Inter Gator: Federated Search from Germany
August 14, 2013
Short honk: We learned about Industrie Consulting. At this link, the inter:gator enterprise search system is explained briefly. What are the “unique” propositions for this search system? The Web page mentions in German (English translation below):
- A system which searches “all” information. (Isn’t this a categorical affirmative?)
- Access controls
- Semantic functions
- A navigator results viewer (hyperbolic map)
- A dashboard. Widgets display search results in different forms on the dashboard.
- “Attractive” price.
The company opened its doors about a decade ago it appears. The system appears to be related to TextDog if the Wikipedia entry is accurate. The system may be based on Lucene. You can download white papers and marketing materials which explain the system. Point your browser to a page with a SharePoint-centric url: http://goo.gl/87ULSW
You may want to brush up on your German. I did not spot any English language information on the firm’s Web site. When you search for information about the company, be aware that the spelling “inter:gator” can produce results with the string in quotes changed to “integrator.” The use of special characters and seemingly innocuous misspellings can have an impact on the relevance of the results of the query.
Stephen E Arnold, August 14, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Russian Mail.ru Drops Google for Homegrown Platform
August 14, 2013
Now, Yandex is not the only web search engine nipping at Google’s heels in Russia. Mail.ru (aka My.com) just ditched their Google contract, relying instead on their own recently completed platform. The Next Web announces the development in, “Russian Internet Giant Mail.ru Drops Google to Power All Search Engine Queries Itself.”
Writer Paul Sawers reminds us that there were some rumors to this effect last November. He also notes:
“Russia is among Europe’s largest Internet markets measured by number of users, with Mail.ru Group’s sites reaching around 86% of Russian Internet users each month, and Search Mail.Ru notching up 39.5 million monthly users. So dropping Google entirely for its own service is a major move not only for the company itself, but for users across the region. . . .
“Mail.ru may be a big player in Russian-language countries, but it has been looking to expand into international markets too, under the name My.com, but no word yet on how these efforts are paying off.”
An interesting shift. Is Russia becoming another lost market (like China) for Google? It may even be that, as enterprises like Mail.ru expand, Google will face more stiff competition around the globe. That would be interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, August 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Elasticsearch Brings on Additional Leadership
August 14, 2013
Open source companies are announcing expansions and broadening leadership teams at a rapid pace. Elasticsearch is joining that trend with their latest announcement. Read more in the MarketWatch article, “Elasticsearch Names Kevin Kluge Vice President of Engineering.”
The article begins:
“Elasticsearch, the company behind the popular real-time search and analytics open source project, today announced the appointment of Kevin Kluge as vice president of engineering. Kevin has a history of leading engineering teams for companies that have changed the dynamics of their markets, including Citrix, Cloud.com and Zimbra. He will play a critical role in extending the value of Elasticsearch.”
Elasticsearch has been a bit embattled in the last year but there is not doubt that they are part of the larger trend of a growing open source search market. However, they are not quite up to the standard that LucidWorks and others have set. LucidWorks is considered the industry leader in customer support and training, and they build upon what is arguably the strongest open source search infrastructure and community, Apache Lucene Solr.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Google Search Explained and Explainedg
August 12, 2013
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to a series of comments on the social networking information aggregation site Reddit. Navigate to http://goo.gl/EJLarJ. The entry is “How does Google search the whole Internet for something in a matter of seconds or even less?”
I found the explanations fascinating.
One person said, ”
Google spends all day every day searching the Web with bots. Web sites and their data are catalogued in a database and when you search, it is the database that is being looked through. It’s also not the whole Internet. Lots of sites have code that prevents them from showing up in the search engine.
Other comments of interest are:
“Amazon has over 2500 sub site maps. ”
“I like that the best way to find out things Google doesn’t know is by using Google.”
“I remember reading somewhere that Google estimated that only 0.02% of the internet is cataloged in the Google database.”
Google’s search index is over 100 million gigabytes big
“I heard an analogy once, that searching the internet with google is like dragging a net through a pond. You’ll get stuff from the surface but there’s a lot of material deeper down you don’t get.”
“Google has only indexed 0.004% of the entire Internet.”
“Imagine there are spiders(web crawlers) going around the web and gathering all the insects(web pages) in stuck there. Then they pile the different insects into cocoons and label them (hash code). Now you can find your favorite insect from the labeled cocoons by keyword and they are brought to you in an order of popularity.”
And my favorite:
“Think of Google like the Index Cards they [librarians] had at the library before computers. The index card system is just an organized collection of where the books (Web sites) exist in the library. All of the actual information is held in the books. A librarian (Web crawler) has to keep the index card system up to date but they [sic] don’t need to do it in realtime every time a book is requested. They keep a database of where everything is instead.”
Yep, librarians with advertising. I am delighted with the explanations of the Google. Delighted, I say.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
eBay Gets New Search Engine
August 10, 2013
An article from Ecommerce Bytes shares information, through the form of an interview, on an update to eBay’s search engine. Cassini is the name of the new search system according to “eBay’s Hugh Williams Explains Cassini Search, Part One.” Many were reported to have questions about why Cassini was rolled out. We enjoyed reading Williams’ framing of the conversation when he stated that most people do not have the same computer that they had ten years ago.
The upgrades to eBay’s search technology were addressed from many angles. Not only the ranking algorithms were tweaked, but also the search systems that process users queries and the machines and scales it runs on.
Williams offers a metaphorical point of comparison for the upgrade:
“An analogy might be, Voyager is a really nice toolbox. You open up the toolbox and get out a few tools and build. I feel like Cassini is more like a fully featured garage with walls of tools that you can use to get out and build great solutions for our customers. It’s is a stack, if you like, it’s all of those things. It’s really a complete ground up rebuild of the whole search technology stack.”
We had not noticed that eBay rolled out this new search engine, but it is good to know that they are working away at search.
Megan Feil, August 10, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Amazon: Everything But Cost Control
August 9, 2013
Amazon is one of the Internet success stories which generally avoids too much praise and too much criticism. The company offers convenience for shoppers who want to get presents delivered to their door.
I read “Amazon’s Profits”, an analysis which takes a look at the concept of profits. The article points out, “You don’t actually know what the profits are.” I would agree. Figuring out Amazon’s financial statements is a time consuming task. When one tosses in various bits and pieces like Mr. Jeff Bezos’ own investment vehicles, I am not sure who owns what. I have heard at conferences that some promising start ups get an opportunity to have Amazon be like a Big Brother. I turn a deaf ear on chatter which suggests the type of deals which are possible. I assume that gossip is inevitable when a service has so many ways to provide services and products to customers worldwide. My most recent Amazon delivery showed up in the early evening. The delivery car was a standard station wagon. The driver looked like one of the fellows at the local pizza joint. Hey, it worked.
The write up presents a number of graphs. These indicators show revenues rising and net income flat, which has been one of the defining characteristics of Amazon for more than a decade. (“Where does the profit go?,” I ask. Some analysts do not seem concerned about this minimal profit attribute, however.) The Amazon revenue by business unit shows that the building block is eCommerce. The write up points out:
This chart [Amazon revenue by segment] shows the revenue segments that Amazon reports. These are in different industries, at different stages of development, and in different markets. It seems pretty likely that their underlying economics are different too. Not, that is, the FCF or net incomes that Amazon reports after all that re-investment, but the underlying performance of the divisions. Moreover, even this isn’t the full story, since Amazon is actually a lot more atomized. Most separate product lines have their own internal owner and P&L by country or region (with a lot of internal transparency, incidentally). Some of them fail and get killed, some have only just started and some are doing very well.
I am no financial wizard. I just assumed that rolling up revenues and costs allows Amazon to present the best possible picture to investors while hiding some of the details from competitors and inquisitive analysts.
The one point I would add to this interesting write up is that Amazon seems to be fighting an on-going battle with cost control. One quick example, “Selling General and Administrative Expenses, FY 2010, 2011, 2012 look like this:
With the approach Amazon is taking in Web services, I wonder if users of these cloud services are actually subsidizing Amazon’s technology infrastructure. The recent roll out of cloud search raises questions about how much money Amazon will pump into the service. Right now, connectors and other must-have features are not available. The interesting deals which have some competitors using Amazon Web services to deliver their service are offered along with similar or directly competitive Amazon branded services. (See my forthcoming article in Information Today “Amazon: The Search Lazy Susan.”) What are the levers Amazon will pull to get its costs under tighter control? How will Amazon deal with labor dust ups in Germany?
Amazon is an interesting company to try and analyze. Like Google and some other dominant Web operations, the finances of these companies are managed to trigger mystery. Investors seem to love AMZN. As I post this, the stock is in the $300 per share range. Hapless JCPenny is about $13 per share. Will JCPenny and other retail outfits survive? I don’t plan on opening a retail store. Heck, I can’t even go into local shops any longer. The outfits have gone out of business. Rampant mismanagement in the Amazon jungle? Good question.
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Semantic Search for Academic Social Networks
August 9, 2013
Arnetminer is an interesting service from China that we came across recently and feel compelled to share it. It is a tool that offers search and mining capabilities for academic and researcher social networks. Semantic technology is the name of its game.
There are several groups and organizations that have funded this service: Chinese Young Faculty Research Funding, IBM China Research Lab and Minnesota/China Collaborative Research Program among others. It was originally developed by Jie Tang in 2006.
We learned about the focal points of the system:
In this system, we focus on: (1) creating a semantic-based profile for each researcher by extracting information from the distributed Web; (2) integrating academic data (e.g., the bibliographic data and the researcher profiles) from multiple sources; (3) accurately searching the heterogeneous network; (4) analyzing and discovering interesting patterns from the built researcher social network.
It looks like the Introduction page was last updated in 2010, but the search engine itself seems to be going strong into 2013. In the past, the folks at Arnetminer have given talks at Google, the World Wide Web Conference and more. It would be interesting to know where they are currently making their rounds at.
Megan Feil, August 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
First Super Scalable LDAP Directory Driven by Big Data
August 9, 2013
We read a rather lengthy summary of a new solution that is classified as a “world’s first.” Yahoo Finance published the press release from Radiant Logic about their commercial solution for distributed storage and processing for enterprise identity management. “Radiant Logic Introduces HDAP: The World’s First Super Scalable LDAP Directory Driven by Big Data and Search Technology” shares the information on it.
It was at the Cloud Identity Summit in Napa that Radiant Logic announced their solution. Based on Hadoop, this new version allows enterprises to channel the power of large cluster and “elastic” computing in their identity infrastructure.
The article tells us:
“With HDAP as part of the upcoming RadiantOne 7.0 virtualization release, companies can radically scale their access and throughput, using the first highly scalable and secure directory that’s based on big data and search technology. A diverse array of forces, from federation and the cloud to an increasingly mobile workforce, is putting escalating pressure on the enterprise identity system. To keep up with authentication and authorization demands, while tapping into greater use of personalization and recommendation engines, companies need a richer view of their identity, along with better performance and greater flexibility.”
We may not typically share articles that use such terminology as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), however we do understand those magical words ‘business value’ that appear so close on the page.
Megan Feil, August 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Natural Language Interface Transforms Search
August 8, 2013
Projections and opportunities are often forecasted for emerging technologies and natural language processing is no exception. We took a look back at an article from earlier in the year posted on Semantic Web: “Looking Ahead to a User Experience Transformed by Conversational Interfaces and NLP.” According to this article, software that is able to understand human intention will play a vital role in transforming business processes and search technology.
IBM distinguished engineer Currie Boyle is quoted as stating the following:
This ecosystem change is happening in the industry…discussing the desire for business dialogue management systems to try to determine the intent of a user seeking information and the intent of the author who wrote it, and matching the two by that intent, even if they don’t share the same words in common to express it. The applications range from consumer conversational and context-aware systems to business professionals finding answers in structured or unstructured data through via natural language interfaces to boosting call contact center performance with dialogue management.
Expert System solutions offer precise analytics using their core semantic search technologies. Their linguistic analysis capabilities enhance the extraction and application of data in the natural language interface.
Megan Feil, August 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Bing Now Offers Search By Creative Commons License
August 8, 2013
Here is a useful tidbit brought to us by Search Engine Land. Amy Gesenhues clues us in to a time-saving search feature in, “New Bing Search-by-License Feature Filters Images Based on Usage Rights.” She reports:
“Bing announced a new ‘Search by License’ feature today that filters images based on usage rights. The new feature filters images with a Creative Commons license, helping users avoid the hassle of digging through image licensing details to find available photos. . . .
“Bing also notes clicking on an image from the Bing image search results page will provide the image’s source to help determine licensing details. According to the announcement, the latest version of Microsoft Office 2013 uses the same ‘Search by License’ technology released today, so that when an image search is performed within any Office application, only licensed images are pulled by default.”
A curiously kid-themed screenshot accompanies the write-up, showing the six Creative Commons options under the handy License drop-down menu. Another image illustrates the source listing that accompanies an image from the results page. With this feature, Bing has just added a welcome shortcut to the arsenal of many who work with graphics for a living.
Cynthia Murrell, August 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
