhelmed 2) hire a computer to deploy its logic to help sort things 3) get out of the water.
The take away for me is that the article makes clear that search and retrieval just don’t work. Some “new” is needed. Perhaps this frustration with search is the trigger behind the interest in “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning”? Predictive analytics may have a shot at solving the problem of finding and identifying needed information, but from what I have seen, there is a lot of talk about fancy math and little evidence that it works at low cost in a manner that makes sense to the average person. Data scientists are not a dime a dozen. Average folks are.
Will the search and content processing vendors step forward and provide concrete facts that show a particular system can solve a Big Data problem for Everyman and Everywoman? We know Google is shifting to an approach to search that yields revenue. Money, not precision and recall, is increasingly important. The search and content vendors who toss around the word “all” have not been able to deliver unless the content corpus is tightly defined and constrained.
Isn’t it obvious that processing infinite flows and changes to “old” content are likely to cost a lot of money. Google, Bing, and Yandex search are not particularly “good.” Each is becoming a system designed to support other functions. In fact, looking for information that is only five or six years “old” is an exercise in frustration. Where has that document “gone.” What other data are not in the index. The vendors are not talking.
In the enterprise, the problem is almost as hopeless. Vendors invent new words to describe a function that seems to convey high value. Do you remember this catchphrase: “One step to ROI”? How do you think that company performed? The founders were able to sell the company and some of the technology lives on today, but the limitations of the system remain painfully evident.
Search and retrieval is complex, expensive to implement in an effective manner, and stuck in a rut. Giving away a search system seems to reduce costs? But are license fees the major expense? Embracing fancy math seems to deliver high value answers? But are the outputs accurate? Users just assume these systems work.
Kudos to Atlantic for helping to make clear that in today’s data world, something new is needed. Changing the words used to describe such out of favor functions as “editorial policy”, controlled terms, scheduled updates, and the like is more popular than innovation.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2013
BA Insight Makes Deloitte Fast 500 List
December 14, 2013
It looks like BA Insight is growing and growing. Yahoo Finance shares, “BA Insight Ranked Number 393 Fastest Growing Company in North America on Deloitte’s 2013 Technology Fast 500 (TM).” The list ranks the 500 fastest-growing: tech, media, telecom, life sciences, and clean tech companies on this continent. The evaluation is based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2008 to 2012. (See the article for conditions contenders must meet.)
We learn:
“BA Insight’s Chief Executive Officer, Massood Zarrabian credits the emergence of Big Data and the market demand for search-driven applications for the company’s revenue growth. He said, ‘We are honored to be ranked among the fastest growing technology companies in North America. BA Insight has been focused on developing the BAI Knowledge Integration Platform that enables organization to implement powerful search-driven applications rapidly, at a fraction of the cost, time, and risk of traditional alternatives. Additionally, we have partnered with visionary organizations to transform their enterprise search engines into knowledge engines giving them full access to organizational knowledge assets.'”
The press release notes that BA Insight has grown 193 percent over five years. Interesting—while other firms are struggling, BA Insight has almost doubled. But from what to what? The write-up does not say.
BA Insight has set out to redefine enterprise search to make it more comprehensive and easier to use. Founded in 2004, the company is headquartered in Boston and keeps its technology center in New York City. Some readers may be interested to know that the company is currently hiring for the Boston office.
Cynthia Murrell, December 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
E-Retailers Guide Ranks EasyAsk Semantic Search Leader in E-Commerce Technology
December 13, 2013
EasyAsk Ranked Among Top Four Providers of E-Commerce Technology, an article on Virtual-Strategy Magazine, recognizes the achievements of EasyAsk, the natural language search company. EasyAsk was recently named one of the top 4 vendors (out of 1,000) in driving e-commerce sales by the E-Retailers Guide. Craig Bassin, CEO of EasyAsk, expressed no surprise at this, since reports show that 43% of visitors to a given website will head straight for the search box.
Bassin expanded on his company’s progress:
“”EasyAsk is poised to capture a significant share of the growing spend on e-commerce technology, said Bassin. “EasyAsk eCommerce Edition delivers amazing value to our clients. EasyAsk is embedded within Infor Storefront and has out-of-the-box integrations with the leading e-commerce platforms, such as IBM Websphere Commerce, Magento, Hybris and Netsuite. Our customers consistently tell us we help them turn shoppers into buyers.” Gartner Inc. estimates that retailers spent about $3 billion on e-commerce technology in 2012. “
Semantic search has become unavoidably important, with Google and Microsoft adopting their own offerings since in the last two years. But EasyAsk stands out as offering “natural language search for e-commerce enterprise, on-premise and cloud platforms.” Their work in raising online revenue by allowing users to search in plain English and receive specific and relevant results has made them a leader in the field.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Elasticsearch in a Box Through Vagrant for the Holidays
December 12, 2013
The article JavaWorld titled Elasticsearch in a Box explores the possibilities of using Elasticsearch as a platform. There are different options, but Elasticsearch-in-a-box through Vagrant is the subject of this article. The base box is 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 using Oracle’s Java 7 and the Elasticsearch version 0.90.7. It is free, and all you need to begin is Vagrant and VirtualBox installed. The article explains,
“Elasticsearch-in-a-box is a freely available Vagrant base box. What that means is that you can quickly fire up and tear down an Elasticsearch environment with simple commands like vagrant up and vagrant destroy…First, you need to add and initialize the Elasticsearch-in-a-box template. Go ahead and create a directory, like /projects/esinabox, change directories into it and execute this command: This command will create a Vagrant definition named esinabox from the downloaded template:
1 vagrant box add esinabox https://s3.amazonaws.com/coffers/esinabox.box”
These steps will account for downloading Elasticsearch-in-a-box template.
A search present just in time for the holidays. Following this, you must only create a VagrantFile which will enable you to customize. Once you have finished you can start Elasticsearch-in-a-box running locally on your machine. From there, executing queries and “tearing down instances” should be no trouble. The template was built through Veewee.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How to Take Advantage of Local Market Opportunities
December 12, 2013
The article titled Three Steps for Crushing Multi-Location Search on Search Engine Land offers tips for “local market opportunity” aka multi- location businesses taking advantage of local coverage in all of the areas serviced. The first tip is to know your local market coverage by identifying all of the areas you might be missing out in and compiling search volume data as well as average order value and doing some fancy mathematical footwork to understand more clearly where you stand to gain the most in terms of first page coverage on search engines. The second tip is to optimize your business listings.
The article states:
“Beef up your listings with as much data as you can provide — directions, payments accepted, localized description, categories, images, local coupons, photos, social network links and links to individual store pages can really make your listing stand out. I call it good data fidelity. This data — when accurate, current and consistent across locations — helps search engines deliver optimum results to user queries. And search engines live or die by delivering a good user experience through accurate results.”
The third and final suggestion is to keep the bulk and manual feeds for local maps through Google Plus, Bing Business and Yahoo up to date and accurate. These all comprise sound advice, but it was surprising to see that the author left out a major tip: buy Google ads.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Exploratory Search Trends Debated
December 11, 2013
An article titled The Changing Face of Exploratory Search on Linkedin presents the current trends in search. Exploratory search is distinct from navigational search, the latter searcher-type knows what she is expecting to get in terms of results. An exploratory searcher might know the search criteria but not how many results will meet their criteria, if any. The article claims that while navigational search exploded in the last fifteen years, exploratory search is still nascent.
The trends highlighted in the article include:
1.) Entity-oriented search. Search has moved beyond words as mere strings of text and increasingly focuses on entities that represent people, places, organizations, and topics.
2.) Knowledge graphs. Search is starting to leverage the network of relationships among entities: Google has its knowledge graph; Microsoft has Satori; and networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are fundamentally social graphs of entities.
3.) Search assistance. Google popularized search suggestions nearly a decade ago, using its knowledge of common queries to reduce effort on the part of searchers.
The article goes on to explain what will happen when faceted search (a mixture of entity-oriented and knowledge graph searches) expands, allowing for precision searches. The final step is faceted search combining with search assistance to mold something akin to Facebook’s graph search. The article touts these trends as new, but they sound awfully familiar. Didn’t Inktomi and Endeca approach search in this way in the 1980s? Perhaps this is just old wine in a new semantic bottle.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Verity 2005 Profile Now Available
December 10, 2013
If you have found the “frozen” enterprise search vendor profiles interesting, you may want to check out the Verity 2005 profile. From 1988 to 2005, Verity was one of the leading providers of information retrieval solutions. Verity was purchased by Autonomy in late 2005, and since that deal closed, the Verity brand has been less and less visible. Some young search mavens are unfamiliar with the Verity system I learned in November 2013. Would you believe that one of the people who had huge Verity gaps in his knowledge works for the company that owns Autonomy. Perhaps my free profiles will help the new wave of search experts appreciate the past and the sameness of systems and the predictable boom and bust cycles of the enterprise search market.
The profile provides a snapshot of Verity, its innovations, and its marketing trajectory during the firm’s salad days. The company moved in on a market sector carved out by the now almost-forgotten Fulcrum Technologies. Verity moved through the now-standard trajectory of government sales and some big deals, OEM licensing and partnerships, shifting from search to allegedly higher-value concepts like “knowledge,” acquisitions to get a grip on certain market sectors, and then to its sale to Autonomy, arguably the big fish in the enterprise search pond in 2005.
You can access the index page for the free profiles at http://xenky.com/vendor-profiles/.
Please, remember the caveats that were ignored by one poobah last week. You can correct, comment upon, and criticize the “frozen” draft of a report I prepared for a client years ago. Please, use the comments section of the Beyond Search blog. I am not too interested in parental email, smarm, or “wow, that’s great” inputs. A Beyond Search editor will make sure the comments are in bounds, but no direct inputs to the Xenky.com site are supported at this time.
Next up? Fulcrum Technologies. Believe it or not, the firm’s technology is still in use today. When was that technology rolled out? You will have to wait for the next free, frozen profile if you do not know. (I had forgotten until we selected a draft report to post.)
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2013
Search and Crowdsourcing: Verbase via Hong Kong
December 6, 2013
Short honk: You may wonder what a crowd sourced search engine is. If you poke around the mainstream Web indexes like Google and Bing, there are some tantalizing clues. Blekko and DuckDuckGo have used the word “crowd sourced” to entice users. With a bit more digging you may come across a search engine from Verbase. The news release, issued in October 2013, explains the notion in this way:
Powered by human intelligence, Verbase delivers more direct results for text-based searches, and enables users to add comments and original content to search results. Verbase is currently receiving over 50,000 unique monthly visitors to its site.
Google is mostly algorithms, most of the time. Rumors of humans tinkering with the giant’s findability system drift around, but Google likes nests of numerical recipes. Humans are, well, human, slow, and often prone to playing volleyball and sleeping.
A Verbase results screen for the query “Fulcrum Technologies Ful/Text”.
The Verbase approach uses three methods:
- A search box that offers category filters. (These look like the Blekko “slash” functions.)
- What the company calls an “automatic user ranking algorithm” that considers “engagement.” (Perhaps this means clicking and the time spent in a results list?)
- A “micro content” function that allows a user to create content. (Does this echo Vivisimo’s approach on steroids?)
According to the news release:
Founded by serial entrepreneur Antoine Sorel Neron, Verbase is a semantic search engine powered by human intelligence that relieves user frustration associated with spam, advertising, and irrelevant search results.
Several observations:
First, Google’s utility is not what it used to be. Search is not about precision and recall. Search is the source of money that funds synthetic biology investments and systems that are tuned to deliver brand advertising. Verbase is one company willing to point out that Google generates results that are sometimes less than useful to online searchers.
Second, Verbase is, like many other Web search companies, hitting some hot buttons to generate interest; for example, crowd sourcing. This is a good idea if methods exist to cope with the issues associated with uncontrolled indexing and content.
Third, the location of the company appears to be Hong Kong. Is this one more example of the center of technology starting to tip somewhere other than longitude of Highway 101?
The system is worth a look. My test queries returned useful results. The graphic approach reminded me of Exalead’s Web search system from three or four years ago. I noted that the system handled an odd ball product name “Ful/Text” reasonably well. Some competitors’ systems insisted that I really wanted “full text.” Wrong.
Verbase brought a smile to my face by returning results that I judged “relevant.” Worth a test drive.
Stephen E Arnold, December 6, 2013
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