Canada and Its Upgraded Archive Search
February 19, 2018
A nation’s archive is a priceless treasure and an informative wonder. The Library of Congress houses many historical documents and items important to United States history. The Vatican also houses an impressive archive that is not only important to world history, but Abrahamic religions. The Library and Archives of Canada is another treasure trove not only for the US’s northern neighbor, but for the world.
The Library and Archives of Canada wants people from over the world to take advantage of its holdings. In order to do so, the Library and Archives of Canada needs a user-friendly database with a search function. Government-branded search engines usually stink worse than last year’s hockey sweats, but Library Journal says that, “Library And Archives Canada Announces Launch Of ‘Collection Search’ (Beta).”
Canada’s new endeavor is appropriately titled Voilà and is a leading-edge library management system. Here is a little more about it:
“The launch of Voilà, a milestone for LAC in its library renewal project, marks the completion of the migration of the national union catalogue holdings from AMICUS to OCLC. Starting today, LAC invites members of the Canadian library community to use Voilà.
The new catalogue offers an intuitive interface with modern features for searching published materials located in hundreds of libraries across Canada that subscribe to OCLC services, or had their holdings migrated from AMICUS to OCLC. LAC will start enriching Voilà to provide public access to its own holdings later this year.”
Canada has a reputation for doing practical and workable solutions, so the new Voilà database will probably have a successful beta phase, unless it gets too sticky with maple syrup.
Whitney Grace, February 19, 2018
Visual Search Enters Its Next Phase
February 16, 2018
About a year ago, some of the biggest names in search declared that visual search was the next big horizon in the industry and that they were pouring great gobs of money into this world. If you are like us, visual search is not exactly part of your everyday life yet. But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t evolving, as we discovered in a fascinating Digital Trends story, “Not Happy With Pinterest Search Results? Refine it With Text and Photo Queries.”
According to the story:
“Pinterest announced the addition of text searches that work within the visual search tool, allowing users to give Pinterest Lens a bit more direction on the intent of the search. According to Pinterest, users make an average of 600 million searches every month.”
That’s a serious trend and an uptick from past numbers we have seen. However, all these advances still don’t seem to be creeping into our daily life…yet. As reported by IT Pro Portal, retailers are seriously starting to adopt visual search technology. This directly stems from the rise of shopping via cell phone, as opposed to laptops. And, as we all know, phones are custom made for visual search thanks to their cameras. The technology sounds like it is there, our interest is there as shoppers, and we think the storm is on the horizon where visual search overtakes the retail market soon.
Patrick Roland, February 16, 2018
The Appification of Search: Dr. Frankenstein Is Back in the Innovation Basement
February 7, 2018
When I need information, I want to define my area of interest. I want to select a database which is likely to contain relevant information. I want to receive results and short summaries. I want to work through the content which conforms to my query. Time consuming and difficult work. But that’s how I roll down the information highway.
I noted a write up from Google called “The Keyword.” The story or marketing piece tells me that when I look for an airline flight, I will be able to book that flight from the search results.
Sounds like a great idea.
As I stated in the opening paragraph, I want to work through results. In the case of looking for a flight, I want to check different departure and return dates, available airports, number of stops, layover times, etc.
Once I locate a particular flight, I check the cost of that flight using different online services.
The reason? I have been flying around for more than a half century, and I have learned how an uninformed decision can set up an overnight in February in the Minneapolis St Paul airport. Believe me that’s not a great place to sleep as the snow falls and the meeting in Fargo becomes essentially impossible.
The write up states:
We’re evolving the way our hotel search works on smartphones to help users explore options and make decisions on their smallest screens. The new hotel search experience includes better price filtering, easier-to-find amenity information and the ability to book right from Google.
Some of the folks looking for flights will find convenience and a small screen ideal for their needs.
Not for me.
I do not trust one stop shops. I do not trust aggregators. I do not trust information assembled when ad dollars may be fluttering like those Minnesota snow flakes. I have learned that Southwest flights and some European carriers data require a visit to the airline’s Web site. Some human travel agents still consolidate tickets for wild and crazy “groups.”
But my principal concern is that online trust is no longer an operating assumption for me. Unless I slog through the data, I lack the information necessary for an informed decision.
Appification of search is one more shift from locating information, processing it, and making an informed decision.
Thank you, Mother Google. But no. I don’t want search results to be an app. I want search results to be one component of data collection and a precursor to analysis. Also, I like a big screen.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2018
Searching Video and Audio Files is Now Easier Than Ever
February 7, 2018
While text-based search has been honed to near perfection in recent years, video and audio search still lags. However, a few companies are really beginning to chip away at this problem. One that recently caught our attention was VidDistill, a company that distills YouTube videos into an indexed list.
According to their website:
vidDistill first gets the video and captions from YouTube based off of the URL the user enters. The caption text is annotated with the time in the video the text corresponds to. If manually provided captions are available, vidDistill uses those captions. If manually provided captions are not available, vidDistill tries to fall back on automatically generated captions. If no captioning of any sort is available, then vidDistill will not work.
Once vidDistill has the punctuated text, it uses a text summarization algorithm to identify the most important sentences of the entire transcript of the video. The text summarization algorithm compresses the text as much as the user specifies.
It was interesting and did what they claimed, however, we wish you could search for words and have it brought up in the index so users could skip directly to specific parts of a video. This technology has been done in audio, quite well. A service called Happy Scribe, which is aimed at journalists transcribing audio notes, takes an audio file and (for a small fee) transcribes it to text, which can then be searched. It’s pretty elegant and fairly accurate, depending on the audio quality. We could see VidDistill using this mentality to great success.
Patrick Roland, February 7, 2018
German Scientists Find Freedom Of Search
February 6, 2018
A storm had been brewing in Germany over the ability for scientists to gain access to expensive academic journals. The deal had more to do with search and rights than it did science, so the publisher stood up and did something shocking. They did…the right thing. We learned more in a recent Nature story, “Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees.”
According to the story:
The Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has granted uninterrupted access to its paywalled journals for researchers at around 200 German universities and research institutes that had refused to renew their individual subscriptions at the end of 2017.
The institutions had formed a consortium to negotiate a nationwide licence with the publisher. They sought a collective deal that would give most scientists in Germany full online access to about 2,500 journals at about half the price that individual libraries have paid in the past. But talks broke down and, by the end of 2017, no deal had been agreed. Elsevier now says that it will allow the country’s scientists to access its paywalled journals without a contract until a national agreement is hammered out.
This is a victory for, not just the scientists, but for freedom of information. We applaud Elsevier for putting aside profit (temporarily) in favor of human. We wish more companies and governments would take their example to heart.
Patrick Roland, February 6, 2018
Whois: A Frustrating Search Experience
February 3, 2018
It’s a complicated moment to be starting any business, especially if you have a domain finding WHOIS site. These tools for tracking down owners of web sites might be under fire, but that hasn’t stopped Zeit from trying. We discovered this startup at its website, under the title: “Domains Search for Web: Instant, Serverless, And Global.”
According to the site:
“We also knew we wanted the user’s search to feel instant and effortless. As the user types, we want to start dispatching queries to get the data from our services as soon as possible, and similarly render them as soon as they become available to the user. With this in mind, we would have to embrace asynchrony at every level of the stack.”
We love Zeit’s user-friendly approach. We just worry how long a business like this can stay afloat. This stems from the recent news that WHOIS sites are under threat of going dark. The General Data Protection Regulation could drastically change or shutter this niche online industry. We are certain that where regulation closes a door, innovators open a window, but we’d be sweating a little if we started a WHOIS site today.
Patrick Roland, February 3, 2018
Google Has Its Own Browser History
February 2, 2018
Have you ever wanted to look at your past Google searches, but did not want to go through your browser history? Google has a new feature that will allow users to see their recent searches. Search Engine Land reports that “Google Home Page Search Box Now Shows You Recent Searches By Default” and it is a super option. Super annoying, that is. Whenever you use Google search, a default dropdown appears before you even enter text into the search box.
Even former Google search executive Matt Cutts said this “new feature” is super annoying. He tried to opt out of it, but could not find the opt-out option. Search Engine Land sent Google an email to see what the scoop was. They discovered that even Google found the automatic browser history box annoying. Here is Google’s official response:
Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that this is not the behavior they want and it was likely a bug. “We launched the ability to see past searches by clicking the search box earlier this year. However, past searches should not be appearing immediately on page load, so we are working to fix this issue,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.
All right, Google! You admitted a mistake and provided a solution. Now can you do something about the fake news stories that are plaguing Google News?
Whitney Grace, February 2, 2018
Sinequa Continues Its Repositioning Effort
January 30, 2018
Cognitive search is a pretty murky pool in terms of public understanding. Recently, Laurent Fanichet attempted to bridge that gap and also stake a claim for his company, Sinequa, as a leader in the field. However, we have questions. His editorial was featured in the French magazine, Journal Du Net called “Cognitive Search: A Valuable Tool to Fight Terrorism.”
According to the story (translated into English):
“Access to the right information at the right time is the promise of cognitive search. This artificial intelligence (AI) treats the “mega-data” of big data, to extract, practically in real time, relevant and contextualized information, from a multitude of sources and complex data. Cognitive search intelligent data processing combines with machine learning…”
It is exciting that France is attempting to use AI to solve its terror threats. While the plans laid out by Fanichet sound wonderful, it will still take quite a bit of work to surpass the other global leaders in the field. Namely, IBM’s Watson, which recently declared it was actually surpassing human beings in reading comprehension. Power like that seems like it would be a huge advantage to counter terror organizations wading through files and reports on suspects. We hope startups see this as a challenge to improve their power and that we all win in the end.
Sinequa continues to associate itself with the hot trends in content processing. Its roots in search and retrieval are now a secondary or tertiary part of the company’s 2018 marketing it appears.
Patrick Roland, January 30, 2018
Big Data, Search, and Artificial Intelligence: Quite a Mash Up
January 29, 2018
I read a consultant-technology mash up marketing essay. The write up is “Big Data and Search: The Time for Artificial Intelligence Is Now.” The write up is mostly jargon. I wonder if the engineer driving the word processing train pushed the wrong button.
Here are the “keywords” I noted in the write up:
Analytics
Artificial intelligence
Big Data
Blockchain
Business action and business use cases
Chatbots
Cognitive (presumably not the IBM which maybe doesn’t work as advertised)
Consumer services
Customer / citizen facing (some government speak too)
Digital assistants
False or biased results (yes, fake news)
Keywords
Machine learning
Natural language processing
Platforms
Real time results
Resources
SQL databases
Search
Transparency
Trust
Video
Google Takes On Russia In Epic Fight
January 26, 2018
It is foolish to challenge Russia to a fight. Napoleon lost his throne because he tried to invade Russia during winter. Hitler pissed off Stalin during World War II, so Russia switched sides, then the Nazis invaded in winter. It is a really bad idea to invade Russia, especially in winter. Google is duking it out with Russia, but this war is digital so maybe Alphabet stands a chance. The Washington Report discusses the wired Cold war in, “Google Is Getting Pulled Into A Fight With Russia Over RT And Sputnik.” The real battle is with two Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik, but they are owned by the government.
The reason for battle is due to Russians apparent and supposed influence on US politics-most notably, the 2016 presidential election. Russia is accused of spreading fake news through RT and Sputnik. News outlets like Google News picks these up and are pushed to US readers. Russia is threatening to retaliate if Google pushes RT and Sputniks’ ratings lower in search rankings. Google decided to curb fake news stories that could be weaponized information against the US. Russia’s RT and Sputnik are amongst those that distribute fake news.
When asked why Russian-backed sites enjoy favorable placement on Google’s platforms, Schmidt said, ‘We are working on detecting this kind of scenario … de-ranking those kinds of sites. It’s basically RT and Sputnik are the two.’ He added that the company does not want to ban the outlets. And according to Google, the company does not re-rank individual websites.
Russia is, of course, is not happy. They claim that Google is being discriminatory and are demanding that Eric Schmidt explain himself. Google just wants to curb fake news and also make sure their platform is not used for nefarious purposes. Good luck, Google. Russia is hard to defeat, but how do they stand on the digital front?
Whitney Grace, January 26, 2018
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