Why is everybody picking on Google

I said it a while ago and now Google is negatively in the news again. The Google is getting to big.

In one of my previous posts I stated that whenever a company or person gets to much influence, it’s only a natural reaction of people to oppose to that force.

On the other hand when a company gets to big, it’s harder to keep focussing on the goals and primairy activities that support those goals.

It’s just a matter of time until the Google breaks up (forced or not) into smaller manageable business parts:

• Office productivity (Apps)
• Advertising
• Enterprise / Internet Search technology
• Cloud computing

Anyone sees other business units?

Tags van Technorati: google,business,public

Twitter has evolved into…. a search engine

Twitter started as an internet equivalent of a short message service. The concept of beeing able to follow other people and to be followed by people that want to know what you’re up to has gotten millions of user to start twittering.

Twitter got in the news when media started to realize that real-time breaking stories were beeing spread through message of Twitter users.

Now Twitter has started turning this “real time news search” as their new “reason for living”.

Of course they have an advantage over Google and Bing to being able to index, enrich and explore their own data.

Also read “”It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine”

Tags van Technorati: twitter

Yahoo search coming to an end?

Just read the post on Beyond Search about Yahoo giving te Search to Bing…

Will this really be the end of Yahoo as a First Real Internet Search Engine?

 

Luckaly Yahoo has some other great offerings like the news portal, Email and other productivity tools.

Tags van Technorati: yahoo,google,microsoft,bing,advertising

Relevance problems over simplified

A few days ago there was an article on CMS Watch about relevance ranking.

Grant Ingersoll of Lucid imagination reacted to that post:

I couldn’t agree more with Therea Regli’s excellent discussion of relevance, especially the point to be “skeptical” of why results are the way they are. This is definitely true for search application developers too. The problem is, if you’re using a proprietary vendor, the only thing you can do about such skepticism is bang your head against the wall. For Apache Lucene and Solr, on the other hand, understanding why something scored the way it did is as simple as making an API call (Lucene) or adding &debugQuery (Solr) to your input and you get, in full unadultered glory every last detail about why a particular document scored a particular way for a given query. Furthermore, if that doesn’t satisfy you, just pop open the source code or ask us or ask on the mailing list!

I must react to the technical over simplification of this relevancy problem. Off course there are options in several search engines that explain why a document has a high relevance score in relation to the query. Solr / Lucene obviously has excelent functions to show it, but I must say that even Autonomy IDOL displays links, scores, terms and weights that explain this also.

Lucid must be carefull not to react to every case about search and relevancy ranking with the "Open source is open so you can build your own search engine" attitude. Let's be realistic about the fact that implementing Search is not cheap and transparent. That's exactly why Lucid entered the business.

Chome OS... De Google val slaat dicht

Much fuzz about the announcement of the Google Chrome OS the past few days.

I must say that I am intrigued by the concept myself. My first reaction was like "Off course, after the Google Apps, Chrome Browser and Android this is the next step".

Google is revealing itself more and more like the other established players as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc. They are actually building a stack of software and platforms that lock in any company that is standardising on their software.

Google is more and more becoming a "normal" IT-company that sells software and tries to bind customers to their solutions.
There are 3 aspects to this issue:

1. Google still is a company that gets it's revenues from advertising
2. Google is starting to dominate (monopoly??) some markets (advertising)
3. Google is known for giving away free services

I wonder where this is going... Google is not the David fighting Goliath with small stones anymore. They are a David on steroids trying to get Achilles and Goliath at the same time.

Read more about this topic:

• With the Chrome OS, Google's software stack is revealed; Shrapnel everywhere
• With OS project, is Google over-extending itself?

Boost for Open Source Search through availability of connectors

Just read the Blog post on Beyond Search about the fact that ISYS is letting its connector technology be reselled by Lucid Imagination.

According to Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, "The combination of ISYS File Readers and Lucene/Solr offers a best-of-breed solution for enterprises that do not want to be held back by lack of functionality and the high costs associated with proprietary search products from infrastructure and platform vendors."

It is clear that Enterprise Search is all about the connectors, as stated in many articles and blog posts earlier. The lack of connectability of Solr/Lucene has, up till now, held back the large scale adaption of the open source platform.

I think this is very good news.

Google announces the 6.0 version of the GSA, Search experts are not impressed

Today Google announced the release of the 6.0 version of their Search Appliance
The main improvements are

• better scalability
  The Box can now hold up to 30 million documents and can be connected to more appliances to hold billions of documents
  
• Flexible architecture
  It is easier to connect more appliances
• Social Search capabilities
  Add page to result.
  

Some excerpts from other sources:

http://www.itworld.com/software/68712/google-search-appliance-now-can-index-billions-documents

In addition, GSA 6.0 provides end users with social search capabilities, such as the ability for them to add results.

"Google has matured in its thinking about how enterprises implement search," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research.

Enhancing the Search Appliance in areas like scale, customization and integration will resonate positively in the enterprise market, where Google's main challenge is being perceived primarily as a consumer-focused company, Wettemann said.

While the Search Appliance's functionality isn't still as sophisticated as that of high-end products from Autonomy and Microsoft's Fast Search, it has moved upstream with this latest round of enhancements, said IDC analyst Susan Feldman.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/02/google-enterprise-search-technology-cio-network-google.html

Forrester Research analyst Matthew Brown says the product improvements may be as dramatic as Google says they are. But taken in context, Google is still trying to play catch-up to a slew of start-ups and giants like Oracle, he says.

"I'm just kind of unimpressed with what they're announcing," says Brown. "They're coming to market so late, with requirements that were established years and years ago."