Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging

There are lots of open source programs and projects out there and many of them are terrible. However, open source works well when software is a commodity and you cannot tell one piece of software from another - e.g. word processors, web browsers, operating systems. When software is a commodity, you are paying only for a brand where the company is getting money for no changes in the software. Professional open source works well when enterprise software is commoditized. Alfresco was created because of the increasing difficulty in differentiating one enterprise content management system from another.

If government is to become the next hot application development sector, it will have to compete with a private tech sector that's already deep into this paradigm and offers developers the possibility of turning cheap web apps into huge riches through acquisition by larger firms.

Stephen Bell wrote “Microsoft Fast Search to Mate with Social Networking.” The title brought a grin to this addled goose’s bill. I like the idea of Fast ESP “mating” with a social network. The metaphor brings a number of images to mind and invites a wide range of double entrendre. Maybe the ComputerWorld editors were tickling the goose’s funny bone?

The story asserts that a fellow named Steve Letford, a Microsoft wizard in New Zealand, revealed at a SharePoint conference that Fast ESP will be “mated with SharePoint in a number of ways.” What? I thought the headline said Fast ESP, and now it is SharePoint.

And finally, Google may be finally overextending itself. The company takes a scattershot approach to new businesses, throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. As a result, Google is losing its image as the minimalist company, and gaining a reputation as the everything, everywhere-all-the-time company. That may prove a risky strategy in the long term, as company executives find themselves spending more time fending off threats and attacks, and less time dominating new markets.

I think to a very large extent Bill Gates is right. Google's "honeymoon" is probably over. They're becoming a real company with real accountability, and the horrid month of July may be a taste of things to come.

Setting up a new computer goes through five stages:

* Denial: I’ve got a new computer. Nothing can go wrong now!
* Anger: No, I don’t want to subscribe to AOL. No, I don’t want Norton updates. No, I don’t want a 60-day trial of Office 2007. There are HOW MANY security updates?!
* Bargaining: I’d do anything to be able to use this thing!
* Depression: I’ve been uninstalling Norton components for 17 hours now. If I have to restart the PC one more time, I swear I’ll kill myself… All I want to do is update Twitter!
* Acceptance: OK, let’s install some good stuff now!

Once you’ve installed all the updates, uninstalled all the crapware, entered your wifi password, and set your screensaver, it’s time to make that shiny new PC do stuff, and for me the doing starts with installing a pretty fixed list of free applications.

If you use Solr, please subscribe to the Solr user mailing list.

The Solr user mailing list is : solr-user@lucene.apache.org.

Solr is an enterprise-ready, Lucene-based search server that supports faceted searching, hit highlighting, and multiple output formats. In this two-part article, Lucene Java™ committer Grant Ingersoll introduces Solr and shows you how to easily incorporate its impressive full-text search functionality into your Web applications.

By letting Microsoft take over its search engine, Yahoo has essentially announced it can’t keep up with Google and Microsoft and instead will focus on amusing users with multimedia deals and Fantasy Football leagues.

Microsoft, for its part, gets a huge bump in traffic to its revamped search engine and online text ad platform. Bing, which currently handles about 8 to 10 percent of U.S. searches, will jump to something in the neighborhood of 30 percent. And by capturing one opposing army, they dramatically simplify the battle lines and create a two-sided conflict.

As Twitter has evolved from a social site meant to help people keep in touch with family and friends, which is how the founders originally envisioned it, to a tool to peer into the world’s collective brain, the company has been adapting the service. “Together with those who use it every day, the service has taught us what it wants to be,” Mr. Stone wrote.

"…in designing [AIE] we picked a few of the golden threads from the semantic web and combined them with a number of techniques which have been shown to improve the search experience". Some of the relevant capabilities include:

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Dictionary and statistical named entity extraction in multiple languages
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Regular expression extraction of any pattern, including common natural language templates like "Sid Probstein is the CTO of Attivio"; you can combine named entity discovery with other search, e.g., find the term "Attivio" near a person entity, etc…
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Relationship modeling, e.g., friend-of-a-friend, using our query-side JOIN() operator.

We can also easily deal with many of the semantic web standards that are XML based - we speak XML "out of the box". For example it is easy to ingest content in RDF (Resource Description Framework), and emit search results (as well as extracted entities and relationships) as RDF triples.

One of the key aspects to presenting accurate and relevant search results is recognizing the user’s intent. A search for “IRA” on a financial services website may result in personal individual retirement account details as well as information about how to open an IRA or roll money over from a 401(k). A search for “cell” on Google may be a query related to cellular phones or it may be biology related.

These ideas have been getting a lot of buzz around the industry over the past year. Gartner analysts have labeled the need to improve refinement as “conversational search” – even predicting that by the end of 2010 more than half of new search projects will employ it. But the big question throughout the buzz is what does it really mean for the end user?

Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to at least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

What is Social Search? Is it simply having the ability to tag a result you found helpful and being able to share that with other users? Or is it more than that? Having the ability to tag results you like so it boosts the relevance for the next person enriches the search experience, but I would expect this capability to be available out-of-the-box for any platform that deals with information access. While being able to tag a useful result is, well, useful, there is a lot more to the story when you use the term social in combination with search.

digglicious.com is a mashup of three fantastic websites; digg.com, del.icio.us and reddit.com. If you are not familiar with these sites, go and check them them out then come back and enjoy this portal into their highlights.

Welcome to LiveAndroid, a LiveCD for Android running on x86 platforms.

Want to give Google Android a try, but don't feel like buying a T-Mobile G1? LiveAndroid lets you download a LiveCD disc image of the Google Android operating system. Just burn the image to a disc, stick it in a CD-ROM drive, and reboot your computer and you can check out Android without installing it or affecting any files on your PC.

We waited for Android to come to Netbooks and Laptops, and then Google said, wait it’s Chrome OS for netbooks, and we got confused, now, allow me to confuse you more, with Live Android, a project hosted on Google Code website, providing you live iso file for android.

You need to search on multiple search engines if you truly want to research a search term, as opposed to simply finding a solution to it. Some users might think that searching in Google is enough to find all the relevant information about a search term and while that may be true more often than not it is a good practice to verify that all relevant websites have been discovered by cross-checking in other search engines.

Solr (pronounced "solar") builds on the well-known Lucene search engine library to create an enterprise search server with a simple HTTP/XML interface. Using Solr, large collections of documents can be indexed based on strongly typed field definitions, thereby taking advantage of Lucene's powerful full-text search features. This article describes Solr's indexing interface and its main features, and shows how field-type definitions are used for precise content analysis.

First, by choosing an open backbone like Lucene and Solr, you are free to plugin the best tool for the job; proprietary solutions often limit you to their own tools and their implementation. Let’s face it, we can’t be good at everything, so it makes sense to be able to plug in the best of breed for something that isn’t a core competency. For example, one could choose OpenNLP or Teragram or any other commercial vendor for these capabilities. Solr, especially, makes it simple to plugin these capabilities through its well defined plugin architecture. (By the way, for almost every capability out there in this realm, there is an open source alternative that warrants investigation.)

Ask your friends what business Google is in and the answer you’ll most likely get is “search.” And they would be wrong. Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company. A full 97 percent of its revenue comes from advertising on its various properties, including YouTube, plus partner sites through its AdSense product. Sure, Google has Android and Chrome OS and everything else, but it doesn’t make money from them — they’re just there to get people to watch more ads.

This isn't just about creating new content on a shiny new intranet — it's about leveraging what the organization already has. An enterprise search strategy must be in place alongside the intranet to exploit the increasingly natural instinct to turn to Google with this type of problem. Applying usage analytics to the intranet, in addition to external-facing Web sites, will help analyze what people are searching for — and, perhaps more important, what people are looking for and can't find. Not only could that improve the organization's understanding of its employees, but also the kinds of customer problems they are trying to solve.

If you click on the number of people liking a post, you'll get a list of those people. Click on a name and you'll be taken to their Google Profile page. From there, you can connect with that person depending on what they have shared. Users can share their Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed accounts and more.

We published a paper just two days ago on open source Enterprise Search tools such as Lucene/Solr and Xapian/Flax which basically asked whether these tools are now comparable for this purpose with the proprietary products from the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft FAST?

It's a very hot topic at the moment, and Matt Asay (VP Business Development, Alfresco) covers Lucene/Solr in particular in his CNET blog.

At the risk of simplification, the answer is more or less "yes", but the integration of these powerful tools can be held back by the fact that companies need to invest time to learn how. Then there is the issue of who do you call when you need support later on?

Today’s workers are used to “Googling” queries and getting results quickly and accurately. However, while searching at work, these same workers often find it difficult to find internal documents with the same speed and efficiency. Searching for a document in the workplace usually involves sifting through multiple pages of search results, which wastes time and money. And, because enterprise users are searching for specific information, not just the most popular answer, they expect more precise search results than they would get from the Internet. Simply put, the techniques that work well on the Web aren’t as well suited to enterprise search.

Want to create a front page that's styled differently from the rest of your site? Perhaps you need a separate admin theme? Or how about a login page which only shows the login block and nothing else? With a little PHP knowledge these problems are easy to solve.