February 1st, 2008 Curt Monash
As I write this, Microsoft has just announced an offer to acquire Yahoo. Early responses from the likes of Danny Sullivan, Henry Blodget, the Download Squad, TechCrunch, Raven SEO, Mashable, and others seem to boil down to:
- Wow.
- Both sides needed it.
- Yahoo wasn’t going anywhere fast on its own.
- Microsoft wasn’t going anywhere fast in search on its own.
- This may be enough critical mass to matter.
- Conference call at 8:30 am
I’ll try to be a bit more analytical than that, but this is still going to be quick. Assuming the deal goes through:
- Microsoft will recombine both parts of the old FAST/alltheweb.com Therefore, Microsoft will be able to use the same technology for web and enterprise search, to the extent that such commonality makes sense.
- I’d expect Microsoft to try to differentiate its technology via faceted/structured search. That’s a FAST strength.
- The old FAST search-as-BI dream might become pretty appealing to Microsoft/Yahoo.
- In a non-search point, Microsoft is strong in games and Yahoo is strong in fantasy sports. Look for some synergies.
- There sure would be a whole lot of non-Windows technology inside Microsoft.
Basically, Microsoft is a company that’s a lot more sophisticated in its thinking about user interfaces and experiences than Yahoo is. That’s where the really interesting competitive innovation would be most likely to occur.
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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo, search
Posted in Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Structured search | 5 Comments »
January 14th, 2008 Curt Monash
Eric Lai wrote in this week’s Computerworld about “Why is enterprise search harder than Google Web search?” Highlights included:
- He described enterprise search as consisting mainly of a search box plus faceted searching, with maybe some automated tagging as well.
- He observed that off-page factors such as PageRank don’t work nearly as well in an enterprise as they do on the Web, and that manual tagging by enterprise users falls far short of closing the gap.
- He stumbled a bit compare/constrasting search engines and “structured” DBMS.
- He basically endorsed the worldview of Ali Riaz, late of FAST, now of Attivio.
On the whole, that’s not bad. If this were an easy subject to write about, I’d have explained it a lot more clearly in the past myself. OK. Let me get off my duff and give it a whirl now. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Attivio, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Search and text storage | 12 Comments »
January 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
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.
Technorati Tags: SharePoint, Microsoft, search
Posted in Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Structured search | No Comments »
January 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
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 the rest of this entry »
Posted in Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage | No Comments »
January 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
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.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, FAST, search
Posted in Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft and Windows Live Search, Search and text storage, Yahoo | 4 Comments »
February 1st, 2007 Curt Monash
FAST is annoying me a bit these days. It’s nothing serious, but travel schedule screw-up’s, an annoying embargo, and a screw-up in the annoying embargo have all hit at once. So I’ll keep this telegraphic and move on to other subjects.
- They’re doing fast queries without using a lot of RAM.
- They’re doing the usual text search thing of indexing across multiple “databases,” only now it’s applied to, well, databases. (Not that there’s much new about that particular aspect. Actually, there seems to be a bit of kludge in that they export the databases to some kind of simple text files.)
- They’re doing some level of concept identification ala the text mining guys. (They don’t call it “entity extraction” because the results aren’t dumped into a database anywhere, but instead are just used on the fly.) Of course, the text mining/search convergence goes both ways.
- They bought a BI/dashboard tool and are using it both to analyze query logs and also to do normal BI/dashboard kinds of things.
- They have big references for this stuff, at least the single-web-site query aspect. Well, actually, the customer names are confidential. Oh well.
And as another example of how this wasn’t the smoothest PR month for FAST, Steve Arnold somehow got the false idea that they were getting out of true text search altogether.
Posted in BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST, Search and text storage, Text mining | 3 Comments »
January 26th, 2007 Curt Monash
Dave Kellogg thinks FAST will be ineffective and defocused because of its efforts in business intelligence. I can’t comment on whether that analysis is brilliant, self-serving, or both, because anything I’ve been told on the subject is under embargo.
Embargos were a crucial PR tactic when Regis McKenna exploited them for the original rollout of the Macintosh in 1984. But I suspect that in many cases they’ve quite outlived their usefulness. If I wait between the time I’m briefed and the time the embargo is up to write something, my thoughts about it get fuzzy. If I write something at the time and put it on ice, it may be obsolete because of what other people write in the mean time.
More and more, if something is embargoed, I wind up not writing about it at all.
EDIT: Point #4 of my post on the mismatch between relational databases and text search is pretty relevant here.
Posted in BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST | 1 Comment »
November 11th, 2006 Curt Monash
Most people in the text analytics market realize that text mining and search are somewhat related. But I don’t think they often stop to contemplate just how close the relationship is, could be, or someday probably will become. Here’s part of what I mean:
- Text mining powers search. The biggest text mining outfits in the world, possibly excepting the US intelligence community, are surely Google, Yahoo, and perhaps Microsoft.
- Search powers text mining. Restricting the corpus of documents to mine, even via a keyword search, makes tons of sense. That’s one of the good ideas in Attensity 4.
- Text mining and search are powered by the same underlying technologies. For starters, there’s all the tokenization, extraction, etc. that vendors in both areas license from Inxight and its competitors. Beyond that, I think there’s a future play in integrated taxonomy management that will rearrange the text analytics market landscape.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Attensity, Business Objects and Inxight, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, IBM and UIMA, Ontologies and context identification, Open source text analytics, Search and text storage, Text mining | 3 Comments »
October 22nd, 2006 Curt Monash
OK. I have a vision of one way search could evolve, which I think deserves consideration on at least a “concept-car” basis. This is all speculative; I haven’t discussed it at length with the vendors who’d need to make it happen, nor checked the technical assumptions carefully myself. So I could well be wrong. Indeed, I’ve at least half-changed my mind multiple times this weekend, just in the drafting of this post. Oh yeah, I’m also mixing several subjects together here too. All-in-all, this is not my crispest post …
Anyhow, the core idea is that large enterprises spider and index a subset of the Web, and use that for most of their employees’ web search needs. Key benefits would include:
- Filtering out spam hits. This is obviously important for search, and in some cases could help with public-web text mining as well. It should be OK to be more aggressive on spam-site filtering in an enterprise-specific index than it is in general web search.
- Filtering out malicious/undesirable downloads of various sorts. I’m thinking mainly of malware/spyware here, but of course it can also be used for netnannying porn-prevention and the like as well. Again, this is more easily done for the enterprise market than for the search world at large. (I anyway think that Google could blow Websense out of the water any time they wanted to – except, of course, for the not-so-small matter of not being seen as participating in the censorship business — but that’s a separate discussion.)
- Capturing employees’ search strings. This could be useful for various purposes, including discerning their interests, and building the corporate ontology for internal web search.
- Freshness control. If there’s a site you really care about, you can make sure it’s re-indexed frequently.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Convera, Directories and filtering, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, IBM and UIMA, Search and text storage, Spam and antispam, Specialized search engines, Text mining, Web site filtering | 1 Comment »
September 1st, 2006 Curt Monash
I’m hearing the same thing from multiple BI vendors, with SAS being the most recent and freshest in my mind — customers want them to “integrate” with Google OneBox. Why Google rather than a better enterprise search technology, such as FAST’s? So far as I’ve figured out, these are the reasons, in no particular order:
- Price.
- Ease of installation (real or imagined).
- The familiar Google brand name.
- The familiar Google UI.
- Google OneBox’s ability to search relational records, reports, etc. along with more tradtional record types.
The last point, I think, is the most interesting. Lots of people think text search is and/or should be the dominant UI of the future. Now, I’ve been a big fan of natural language command line interfaces ever since the days of Intellect and Lotus HAL. But judging by the market success of those products — or for that matter of voice command/control — I was in a very small minority. Maybe the even simpler search interface — words jumbled together without grammatical structure — will win out instead.
Who knows? Progress is a funny thing. Maybe the ultimate UI will be one that responds well to grunts, hand gestures, and stick-figure drawings. We could call it NeanderHAL, but that would wrong …
Posted in BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Natural language processing (NLP), SAS, Search and text storage | 1 Comment »