Beyond Search

Google Certification Baby Steps

2009-07-01T21:05:22Z

Microsoft’s “partner” program has been a gold mine. Partners pay to be certified. Partners pay to attend conferences. Partners spend to dedicate engineers to things Microsoft. Google has some partner savvy wizards on its staff, but the company has been taking baby steps to build a really big partner ecosystem. Today’s partners are more like junior Googlers than the Big Deal Certified Gold outfits that Microsoft has in tow.

That might be changing.

Read “Google Sets up Accreditation Programme to Safeguard Site Conversion”. You see words that suggest that Google wants to do good. You see words that dance away from Big Time Certification and Accreditation. I noted this passage:

Google has extended the project by launching the Google Conversion Professional (GCP) programmed to help brands connect with those companies it deems to be the best conversion specialists….Graham Cooke, Google UK senior ecommerce manager, said, “We want our customers to get the best ROI from their advertising. If we’re driving paid clicks to a site but they’re not converting as well as they could be, we want that to be improved.”

For this addled goose, the Google is taking some baby steps.

Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2009

X1 Gains Additional Funding

2009-07-01T21:04:45Z

I heard that X1 had been seeking additional funding. Until I read the SocalTech.com story, “X1 Technologies Gains New Funding, CEO” here, I was in the dark about the company’s financial status. Along with the money, other changes were reported by SocalTech.com; for example:

The cash came from Idealab, the outfit that funded Overture which was sold to Yahoo. (Google learned a little from its observation of Overture I have heard.)
John Waller has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer
Bill Gross has rejoined the firm’s Board of Directors.

X1 has pushed from its high speed desktop information niche into the enterprise. My tests of the system a year ago revealed that the product was indeed a speedy indexer, easily able to keep pace with new email and other content at which I pointed the system. I prefer considerable control over a search system, and X1 made it harder for me to customize its system that I liked.

In the last year, the company has focused on making the product snap into Microsoft SharePoint as well as retaining the company’s core competency in email indexing. The product is on my list for a review later this year. You can get more information about X1 here. You can download a trial of the desktop system here.

Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2009

Recommind and Its 2009 Positioning

2009-07-01T21:03:38Z

Short honk: I find the shifting and twisting of search vendors interesting. In MetroCorpCounsel.com I learned that Recommind was described as “a leader in search-powered information risk management (IRM) software”. You can read the story “Recommind Survey Finds Global Recession Making Information Risk Worse For Large Enterprises” here. The company landed a new search account described in this way:

Recommind has announced that Seyfarth Shaw LLP has selected Recommind’s MindServer Search application as the search layer powering the firm’s new Microsoft SharePoint portal.

My take is that Recommind is a vendor of search systems. It is describing itself as a leader in a new field, information risk management. Interesting.

Stephen Arnold, June 6, 2009

Microsoft Visual Studio Shocker

2009-07-01T21:02:23Z

I get a copy (no charge because I don’t subscribe to print publications any longer) of Visual Studio Magazine. The May 2009 issue arrived on Friday, May 29, and I was flipping through the articles. I scan for info about Microsoft’s many search systems, but my eye landed on page 18. A table, reproduced below, provided some information derived from a poll of 369 developers. The idea was to get some info about Dot Net programming tools. I had heard that Dot Net was a sore spot with some developers due to performance problems, and I have only isolated examples of unacceptable performance from Dot Net centric applications. Throwing hardware at the problem seems to be the way out of the woods for speed issues.

Here’s a scan of the table, and I have converted some of the items to summary bullets for readability. You may be able to locate the original material online at the Visual Studio Magazine here. I haven’t had much luck locating stories that are not super positive, but your mileage may be different.

Here’s the table from page 18 of the May 2009 issue:

Now, let me highlight several data points:

The sample reported that 31 percent of the organizations are moving forward with new projects
About one third of the respondents see a tough development market in the second half of 2009
45 percent of the sample reported developer fatigue due to Microsoft’s technology upgrades
60 percent of the sample reported that their organizations are * not * developing specifically for the Windows 7 client operating system.

I like the “developer fatigue” angle. Google’s approach seems to be to allow developers to use what they know, thus making some effort to reduce developer fatigue. The question in my mind is, “How many developers may throw up their hands and just go with the GOOG?” That’s a $64 question.

Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2009

Autonomy Not Longer a Search Vendor

2009-07-04T14:45:35Z

Notch up at $15 million software compliance deal for Autonomy,. For the details read “Autonomy Corp Wins $15 Million Compliance Solutions Order From US Bank”. The deal is worth more than the combined revenues of Funnelback, Lexalytics, and Vivisimo—to name three vendors of search and content processing. The deal about more than one tenth of Endeca’s revenues. I think what the deal makes clear is:

Terminology for describing a vendor as in the search business is not indicative of what the coming is selling
Search vendors who stick to basic indexing and retrieval will have a tough time making a value proposition that causes big companies to pump out $15 million contracts with enthusiasm
The notion of what it takes to succeed in the contentious, competitive world of enterprise search has to be rethought.

Autonomy has emphasized that it is a leader in enterprise search. I think it has morphed into a different type of software3 outfit. Any thoughts for adjectives that would describe this space?

Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2009

Tweetmeme for Business

2009-07-01T21:00:10Z

Tweetmeme is a real-time search engine provided by Twitter that gathers all links posted on Twitter and determines which are the most popular and categorizes them on the front page. Readers can easily subscribe to each of the available categories, gaining access to the most popular, up-to-the-minute content through their Twitter account.

Twitter and its tools are the latest rage in Social Networking and business should be taking full advantage of what they can offer. If your business posts a blog, Tweetmeme provides the freshest, most relevant topics to be used as inspiration for the blog posts. Business can also use Tweetmeme’s service to send out time-sensitive information to large groups of customers or prospects, such as a real estate agent using Tweetmeme to create a stream of relevant information for their blog or site.

Read more about what Tweetmeme can do for your business:

Melanie Van Nuys, July 6, 2009

Funnelback on the Move

2009-07-01T20:57:33Z

Funnelback, an Australian enterprise search company, continues to land customers. In the US, the company licensed its search system to Pacific Network TV. Jim Tink posted a news story about the tie up on the Funnelback Web site. A reader in Australia told me that Funnelback has been added to the approved vendors list for the government of New South Wales. If you want more information about the company, you can explore the company’s Web site.

In a nutshell, Funnelback is a search system that includes a range of features, including folksonomy tagging, clustering, faceted navigation, and geospatial query processing. The company describes its system this way:

The core of the Funnelback search tool is its ranking function. Our ranking function combines many sources of evidence, such as the content and structure of the document, internal and external metadata, website structure, link structure, user interaction data, publication dates, and external textual annotations such as anchortext and tags. In order to achieve accurate and reliable rankings, we extract as much useful evidence as possible and weight it according to its value and reliability. All of the components of the system are well engineered and standards compliant while tolerant of prevalent violations of standards found in most applications. Data gathering components are able to recognize duplicate and near-duplicate content/sites. Our text filters reliably extract text content and metadata for indexing. Our link analysis tools recognize subtle affiliations as well as obvious ones. The indexer must know what to index and what not to index.

For more information, you can download Funnelback’s eight page white paper.

Stephen Arnold, July 5, 2009

Microsoft’s Revenue Vulnerability

2009-07-01T20:56:36Z

Not long ago, I read an article by Glyn Moody. The story was “Why Microsoft Hates – No, Really Hates – ODF” here. The ODF stands for the Open Document Format. (You can learn more about this from the OASIS organization itself.) The idea is simple. Save text files in a format that is not proprietary.

The “hate” angle is, according to Glyn Moody, tethered to Microsoft’s dependence on revenue from its proprietary Office file formats. Open formats would make it easier for organizations struggling to pay hefty client access license fees to shift to another suite of application software. Glyn Moody mentions Open Office, but other options that cost less than Microsoft’s products exist.

For me the most significant part of the write up was:

What this means is that Microsoft is only making big money on its Office suite, for whose luxurious margins it must therefore fight tooth and nail. Which, judging by its behavior at the ISO, and some more recent stories, is exactly what it is doing in the face of growing pressure from open ODF-based alternatives like OpenOffice.org.

As I thought about her argument, I thought about the threat that Google’s push into the enterprise represents to Microsoft’s financial stability. Hypothetically Google could nibble away at Microsoft’s revenues from its breadwinning applications software products just enough to force Microsoft to dip into its cash reserve, raise prices, or make a foolish decision. Google does not have to win big to create a cash problem for Microsoft.

If Glyn Moody’s financial assertions are on target, Microsoft has a revenue vulnerability and a reason to fight initiative such as the ODF. I find it interesting to think about Microsoft having to undergo the type of staff reductions and cost cutting that Yahoo is now enduring.

Google does not have to do much or move quickly. Once the bleeding starts, Microsoft may have a tough time healing the many tiny wounds that Google seems to be trying to inflict.

Stephen Arnold, July 5, 2009

Lexalytics, Endeca and a Missing Search Box

2009-07-01T20:56:10Z

I noted on the Lexalytics Web site a new design. I still lament the lack of a search box on the main page. I find that having to click and fumble is not as helpful as having a search system available to visitors. What makes it more unusual is that on the site I located this item, “Text Analytics – Enterprise Search”. The article explains that Lexalytics and Endeca have a business relationship. I also noticed that Lexalytics is a partner with Microsoft Fast. I wonder if either Endeca or Microsoft might gain from indexing the Lexalytics’ Web site and making a search function available. Google’s custom search engine is also available. The absence of a search box is:

An oversight which is not positive for a company in the search and content processing business
A business decision which makes me as a user do extra work
Political because Lexalytics’ management can’t decide which of the partners’ systems to feature
Something the addled goose is not sufficiently alert to discern.

I hope the search box makes an appearance soon. The big “add you email box” fooled me until I looked closely.

Stephen Arnold, July 5, 2009

Bing and Fail Over

2009-07-04T14:33:07Z

Short honk: I had high hopes for Bing.com and its next generation, high availability data centers. The addled goose is inspecting goose ponds 4,000 miles from Harrods Creek and was not able to access Bing.com’s travel vertical. The goose thought he was at fault. I then read “Seattle Data Center Fire Knocks out Bing Travel, Other Web Sites” and learned that others were at fault. Whew. New acronym need: MGOL or Microsoft Goes Off Line.

Stephen Arnold, July 4, 2009