February 28, 2007

SAP’s “search” strategy isn’t about search

I caught up with Dennis Moore today to talk about SAP’s search strategy. And the biggest thing I learned was – it’s not about the search. Rather, it’s about a general interface, of which search and natural language just happen to be major parts.

Dennis didn’t actually give me a lot of details, at least not ones he’s eager to see published at this time. That said, SAP has long had a bare-bones search engine TREX. (TREX was also adapted to create the columnar relational data manager BI Accelerator.) But we didn’t talk about TREX enhancements at all, and I’m guessing there haven’t really been many. Rather, SAP’s focus seems to be on:

A. Finding business objects.

B. Helping users do things with them.

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February 23, 2007

Has Google hit 10 petabytes yet?

I’ve been musing about how big Google’s core database might be. Figuring that out is not a trivial problem, unless they’ve published the answer somewhere that I’m not aware of. But here’s a big clue, from an announcement about their n-gram data:

We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text

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February 15, 2007

InQuira’s and Mercado’s approaches to structured search

InQuira and Mercado both have broadened their marketing pitches beyond their traditional specialties of structured search for e-commerce. Even so, it’s well worth talking about those search technologies, which offer features and precision that you just don’t get from generic search engines. There’s a lot going on in these rather cool products.

In broad outline, Mercado and InQuira each combine three basic search approaches:

Of the two, InQuira seems to have the more sophisticated ontology. Indeed, the not-wholly-absurd claim is that InQuira does natural-language processing (NLP). Both vendors incorporate user information in deciding which search results to show, in ways that may be harbingers of what generic search engines like Google and Yahoo will do down the road. Read more

February 7, 2007

Is DMOZ the cure to Wikipedia’s spam problem?

Joost de Valk makes an interesting suggestion, namely that Wikipedia should drop all external links other than to DMOZ, and rely on DMOZ as the outside link directory. As division of labor, it makes perfect sense. However, it’s a total non-starter until at least two problems are solved. Read more

February 7, 2007

Does anybody actually use Technorati?

I just did some Technorati searches, and my blog posts come up near the top of the search results for a bunch of small companies’ names and similar words — Attensity, ClearForest, Netezza, DATAllegro, Crossbeam, DMOZ, ODP, and surely many others.

But judging by my referrer logs, nobody cares. I get lots of visitors via classic search engines — largely Google, but also the others — but bubkus from Technorati.

Technorati Tags:

February 6, 2007

Social networking architecture of the future continued

Responding to a question by Jon Udell a few hours ago, I argued that private social networking “walled gardens” aren’t needed. The whole thing can be done publicly as well, assuming there’s a central database to help with things like access control, as in the hypothetical service I named “Linkerati.”

Some other comments on his post raise issues like “Yes, but what if a walled garden is the easiest way to get people to post the needed information?” I have a quick reply: Just let all the needed information be entered in the central database, and you’re clearly better off than in a walled garden. Read more

February 6, 2007

Fact and Fiction: DMOZ and the ODP

I shall explain. Read more

February 6, 2007

A hobbit writes from the ODP Entmoot

Before saying anything about the Open Directory Project or the DMOZ directory it produces, I should offer several disclaimers.

Read more

February 6, 2007

What is LinkedIn needed for? Absolutely nothing. And the same goes for MySpace.

Jon Udell asks whether private social networks such as LinkedIn are needed, or whether they can be completely refactored across the public internet. I say the latter. In social networking as in almost everything else, there’s no long-term need for an internet walled garden.

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February 3, 2007

Can Hakia hack it?

Hakia purports to be a new search engine that indexes “semantically,” which I presume means on phrases or concepts or something. But I’ve run a few queries side by side on Hakia and Google, and they’re not doing well. I think they’re not making sufficiently good use of page reputation. Try “web hosting forum” for an example of this, looking at the top two hits in both cases.

When I queried on “Viagra,” Hakia did — as it were — outperform Google. But that’s the only case I, uh, came up with. On less snigger-worthy searches, Google seemed to do as well as or better than Hakia.

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