More website weirdness
Here’s something longer-lasting and weirder than Vertica’s “We sell turkeys” theme: Mark Logic, whose product is used primarily to help enterprises make their content more acceptable, doesn’t have a search engine on its own website.*
*Or if it does, it’s VERY well-hidden. I looked at the home page and site map alike.
I wanted to refresh my memory as to Mark Logic’s history of working with specific text mining vendors, beyond what’s on the official partner page. No luck. Normally when site search is inadequate, one goes to Google. But that’s problematic too. Marklogic.com pages come up pretty low on Google’s search results, suggesting that:
- Mark Logic doesn’t put a lot of effort into SEO (or else doesn’t do it very well).
- One can’t be confident all the site’s significant pages are findable by Google.
Looking to other companies’ sites for clues isn’t conclusive either. E.g., Clearforest lists Mark Logic as a partner, but Mark Logic doesn’t return the compliment. (If memory serves, Mark Logic and Clearforest have worked together both on national security deals and custom publishing deals — but don’t hold me to that.)
When it comes to making its own information conveniently available, Mark Logic is quite the unshod cobbler.
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7 Responses to “More website weirdness”
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Is this so surprising?
I would not be surprised at all if, internally, Googlers had problem finding company documents. I would not be surprised if an OLAP company had trouble analyzing its own data.
Too right Daniel, talk to builders’ wives and they’ll inevitably complain about the fact that their homes are always a shoddy work-in-progress.
Gareth
A cheap shot, Curt. We do not sell a web CMS, we sell an XML Server. In fact, the only reason we’d consider using MarkLogic Server to publish our relatively tiny site would be to avoid shots like these.
As a reminder, MarkLogic Server is typically used by publishers as a platform for the creation of information products, typically with anywhere between 100,000 and (in our Government vertical) 1B documents.
My relatively small marketing team has yet to generate 1M documents on MarkLogic. Ergo, the site doesn’t run on MarkLogic nor will it soon.
If you want to see examples of the old, eating your own dog food thing, see MarkMail (http://markmail.org) which has spidered 30M email messages and is a great Internet mail archive search engine.
And, if you’re interested, we can show you our *internal* deployment of MarkMail which generates 1000s of hits per day. And we have some other cool, more use-case-appropriate apps, as well.
For roughly the same reason, I haven’t built our GL/financial app on MarkLogic, we haven’t deployed our site on it either.
Dave,
The criticism isn’t that Mark Logic fails to be SUPERIOR to other companies in its presentation of information. If it were, your rebuttal would make perfect sense.
Rather, the implication is that Mark Logic’s presentation is INFERIOR. A rebuttal to that might be “Small-site site search options are so terrible that it’s best to use none at all.” Is that your position?
Best,
CAM
Seriously, if you want to see MarkLogic in action, go to http://markmail.org. It’s pretty impressive given the content and the 2 servers (I’m told) running it.
Candidly Curt, even though I’m not a Marklogic customer so it doesn’t really matter, I can’t tell if you’re comment is aimed at their product or just their website. Disappointing in that regard.
Nick,
It’s hard to think of another company than Mark Logic about which I’ve written as consistently favorably.
Maybe that can be your first clue. 😉
Best,
CAM
Curt,
I guess that’s the problem with blogs – taking stand-alone articles in their stand-alone context… I simply couldn’t be bothered to search back articles before responding (yes, it’s true!)…
Cheers,
Nick