Windows Live search is rather different from MSN
Until the middle of this year, I got negligible search engine traffic from either MSN or Yahoo, or indeed any other search engine except Google. We’re literally talking a 90-95% share for Google, on each of my three main blogs, most months.
But in November, the Windows Live share was 19% on DBMS2, 29% on Text Technologies, and 41% on the Monash Report. And those aren’t blips; in each case there was steady August-November monthly growth. But on the other hand, early December month-to-date figures are all back down. Weird. Read more
QL2 – web text extraction and more
Here are some highlights of the QL2 story, per exec Mike McDermott.
- QL2’s main business is scraping price and other product offering data from the web for high-speed competitive analysis. For example, of their 250ish customers overall, over 90 are airlines. Online retailers are another big chunk of their customer base.
- QL2 also commonly partners with text mining companies in applications such as Voice of the Market or competitive intelligence. E.g., QL2 has been brought into a few deals each by Attensity, Clarabridge, and especially Temis.
- QL2 goes well beyond basic crawling. Notably, the system fills in forms with parameters. And of course it monitors pages for changes.
- QL2’s scripting language is, Mike tells me, very SQL-like. Hence the “QL” in the name.
- QL2 rolls its own filters, rather than using INSO or whoever. (Actually, what are the main file-reading filter choices these days? I’ve lost track.) Indeed, Mike fondly believes QL2 does a better job with PDFs than Adobe does.
- QL2 doesn’t want to be thought of as web-only. Rather, Mike likes my formulation of “text data ETL, web or otherwise.” That said, he freely admits QL2’s strength is in Extract rather than in Transform or Load.
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, QL2, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
Danny Sullivan thinks blended vertical search is a game-changer
Danny Sullivan thinks blended vertical search — which he’s calling Search 3.0 — is a game changer. (In this context, “vertical” search denotes alternate result types such as video, image, map coordinates, or product listings.) In saying that, he’s focused on search marketers, who now have a lot more ways to try to get their messages onto Google searchers’ top result pages. But I presume what he’s really saying is that there will be a feedback effect — if Google tells all web searchers about videos and product listings, then internet marketers will be more motivated to post videos and product listings, and hence there will be more interesting choices of videos and product listings — which Google will naturally wind up featuring more prominently in its search results. And so on.
Given the Youtube explosion, I find it hard to argue with his claim.
| Categories: Google, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines, Specialized search, Structured search | Leave a Comment |
So what’s the state of speech recognition and dictation software?
Linda asked me about the state of desktop dictation technology. In particular, she asked me whether there was much difference between the latest version and earlier, cheaper ones. My knowledge of the area is out of date, so I thought I’d throw both the specific question and the broader subject of speech recognition out there for general discussion.
Here’s much of what I know or believe about speech recognition:
- Most major independent commercial speech recognition efforts have wound up being merged into Nuance Communications. That goes for both desktop and server-side stuff. None was doing particularly well before its respective merger. Read more
| Categories: Language recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Nuance, Speech recognition, Sybase | 12 Comments |
I would like to know what Factiva is up to
Who should I talk with?
Technorati Tags: Factiva
| Categories: Factiva/Dow Jones | 2 Comments |
Clarabridge does SaaS, sees Inxight
I just had a quick chat with text mining vendor Clarabridge’s CEO Sid Banerjee. Naturally, I asked the standard “So who are you seeing in the marketplace the most?” question. Attensity is unsurprisingly #1. What’s new, however, is that Inxight – heretofore not a text mining presence vs. commercially-focused Clarabridge – has begun to show up a bit this quarter, via the Business Objects sales force. Sid was of course dismissive of their current level of technological readiness and integration – but at least BOBJ/Inxight is showing up now.
The most interesting point was text mining SaaS (Software as a Service). When Clarabridge first put out its “We offer SaaS now!” announcement, I yawned. But Sid tells me that about half of Clarabridge’s deals now are actually SaaS. The way the SaaS technology works is pretty simple. The customer gathers together text into a staging database – typically daily or weekly – and it gets sucked into a Clarabridge-managed Clarabridge installation in some high-end SaaS data center. If there’s a desire to join the results of the text analysis with some tabular data from the client’s data warehouse, the needed columns get sent over as well. And then Clarabridge does its thing. Read more
| Categories: BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, IBM and UIMA, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text mining, Text mining SaaS | 1 Comment |
Everybody’s talking about structured/unstructured integration
Today’s big news is IBM’s $5 billion acquisition of Cognos. Part of the analyst conference call was two customer examples of how the companies had worked together in the past — and one of those two had a lot of “integration of structured and unstructured data.” The application sounded more like a 360-degree customer view, retrieving text documents alongside relational records, than it did like hardcore text analytics. Even so, it illustrates a trend that I was seeing even before BOBJ’s buy of Inxight, namely an increasing focus in the business intelligence world on at least the trappings of text analytics.
| Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA | 3 Comments |
What TEMIS is seeing in the marketplace
CEO Eric Bregand of Temis recently checked in by email with an update on text mining market activity. Highlights of Eric’s views include:
- Yep, Voice Of The Customer is hot, in “many markets”; Eric specifically mentioned banking, car, energy, food, and retail. He further sees IBM backing VotC as text’s “killer app.” (Note: Temis has a history of partnering with IBM, most notably via its unusually strong commitment to UIMA.)
- Specifically, THE hot topics in the European market these days are competitive intelligence and sentiment analysis. (Note: I’ve always thought Temis got serious about competitive analysis a little earlier than most other text mining vendors did.)
- Life sciences is an ever growing focus for Temis.
- I confused him a bit with how I phrased my question about custom publishing and Temis’ Mark Logic partnership. But he did express favorable views of the market, specifically in the area of integrating text mining and native XML database management, and even volunteered that nStein appears to be doing well.
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Custom publishing, IBM and UIMA, Investment research and trading, Mark Logic, nStein, TEMIS, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 1 Comment |
Business Objects-Inxight update
I’m at the Business Objects annual user conference, and had a couple of chances to talk with Inxight/text analytics folks. When I asked about areas of commercial application traction, answers were similar to those I got from Attensity and Clarabridge, but not quite the same. Specifically:
- Voice of the Customer is definitely tops.
- Some of the other applications Attensity and Clarabridge mentioned appear as well (e.g., antifraud).
- Business Objects also has a couple of customers looking at text mining as an aid to medical records, e.g. by helping to catch errors in tabular-field coding.
- There are some projects in actual investment research/analysis/trading, e.g. in correlating news announcements and stock price movements.
The Business Objects/Inxight folks also made a couple of interesting general technical points. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Investment research and trading, Voice of the Customer | Leave a Comment |
SAP is acquiring Inxight
More precisely, SAP is acquiring Business Objects, and of course Business Objects already acquired Inxight.
This could be interesting …
| Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, SAP, Text mining | Leave a Comment |