A claim that Google is doing pretty detailed extraction
In a blog post focusing on SEOing for local search, some interesting claims are argued, including:
- Google knows what a review is. (This seems to be “everybody knows it” conventional wisdom.)
- Google knows how many stars a review got. (Ditto.)
- Google tracks who the reviewer is and how many other reviews s/he wrote (that’s the big insight of the post and related conversation).
Pretty interesting. Text mining companies are paying a lot of attention to Voice-of-the-Market these days; even so, I question whether then can do the same things out of the box.
| Categories: Competitive intelligence, Google, Search engines | 1 Comment |
How Google’s technology took flight
For those who missed the original publication in April, 2002.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Search engines | 2 Comments |
A very fast splogger
The first post ever on Strategic Messaging went up at 2:49 am. Within four hours, I had my first splog trackbacks, all from the same site. The strategicmessaging.com domain itself had just repropagated through DNS hours earlier, and had no incoming links other than Whois and the like.
Pretty impressive spamming. Not that it did him any good, of course, except insofar as he was stealing a bit of my content …
More on Microsoft in enterprise search
Following up on my prior posts about Microsoft’s impending acquisition of FAST, they’ve now had the conference call. By custom and indeed antitrust law, such calls are very light on content. But here are a few tidbits and takeaways, all from Jeff Raikes of Microsoft:
- Jeff talked solely about FAST as adding to enterprise search, and rightly contrasted that with web search.
- However, he deflected questions about web search with “We aren’t talking about that much detail right now” rather than with a firm “Well, we aren’t allowed to use FAST that way.”
- Specifically, enterprise search is all about integration with SharePoint (portal).
- Jeff said Microsoft’s current search could handle millions or maybe tens of millions of documents, but thought there was demand for FAST’s ability to handle billions.
- He positioned FAST as an application development platform, giving an example of structured search (the actual word was “pivot”) in consumer electronics. … Well, at least he’s looking in the right direction.
| Categories: Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft, Search engines, Structured search | 1 Comment |
Microsoft in enterprise search
Microsoft has certainly had a number of false starts in search. At the 1997 Verity user conference, a Microsoft employee told me of his confidence Microsoft would surpass Verity in enterprise search the next year. Yeah, right.
In September, 2003, a nice woman wrote me to tell me she had joined Microsoft and would personally write the ranking engine for MSN search. That worked out great too.
Now Microsoft has a multi-faceted enterprise search strategy. Guy Creese seems mightily impressed. Should we, for once, be impressed too?
Frankly, yes. So far as I can tell, most traditional text search products have atrophied, including Verity before it was bought by Autonomy. And I’m skeptical about Autonomy’s Bayesian-everything approach. Oracle and Google, in different ways, consistently fail to round out their products. So if FAST’s technology can ever be fleshed out and stabilized, it indeed could be a market leader or even dominator. Read more
| Categories: Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
Microsoft is buying FAST; what about FAST’s contractual prohibition?
As you’ve probably heard by now, Microsoft is buying enterprise search vendor FAST (Fast Search & Transfer). FAST wasn’t always focused on enterprise search; in fact, FAST built alltheweb.com. And when FAST sold alltheweb.com to Inktomi, it agreed not to reenter the web search business itself. Inktomi was subsequently bought by Yahoo, a company not much inclined to do Microsoft any favors in the web search arena.
I look forward to hearing why this won’t be a problem.
| Categories: Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft, Search engines, Yahoo | 4 Comments |
Babelfish phrase game — Round 1
Babelfish is a machine-translation service offered at a few websites, like these at Yahoo and Yahoo property Altavista. These translations can be somewhat amusing. Indeed, they can be source of a guessing game. A well-known English phrase — say a quote, or idiom, or song lyric — is translated into a foreign language and back a few times. The result is presented, and the challenge is to guess the original.
I’ll start with five; please feel free to post your answers in the comment thread. You can check them before posting, at the second link above. 🙂
- Attach me and me become to the bottom more effective than you can to indeed present you (English –> German –> French –> English)
- A law was returned to the moon loine makes here (English –> Italian –> French –> English)
- It is not for the sake of, ask those which your country can ask those which can make because of your country and do (English –> Japanese –> English)
- Whose of wood these will be me think 4 he knows (English –> Russian –> English)
- Sincerely I do not give my expensive, with swore (English –> German –> French –> English)
| Categories: Babelfish game, Fun stuff | 5 Comments |
Restoring security and function to my mail and websites
OK. Here’s the story as I now know it.
- monash.com was hit by a massive mail-bomb Christmas Eve. My email and websites went down for a while as a consequence. What’s more, with a flooded mail queue, there were further mail problems through at least 12/28. Some mail bounced, and other mail that appeared to go through was lost forever. If you’ve mailed me since 12/24 and I haven’t answered, please send again.
- The mail-bomb paved the way for an injection of some malware. I started noticing possible trojans on monash.com 12/31. Melissa Bradshaw, my stellar web designer, noticed Javascript that she hadn’t written, both on monash.com and dbms2.com. So far as we could tell, standard anti-malware client protections were sufficient to keep any trojans from being successfully downloaded to clients.
- My very attentive web hosting company, Dimension Servers, is rebuilding its Linux kernel accordingly. Scheduled downtime for all my sites and mail is midnight to 3:00 am Eastern tonight, but that’s obviously just a rough estimate. Company president Jonathan MacAllister telephoned me to tell me this personally, notwithstanding that his wife delivered a baby by emergency C-section today. (Wife and baby are OK!)
- Jonathan also told me that after the attack, he bought a Cisco appliance. Every web hosting company needs to do that, as appliances are much more efficient at dealing with overloading attacks than the servers themselves. Cisco was a brand choice pretty much dictated by his remote data center.
- David Ferris and Richi Jennings have convinced me to move monash.com email to Google’s free mail hosting service. This is what they’re doing with ferris.com mail and all of Richi’s domains as well. NO analysts are more reliable on email than David and Richi. And hosting is surely no exception, as David and I did a research project together some years ago uncovering the Critical Path sham.
- The net effect of that move will be that monash.com and dbms2.com have their email managed quite separately, so if you can’t get me at one, please try the other. Generally, if you don’t know me you should write to monash.com, and I’ll probably write back from dbms2.com.
- I’ll post about all this again after things seem to have worked out, possibly over on the Monash Report.
Happy New Year,
CAM
| Categories: Spam and antispam | 2 Comments |