Lynda Moulton on enterprise search
Lynda Moulton and I see enterprise search quite similarly, as I discovered when she called me yesterday to praise my post on the many differences between enterprise and web search, and followed up with this one of her own. One of Lynda’s big themes is that large enterprises, much as they use multiple database management systems, use multiple search engines too. Read more
An interesting Matt Cutts interview from December
Stephen Spencer has a great interview with Matt Cutts of Google, from last month’s Pubcon. Almost all of it is SEO-related. But it also contains a few tidbits that may be interesting even if one doesn’t care about SEO, such as:
- Google now indexes up to 1/2 a megabyte per page, up from the old 101K limit.
- Google needs to do a fair amount of image recognition, but they’re going fairly plain-vanilla. For Flash they use an Adobe-supplied SDK. For detecting hidden text (e.g., white-on-white) they use what Matt characterizes as pretty simple heuristics.
- As I noted recently, Google seems to have a lot of heuristics for identifying particular types of pages. In this interview, the example was that a page that would otherwise seem spammy because it consisted only of links would be fine if it were serving as a true site map or archive.
SEO highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Google, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines | Leave a Comment |
19 bullet points about the difference between enterprise and web search
Eric Lai wrote in this week’s Computerworld about “Why is enterprise search harder than Google Web search?” Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Attivio, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Search engines | 16 Comments |
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 |
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 |
The text mining vendors continue to lack constructive vision
I’ve been thinking for a long time that the various text mining companies doing sentiment analysis should try some public-facing (or at least multi-customer) services. Investors might love such a thing. So might marketing managers (actually, Factiva claims to be active there, at least as per their web site). And as a key part of the strategy, text mining companies selling to enterprises might brand such a site and gain massive awareness accordingly. Well, it seems that public-facing sentiment analysis sites are springing up. At least, Summize has. (Hat tip to TechCrunch.) And the text mining vendors are nowhere to be seen.
So what else is new? Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Factiva/Dow Jones, Investment research and trading, Text mining | 1 Comment |
Attivio tries to do it all
When Andrew McKay was at FAST, I grumped about his search/BI integration story. Now that he’s trying to do the same thing at a startup called Attivio, it sounds more plausible.
Attivio is having a house party and product rollout in the latter part of January, and details are scarce in the mean time. But here are some highlights.
- Attivio was founded in August. It has 21 people and 1 VC. The VC has invested >$6 million and committed >$12 million total.
- Attivio has ambitious plans for a fully integrated data management/real-time BI stack. It’s currently called the “Active Intelligence Engine.” Read more