Month: October 2009

Freebase. Wolfram Alpha. Google Squared. I hesitate to declare a trend, but there does seem to be a growing interest in more structured approaches to information seeking.

The latest entry is Factual, launched today by Gil Elbaz. Elbaz is no slouch: in 1998, he and Adam Weissman co-founded Applied Semantics (originally known as Oingo) and built a word sense disambiguation engine based on WordNet. In 2003, they sold the company to Google for $102M, where it became the bases of their very lucrative AdSense offering.

According to Factual’s website:

Factual is a platform where anyone can share and mash open data on any subject.  For example, you might find a comprehensive directory of restaurants along with dozens of searchable attributes, a huge database of published books, or a list of every video game and their cheat codes.  We provide smart tools to help the community build and maintain a trusted source of structured data.

Factual’s key product, the Factual Table, provides a unique way to view and work with structured data.  Information in Factual Tables comes from the wisdom of the community and from our powerful data mining tools, and the result is rich, dynamic, and transparent data.

You can read more detailed coverage in Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, and VentureBeat.

To me, Factual sounds like a hybrid between Freebase and Many Eyes. And, like both, it’s free (as in free beer). Free cuts both ways: the Factual site states clearly that “There is currently no way for us to help you monetize these tables.” As with many companies at this stage, the business model is TBD.

I have mixed feelings. I like the increasing interest by startups in structured search. It’s a step in the right direction, since structure is a key enabler for interaction. But we already have one Freebase (and even Google Base), and it’s not clear that we need yet another company to enable crowd-sourced submission of structured data. Perhaps what we need is a way to incent the sort of behavior that has made Wikipedia so successful. As my colleague Rob Gonzalez (who is rumored to have a blog in the works) is always happy to point out, structured data repositories are a public good that no one is ever willing to pay for. The current best hope seems to be the Linked Data initiative, which sounds great in theory–though I think the jury is still out on whether it will succeed in practice.

My ambivalence aside, I am excited that some of the greatest minds in computer science are focused on bringing more structure to the information seeking progress. Even if some of these efforts prove to be false starts, we’re going in the right direction. Structured search is on the table.

As some of you may remember, I’m excited about Google Squared, a project I see as a great first step toward exploratory search at a web scale. Yes, I know that Duck Duck Go, Kosmix and others are already taking on this challenge, but it makes a difference to see Google throw its weight behind such an ungoogley initiative. Plus Google Squared is ambitious, to say the least–the input is free-form text and the output is highly structured.

Since I’ve beaten up Wolfram Alpha for is overreliance on NLP, I can’t give Google a free pass. It would be nice to be able to give Google Square more structured guidance (yes, I’m still an HCIR fanatic). But Google Squared seems to achieve far more robust query interpretation than Wolfram Alpha’s–perhaps because supporting exploratory search is less brittle than question answering.

The quality of the tables that Google Square produces as results is still spotty, but it is a major improvement from the initial release. To those who wrote off Google Squared in June, I suggest you take a second look.

A few months ago, I wrote in “The Twouble with Twitter Search“:

But the trickle that Twitter returns is hardly enough.

I believe this limitation is by design–that Twitter knows the value of such access and isn’t about to give it away. I just hope Twitter will figure out a way to provide this access for a price, and that an ecology of information access providers develops around it. Of course, if Google or Microsoft buys Twitter first, that probably won’t happen.

Now that Twitter has raised $100M at a valuation of $1B, I doubt any acquisition will happen anytime soon. But, according to Kara Swisher’s unnamed sources:

Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.

If so, then it’s about time! How much either Microsoft or Google would pay for this feed is an interesting question. It’s probably not a coincidence that Twitter raised its last round of funding before pursuing this path–the revenue they obtain this way could be significant, but is unlikely to justify a $1B valuation.

In any case, I’m excited as a consumer that Twitter may finally allow Google and Microsoft to better expose the value of its content. But I’m also curious what my friends on the Twitter Search team think of the potential competition from the web search titans. Until now, no one has been able compete effectively with Twitter’s native search because of  lacking access to the firehose. Having such access would give Google and Microsoft more than a fighting chance. Given the centrality of search to Twitter’s user experience, it’s an interesting corporate strategy.

As has been anticipated for a while–and discussed during the Ethics of Blogging panel–the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published explicit guidelines regarding how bloggers (at least within its jurisdiction) must disclose any “material connections” they have to the companies they endorse.  The full details are available here.

There have been a number of reactions across the blogosphere, but I’d like to hone in on two opposing views: those of What Would Google Do author (and blogger) Jeff Jarvis and Googler Matt Cutts.

Jarvis describes the regulations as “a monument to unintended consequence, hidden dangers, and dangerous assumptions…the greatest myth embedded within the FTC’s rules [is] that the government can and should sanitize the internet for our protection.”

Commenting on Jarvis’s post, Cutts replies:

As a Google engineer who has seen the damage done by fake blogs, sock puppets, and endless scams on the internet, I’m happy to take the opposite position: I think the FTC guidelines will make the web more useful and more trustworthy for consumers. Consumers don’t want to be shilled and they don’t want payola; they want a web that they can trust. The FTC guidelines just say that material connections should be disclosed. From having dealt with these issues over several years, I believe that will be a good thing for the web.

It’s a fascinating debate, and I can see merit in both sides. Like the folks at Reason, I lean libertarian (at least on issues of freedom of expression) and am not eager to see more government regulation of online speech. That said, I see the value of laws requiring truth in advertising, and I don’t see why pay-for-play bloggers should get a free pass if they are acting as advertisers. Interestingly, Jarvis’s response to Cutts is: “I trust you to regulate spam more than the FTC. You are better at it and have more impact.” That’s probably true today, but wouldn’t want to invest that responsibility in a company that makes 99% of its revenue from advertising.

Everyone in this discussion sees the value of transparency–the question is whether it should be a legal norm enforced through FTC regulation or a social norm enforced by the marketplace. Despite my general skepticism about regulation of expression, I temper my libertarianism with a dose of pragmatism. For example, I’m glad that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at least tries to regulate health claims–its efforts may not eliminate quackery, but they surely reduce the problem.

Do we need FTC regulation in order to tame the jungle of social media? For that matter, will regulations have a positive effect, or will sploggers and other scammers simply ignore them–and perhaps even more offshore? I share Jarvis’s fear that the regulation will cause more harm than good–perhaps even having chilling effects on would-be bloggers. Certainly the FTC will have to use its new power wisely–both to avoid trampling the existing blogosphere and to not scare off newcomers. Still, if the FTC shows that it is only out to get true scammers, it may help establish, in Cutts’s words, a web we can trust.

I’m Daniel Tunkelang, and I endorse this blog post.