links for 2008-07-24
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site with comprehensive info on search tools
links for 2008-07-22
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Voor het bouwen van websites bestaan internationaal erkende afspraken in de vorm van webstandaarden. Zoals het huidige waarmerk drempelvrij.nl heeft aangetoond, levert toepassing van die standaarden een beter toegankelijke website op.
links for 2008-07-16
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Thanks to Lost Remote, I found this post from a fellow who found an interesting Google experiment in crowdsourced SERP personalization, what they call “Edit Search Results.”
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We encourage you to submit your search content as a column on A9.com’s OpenSearch Client.
If you are a content developer and already have a search engine for your site, you will want to read through the OpenSearch specification on www.opensearch.org.
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A web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.
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The Google Blog posted their third entry on how Google rankings work. This write up is more about the technology behind their ranking system. I’ll bullet point some of the key points for you all:
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In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking.
links for 2008-07-15
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Whether it soars or flops, Center’d represents a twist on a powerful business trend. Dozens of so-called “vertical search” companies have sprung up in a time when Google has firmly established itself as the default go-to-first search engine.
Conceptsearching unique?
I stumbled upon an article about a new component for Sharepoint, named conceptClassifier for Sharepoint. Off-cource I paid the site of the supplier a visit. This site ,http://www.conceptsearching.com/web/, astouned me with the following statement:
Most meaning is expressed in short patterns of words whilst single words in isolation are highly ambiguous. And yet all statistical information retrieval products work on the basis of single word terms. Until now …
Concept Searching is the only company to offer a full range of statistical information retrieval products based on Compound Term Processing. Our unique technology automatically identifies the word patterns in unstructured text that convey the most meaning and our products use these higher order terms to improve Precision with no loss of Recall.
Uuhhhhh, isn’t this something Autonomy has been doing for years now? Come on guy’s.
Summary of latest Forrester research on Enterprise search vendors
Networkworld published an excelent summary of the Forrester research report concerning enterprise search vendors.
Users are still frustrated by the limitations of enterprise search, finds a June study by AIIM, a nonprofit content-management research firm. Nearly half (49%) of respondents to an AIIM poll of 500 businesses said it’s difficult and time-consuming to find information necessary to do their jobs, and 69% said less than half of their enterprise’s information is searchable.
Enterprises themselves must accept much of the blame, because they have largely failed to take a strategic approach to enterprise search, AIIM says.
Autonomy offers the most complete product reviewed by Forrester “with the best core technology architecture and security capabilities.” But some customers believe Autonomy’s service and support offerings are lacking compared with the cost and complexity of the product, says Forrester, which interviewed 22 user companies.
Fast, acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in April, will continue to sell its wares as a stand-alone product but also become a core component of Microsoft SharePoint. Fast is “the obvious choice for companies with deep Microsoft platform investments,” even though it remains in a state of flux following the acquisition, Forrester says
“Both (IBM’s omnifind and Oracle Secure Enterprise search) lack some of the mature tools offered by pure-play vendors, such as slick reporting and taxonomy management tools,” Forrester writes. IBM and Oracle don’t have as strong a focus on enterprise search as other vendors, but their “content, collaboration and portal footprint in the enterprise make them vendors to consider for [information and knowledge management] pros who see search as part of a broader information management platform.”
Position of Autonomy stronger
Business weekly tops a story about Autonomy closiong some big deals in the US:
This story closed with an interesting analys about the position of Autonomy:
One key element of the Morgan Stanley report suggests Autonomy will benefit from what the firm calls “the Swiss effect.” It says: “Autonomy can be helped by its independence, particularly after the acquisition of its main competitor, FAST, by Microsoft.
“The products in this market developed by Microsoft, as well as IBM and Oracle, are likely to see development that works best integrated into their own technology stacks. Autonomy can work equally well on any of these technologies.”
Three pure players – Autonomy, FAST/Microsoft and Endeca – operate in the high-end market and three majors operate in the medium-to-low end market (IBM, Microsoft and Google).
Microsoft became a key player by taking FAST but Morgan Stanley reckons: “Although Oracle, Microsoft and Google should not be discounted, we think they are more focused on the low-medium end of this market and here they will provide cheap and easy to use functionality.
“They will be less useful for the high end, which is focused on complex, information-intensive tasks. At the high end we think Autonomy stands out.”
Less is more: the credo of the internet
In the post less is more and how to unlock the web the principle of making small services and opening them up through an API is explained.
Some interesting quotes:
Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.
Add a couple of features to Twitter and it’s Wordpress. Why is a Wordpress minus a couple of features so popular? You have to stop thinking in the traditional way and adopt the new “less is more” philosophy to understand that
Most importantly, it is because the Internet constantly changes and it’s really hard to build something big and complex on such shaky grounds.
Aggregation and organization of data might play a very big part in our lives really soon.