February 28th, 2007 Curt Monash
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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Posted in BI integration, Enterprise search, Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), SAP AG and TREX, Search and text storage | 1 Comment »
February 23rd, 2007 Curt Monash
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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Posted in Google, Search and text storage | No Comments »
February 15th, 2007 Curt Monash
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:
- Generic text indexing.
- Augmentation via an ontology.
- A rules engine that helps the site owner determine which results and responses are shown under various circumstances.
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.
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Posted in InQuira, Mercado, Natural language processing (NLP), Ontologies and context identification, Search and text storage, Structured search | 2 Comments »
February 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
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 the rest of this entry »
Posted in Directories, Directories and filtering, ODP and DMOZ, Ontologies and context identification, Spam and antispam | 4 Comments »
February 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
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: Technorati
Posted in Search and text storage, Specialized search engines | 4 Comments »
February 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
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.
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Posted in Social networking, Social software and media | No Comments »
February 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
- DMOZ is dead. Fiction!
- New site submissions are being processed. Partial fact.
- Pending site submissions were lost in the outage. Partial fact.
- Other non-public ODP data was lost in the outage too. Partial fact.
- New editor applications aren’t being processed yet. Fact.
- ODP editors are corrupt. Fiction!
- The ODP is secretive and deceptive. Largely fiction.
- If a DMOZ category doesn’t have a listed editor, it’s unlikely to get much attention. Part fact, part fiction.
- ODP editors hate search engine optimization. Partial fact.
- ODP editors hate SEOs. Partial fact.
I shall explain. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Directories, Directories and filtering, ODP and DMOZ, Search engine optimization (SEO) | 5 Comments »
February 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
Before saying anything about the Open Directory Project or the DMOZ directory it produces, I should offer several disclaimers.
- No editor speaks for the ODP, let alone for Time Warner/AOL/Netscape.
- No single editor’s opinions or choices control any edits in DMOZ, even if s/he is the sole listed editor of a category. Any of us can be overruled on any editing decision at any time.
- I’m effectively as new as they come, or at least was at the time DMOZ editing came back online (late December). There have been no new editors since the well-publicized outage, and I had next to no involvement with the project prior to the outage.
- Notwithstanding point #2, I’m quite opinionated, which I’m sure surprises approximately nobody. And my opinions quite often are different from those of the ODP mainstream.
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Posted in Directories and filtering, ODP and DMOZ | 1 Comment »
February 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
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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Posted in Social networking, Social software and media | 1 Comment »
February 3rd, 2007 Curt Monash
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.
Posted in Google, Search and text storage | Comments Off