Lynda Moulton prefers enterprise search products that get up and running quickly
Lynda Moulton, to put it mildly, disagrees with the Gartner Magic Quadrant analysis of enterprise search. Her preferred approach is captured in:
Coveo, Exalead, ISYS, Recommind, Vivisimo, and X1 are a few of a select group that are marking a mark in their respective niches, as products ready for action with a short implementation cycle (weeks or months not years).
By way of contrast, Lynda opines:
Autonomy and Endeca continue to bring value to very large projects in large companies but are not plug-and-play solutions, by any means. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft offer search solutions of a very different type with a heavy vendor or third-party service requirement. Google Search Appliance has a much larger installed base than any of these but needs serious tuning and customization to make it suitable to enterprise needs.
In particular, her views about FAST (now Microsoft) are scathing.
| Categories: Coveo, Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
More on Languageware
Marie Wallace of IBM wrote back in response to my post on Languageware. In particular, it seems I got the Languageware/UIMA relationship wrong. Marie’s email was long and thoughtful enough that, rather than just pointing her at the comment thread, I asked for permission to repost it. Here goes:
Thanks for your mention to LanguageWare on your blog, albeit a skeptical one
I totally understand your scepticism as there is so much talk about text analytics these days and everyone believes they have solved the problem. I guess I can only hope that our approach will indeed prove to be different and offers some new and interesting perspectives.
The key differentiation in our approach is that we have completely decoupled the language model from the code that runs the analysis. This has been generalized to a set of data-driven algorithms that apply across many languages so that you can have an approach that makes the solution hugely and rapidly customizable (without having to change code). It is this flexibility that we believe is core to realizing multi-lingual and multi-domain text analysis applications in a real-word scenario. This customization environment is available for download from Alphaworks, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/lrw, and we would love to get feedback from your community.
On your point about performance, we actually consider UIMA one of our greatest performance optimizations and core to our design. The point about one-pass is that we never go back over the same piece of text twice at the same “level” and take a very careful approach when defining our UIMA Annotators. Certain layers of language processing just don’t make sense to split up due to their interconnectedness and therefore we create our UIMA annotators according to where they sit in the overall processing layers. That’s the key point.
Anyway those are my thoughts, and thanks again for the mention. It’s really great to see these topics being discussed in an open and challenging forum.
Languageware — IBM takes another try at natural language processing
Marie Wallace of IBM wrote in from Ireland to call my attention to Languageware, IBM’s latest try at natural language processing (NLP). Obviously, IBM has been down this road multiple times before, from ViaVoice (dictation software that got beat out by Dragon NaturallySpeaking) to Penelope (research project that seemingly went on for as long as Odysseus was away from Ithaca — rumor has it that the principals eventually decamped to Microsoft, and continued to not produce commercial technology there). Read more
Worst search UI ever
On the whole, the Barack Obama campaign has been very internet-savvy. Maybe their web site JohnMcCainRecord.com is yet another example of same. But to my eyes, it has such an appallingly bad search interface that people going to the site are apt to be annoyed. To wit:
- There a huge search box in the center of the screen.
- All the search box ever does is take you to one of the 13 categories listed right below it.
- Usually, it doesn’t even do that. Instead, it just fails. For example, I entered terrorism and hit “Go”, and got no response. Ditto nuclear energy.
- When it does give you an answer, it’s apt not to be what you were looking for. For example, entering Iran takes you to the Foreign Policy page, which contains nothing about Iran.
And then, of course, there’s the funny stuff. For example, if you search on foo, you are taken to Rural Issues.
In general terms, I like the idea of the site. But absent some serious changes, JohnMcCainRecord.com should not have a search interface.
Edit: More here in my post on The Obama campaign’s Search Engine to Nowhere
| Categories: Search engines, Structured search | Leave a Comment |
Attivio update
I talked w/ Andrew McKay of Attivio for 2 ½ hours Thursday. I’ve also been working with some Attivio engineers on a blog search engine. I think it’s time to post about Attivio. 🙂 Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Attivio, Enterprise search, Lucene, Structured search | 7 Comments |
Low-latency text mining in the investment market
I’m not at Gartner’s Event Processing conference, but there seem to be some interesting posts and articles coming out of it. Seth Grimes has one on Reuters’ integration of text mining and event processing, including sentiment analysis. Well worth reading. Lots more detail than I’ve ever posted on similar applications.
| Categories: ClearForest/Reuters, Investment research and trading, Sentiment analysis, Text mining | 4 Comments |
One overview of e-discovery
I just found a year-old (almost) blog post from EMC executive Andrew Cohen that succinctly lays out his view (which he believes to mainly be a consensus stance) on e-discovery. Cohen is evidently both a lawyer and a honcho in document management system vendor EMC’s Compliance Division, which is probably relevant to interpreting his outlook, in the spirit of the old Kennedy School dictum that “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”
Highlights included:
- Information management is central to e-discovery.
- In particular, auditability (my word) is central, if you want electronic documents to hold up as evidence in court.
- Search is good enough, but it’s not the biggest issue in e-discovery.
- E-mail archiving has reached the tipping point, and is increasingly a must-have, largely for its e-discovery benefits.
| Categories: E-discovery, Enterprise search | Leave a Comment |
Blog user interfaces
Over on A World of Bytes, I’ve started highlighting interesting tech blogs people might enjoy. However, I chided each of my first three selections for UI failings. A comment thread quickly ensued, and social media maven Jeremiah Owyang asked how he could make his blog easier to read. This post is a followup to that discussion.
Jeremiah’s blog and my most active ones – DBMS2 and Text Technologies – have a lot in common. Specifically, they are multi-hundred-page websites, featuring dense material meant to be read by busy, tech-savvy people. And so my core advice boils down to: Make it as easy as possible for people to find and recognize what is interesting to them.
In particular, I suggest: Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | 5 Comments |
The layered messaging marketing model as applied to Attensity
My general layered messaging theory survived its first test against an IT vendor example – Netezza. Let’s try another, in this case a company that’s not a Monash Research client. Read more
| Categories: Attensity, Competitive intelligence, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 3 Comments |
A cautionary tale about Facebook ad targeting
Washington Post writer Rachel Beckman complains that Facebook inundated her with ads accusing her of being fat and then, when she got engaged, warned her of being a “fat bride”. Now, although she’s newly married or about to be, Facebook is (obviously prematurely) advertising fertility treatments to her.
It’s just the early days, but this sort of thing is bound to create backlash. I don’t think there’s going to be a resolution until people can create profiles so detailed that, for example, they contain the fact that you disapprove of ads about weight-loss aids.
In the short term, e-commerce software vendors should be thinking about how to create UIs that offer most of the benefit of this kind of targeting, but without giving offense.
Sigh. I guess today’s my day for writing about offensive marketing.