Search Your Computer
January 13, 2020
On January 10, 2020, one of the DarkCyber team needed to locate a file on a Windows 10 machine. Windows 10 search was okay, but it generated false drops and took too long.
DarkCyber tried to get its copy of ISYS Desktop Search 8 to work, but that was a non starter. We had given up on Copernic a couple of versions ago. The DTSearch trial had expired as had a couple of New Age search systems vendors had provided to us to test; for example, X1, Vound and Perfect Search, among others. Elastic was overkill. Yikes.
We then checked our files for “desktop search” and located links to these articles:
- Microsoft Windows 10 Search Indexer Diagnostics
- WizFile Is an Ultra-Fast Windows Search Tool
- UltraSearch, Fast Windows File Finder
- Everything Desktop Search
- FileSearchy Is a Fast Windows Search Alternative
- Windows Search Replacement Fileseek
- SearchMyFiles, A Versatile Desktop Search for Windows
We found a couple of these programs useful. In fact, the Everything software, version 1.4 did the trick for us.
We wanted to thank Martin Brinkmann for his articles which provided useful links and helpful information to us. Good job!
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2020
Lucidworks: Beyond Search for Sure
January 9, 2020
Lucid Imagination experienced what DarkCyber recalls as a bit of turmoil. From the git go, there was tension in the open sourcey ranks. One of the founders was unceremoniously given an opportunity to find his future elsewhere. Then there was the game of Revolving Door Presidents. Next was the defection of some lucid thinkers to Amazon, not in Seattle but just up the 101 to some non descript buildings. Like a law of nature another round of presidential revolving doors. Along the way, more investors wrote checks for what was an open source play based on Lucene/Solr. (I know that writing the two “names” together does not capture the grandiosity of the conception of community supported search and the privately held companies efforts to create a huge, billion dollar information access business. Sigh.
Now Lucidworks (which I automatically interpret as the phrase “Lucidworks. Really?”) has acquired an eCommerce vendor. Hello, what’s happening Magento, Mercado, Shopify, and Amazon. Yep, Amazon. But doesn’t Amazon have search too? Trivial point. Lucidworks is going to turn the $200 million in investment capital, an interface scripting engine, open source software, and Cirrus10 (an ecommerce service provider) into billions. Yes, billions!
According to “Lucidworks Acquires Cirrus10, Global Ecommerce Service Provider, to Deepen Domain Expertise and Become a Leader in Digital Commerce Solutions” states:
Lucidworks, leader in AI-powered search, acquires Cirrus10, ecommerce solutions expert with more than 100 ecommerce customers. Lucidworks and Cirrus10 have worked together as partners for the past two years and now combine their domain expertise to provide more targeted solutions for different domains in the fast-moving ecommerce market.
The Yahoo news story points out that Lucidworks’ secret sauce is a system:
produces relevant results, recommends products that meet customer goals, and predicts shopper intent to create a more engaging experience.
And don’t forget artificial intelligence. AI! Obviously.
But whose AI? The answer appears to be AI from Cirrus10. DarkCyber noted this statement from a co founder of the ecommerce service provider:
“Fusion is the world’s only platform for extensible AI-driven search. Fusion elevated our service offerings by giving us a framework for exploring machine learning with our customers, and using it, we can build personalized and scalable relevancy models without a black box or army of data scientists. By combining Lucidworks search and AI expertise with our deep experience in the ecommerce space we can cement our role as digital commerce solution leaders.”—Peter Curran, Cirrus10
What appears to be the business strategy for Lucidworks is to get something that generates sustainable revenue, allows the company to upsell Cirrus10’s customers, and differentiate Lucidworks from the competitors in plain old search.
There are competitors; for example, outfits with venture capital backers demanding results (Algolia, Coveo). Also, open sourcey solutions (Drupal Commerce, Magento Community Edition) and small, feisty outfits like SLI Systems and EasyAsk). Note: This is a partial list. I almost forget companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google.
DarkCyber interprets the “beyond search” phrase as an attempt to make a 12 year old company into a revenue and profit machine.
DarkCyber, which is an annex to our blog Beyond Search, wishes the clear thinkers a great 2020. The question “Lucidworks. Really?” could be answered as long as AI, NLP, machine learning, open source, and synergy produce a winner, not a horse designed by a committee.
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2019
Are Media Worthless? Matt Taibbi Says Yes
January 3, 2020
Robert Steele, a former US spy whom I know, and also the top reviewer for non-fiction books in English, has published Review: Hate Inc. Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi and given the book five stars, calling it “”totally brilliant.”
I was drawn to this statement in Steele’s review:
There will come a time, guaranteed, when Americans pine for a powerful neither-party-aligned news network, to help make sense of things.
Steele’s review appears to provide a concise summary of the book that those who worry about accuracy, data integrity, ethics, and the concept of social value should find interesting. Steele concludes the review by noting:
The same is true of the intelligence community, and the academy, of non-profits and governments. Keep the money moving, never mind the facts.
Facts? Are facts irrelevant? Steele and Taibbi appear to agree that facts remain important. Dissenters: Possibly the “media?”
Stephen E Arnold, January 3, 2020
Cognitive Search: A Silver Bullet?
January 2, 2020
Search is a basic function that requires tinkering to make it intuitive and a useful tool for enterprise systems. In the past, most out of the box search solutions stink and require augmentations from the IT department to work. Enterprise search, however, has dramatically improved and that makes a slow news day for search experts. Most headlines based enterprise search include the latest buzz topics, like, “Significance Of Cognitive Search In The Enterprise” posted on Analytics Insight.
Cognitive search is apparently the newest thing. It is basically enterprise search injected with machine learning/artificial intelligence steroids. An undeniable truth is that enterprise systems are pulling their data across many systems, on site and in the cloud. A good search tool will crawl each dataset and return the most accurate results. Cognitive search uses AI to make search smarter aka “more cognitive,” which basically means the search tool learns from search queries, make search suggestions, and offer predictions. The official jargon sounds smarter:
“Cognitive search is associated with the concept of machine learning, where a computer system processes new insights and convert the way it reacts based on the newly gained data. By using the form of AI, it provides more in-depth search outcomes based on local information, previous search history and other variables. It also brings more specific results to an end-user as the cognitive system learns how an individual or system acts these searches.
This makes the cognitive search method a variable implementation into an enterprise’s network search capability.”
In other words, based off the latest technology craze enterprise search is going to become smarter and more intuitive for users! Blah, blah, semantic search, blah, blah, search engines, blah, blah, algorithms. It is the same “new and improved” spiel that comes every year.
Whitney Grace, January 2, 2020
PubMed: Some Tweaks
December 27, 2019
PubMed.gov is an old school online information service. The user types in one or more terms, and the system generates a list of results. Controlled terms work better than “free text” guesses.
According to “Announcing the New PubMed”:
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is replacing the current version of the PubMed database with a newly re-designed version. The new version is now live and can be found at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
The appearance of the site has been updated. To one of the DarkCyber team members, the logo was influenced by PayPal’s design motif. Clicking for pages of results has been supplanted by the infinite scroll. Personally, I prefer to know how many pages of results have been found for a particular query. But, just tell me, “Hey, boomer, you are stupid.” I get it.
The write up does not comment upon backlog, changes in editorial policy, and cleaning citations to weed out those which are essentially marketing write ups or articles with non reproducible results, wonky statistics, or findings unrelated to the main job of medicine. But you can use the service on a mobile phone.
Stephen E Arnold, December 27, 2019
Expanding the User Base: Voice Search As the Three Rs Are Deprecated
December 24, 2019
How does a company deal with declining reading and writing skills? Easy. Shift to voice search. The technology opens the door to individuals who may not be able to read or write. Voice search sidesteps barriers to obtaining information online. “You’ll Soon Be Able Search YouTube Web by Using Your Voice” definitely makes clear that creating a way for those who are unable or unwilling to thumb type is going to be a reality. The write up itself is an example of what happens when basic skills are not up to snuff.
We noted this passage:
As per renowned reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, YouTube is currently working on voice search for the web, meaning it will let users use their voice to perform searches.
DarkCyber is not sure what a “per renowned reverse engineer” is, but the message is clear. If a person cannot read, spell, or write—voice search will make it possible to watch YouTube videos.
Why?
Advertising revenue is one possible answer. Even those lacking certain skills buy stuff equipped with voice recognition. The reading and writing? Unnecessary for some consumers.
Stephen E Arnold, December 24, 2019
Do Four Peas Make a Useful Digital Pod?
December 24, 2019
The Four P’s of Information
This has the problem with data since at least the turn of this century—Forbes posts a “Reality Check: Still Spending More Time Gathering Instead of Analyzing.” Writer and Keeeb CTO Sid Probstein reminds us:
“Numerous studies of ‘knowledge worker’ productivity have shown that we spend too much time gathering information instead of analyzing it. In 2001, IDC published its venerable white paper, ‘The High Cost of Not Finding Information,’ noting that knowledge workers were spending two and a half hours a day searching for information. Since then, we have seen the rise of the cloud, ubiquitous computing, connectivity and everything else that was science fiction when we were kids becoming a reality — including the imminent emergence of AI. Yet in 2012, a decade after the IDC report, a study conducted by McKinsey found that knowledge workers still spend 19% of their time searching for and gathering information, and a 2018 IDC study found that ‘data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week’ — 30% searching for, governing and preparing data plus 20% duplicating work. Clearly, all the technology advances have not flipped the productivity paradigm; it seems like we still spend more time searching for information that exists rather than analyzing and creating new knowledge.”
Probstein believes much of the problem lies in data silos. There are four subsets of the data silo issue, we’re told, but most proposed solutions fail to address all of them. They are the “four P’s” of information: Public Data (info that is searchable across the World Wide Web), Private Data (information behind login pages or firewalls), Paid Data (like industry research, datasets, and professional information), and Personal Data (our own notes, bookmarks, and saved references). See the article for more about each of these areas. Bridging these silos remains a challenge for knowledge workers, but it seems businesses may be taking the issue more seriously. Will we soon be making better use of all that data? Do four peas make a pod? Not yet.
Cynthia Murrell, December 24, 2019
Supersearcher: Secrets Revealed
December 12, 2019
Most of the people I encounter today are quick to tell me, “I am an excellent researcher.” Confidence can be useful. When I read articles like “Become a Google Super Searcher with These 17 Tips,” I marvel at how the concept of a super searcher has degraded. I have met some super searchers; for example, Barbara Quint, Marydee Ojala, Reva Basch, and others. You may ask, “Who are these people?” Sorry. I won’t help you. Use the tips in the article to locate information about these real super searchers.
What are the secrets revealed in the Spec? Let me highlight five of these insights for you. You may find them helpful. I reserve comment. Here we go, but you will have to use your search skills to locate the other secrets if the link and the paywall block you, gentle reader:
- Know the difference between a link to a source and an ad.
- Be suspicious.
- Use other search engines in addition to Google.
- Wikipedia may not be a verified source.
- Arrange your search terms.
Remember. There are 12 more tips. And you can use the Twitter CEO’s favorite search engine which recycles results from other search systems.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2019
Has Google Trashed Christmas for Kids?
December 6, 2019
Christmas? Ruined by the Google? I don’t believe it, but Metro UK may.
I learned in “Google Ruins Christmas for 1.1 Million Children Every Year Claim Teachers.” If the story is online, isn’t it true?
The write up states:
Research carried out by Exam Papers Plus suggests that each year over a million children are typing into Google whether or not Father Christmas is real.
How is this possible?
1,116,500 children ask Google “Is Santa Real” each year.
Google’s smart search system obviously knows the answer. Kids who do research are informed of the truth delivered by an objective, ad supported online service.
One tip: Don’t make a video for children that espouses untruths or put links in comments sections of video for children. A lump of coal may be placed in one’s stocking. Not just any coal. The lignite stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, December 6, 2019
Microsoft Search: Still Playing an Old Eight Track Cassette?
November 20, 2019
How many times has DarkCyber heard about Microsoft’s improved search? Once, twice? Nope, dozens upon dozens. Whether it was the yip yap about Fast Search & Transfer, Colloquis and its natural language processing, Powerset and its semantic search system, Semantic Machines for natural voice functions, or the home brew solutions from hither and yon in the Microsoft research and development empire. There’s Outlook search and Bing search and probably a version of LinkedIn’s open source search kicking around too.
But that’s irrelevant in today’s “who cares about the past?” datasphere. DarkCyber noted “Here’s How Microsoft Is Looking to Make Search Smarter and More Natural.” What is smart search? An abrogation of user intentions? What is more natural? Boolean logic, field codes, date and time metadata, and similar artifacts of a long lost era seem okay for the DarkCyber team.
The write up explains in its own surrealistic way:
Microsoft’s ultimate goal with Microsoft Search is to provide answers not just to simple queries, but also more personalized, complex ones, such as “Can I bring my pet to work?”. The Microsoft Graph API, semantic knowledge understanding from Bing, machine-reading comprehension and the Office 365 storage and services substrate all are playing a role in bringing this kind of search to Microsoft’s apps.
Yeah, okay. But enterprise SharePoint users still complain that current content cannot be located. The current tools are blind to versions of content residing on departmental servers or parked in a cloud account owned by the legal department. And what about the prices just quoted by an enterprise sales professional? Sorry. You are out of luck, but Microsoft is… trying.
Now grab this peek into the future of Microsoft search:
Turing in Bing already has helped Microsoft to understand semantics via searching by concept instead of keyword. Natural-language processing also has helped with understanding query intent, she noted. Semantic understanding means users don’t have to expect exact word matches. (When searching for Coke, matches with “canned soda,” also could be part of the set of results generated, for example.) The Turing researchers are employing machine reading, as well, to help with contextual search/results.
The chaotic and often misfiring Microsoft search technologies do one thing well: Generate revenue for the legions of certified Microsoft partners.
Users? Yeah, Microsoft may help you too. In the meantime, the lawyers will manage their own contract drafts and eDiscovery materials. The engineers will stick with the tools baked into AutoCAD type systems? The marketers will do what marketers in many companies do? Stuff data on USBs, into the Google cloud, or copy the files to a shared folder on a former employee’s desktop. Yes, it happens.
Microsoft and search. Getting better. Here’s a snippet about Powerset (CNET, 2008)
Much of what Powerset has enabled with its technology is a superior user experience for searching. Powerset’s Wikipedia search, which surfaces concepts, meanings, and relationships (like subject, verbs, and objects in a language), is the very small tip of the iceberg.
Time for a new eight track tape?
Stephen E Arnold, November 20, 2019
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