Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging

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.