Category: Uncategorized

A couple of years ago, I started The Noisy Channel as a personal blog. Since my then-employer Endeca didn’t have a corporate blog, I became the company’s ambassador to the blogosphere, despite my protests that this was not a corporate blog.

But I’m pleased to report that Endeca now has is its own blog, aptly entitled Search Facets. I’m not usually a fan of corporate blogs, but I like the approach Endeca is taking to this one. The folks who have posted so far are Adam Ferrari (CTO), Vladimir Zelevinsky (Research Scientist), and Pete Bell (Co-Founder)–an indication that the blog will contain substance, rather than warmed-over press releases.

Indeed, the posts so far are nice and meaty. I particularly like Adam’s post about “Vertical stores for vertical web search?“–it’s nice to see read intelligent analysis from someone who understand the strengths of both MapReduce and column-oriented relational databases.

Anyway, I’m delighted that my former co-workers have taken to the blogosphere, and I look forward to reading what they have to say!

Weren’t we just talking about what’s different about mobile search use cases and about how to make web search more exploratory? I may be biased, but I think that Google’s recently launched “near me now” button is a step in the right direction (no pun intended!) on both of these fronts.

I’m curious to hear unbiased feedback from iPhone and Android users who have gotten to play with it.

In a recent announcement, Twitter Platform / API Product Manager Ryan Sarver tells us that Twitter is:

committed to providing a framework for any company big or small, rich or poor to do a deal with us to get access to the Firehose in the same way we did deals with Google and Microsoft. We want everyone to have the opportunity — terms will vary based on a number of variables but we want a two-person startup in a  garage to have the same opportunity to build great things with the full feed that someone with a billion dollar market cap does. There are still a lot of details to be fleshed out and communicated, but this a top priority for us and we look forward to what types of companies and products get built on top of this unique and rich stream.

That and some other details, like raising the API rate limit from 150 requests per hour to 1500,  may well bring on what Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb calls “Twitter 2.0“. But it was something else in Kirkpatrick’s write up that caught my attention–this quote from Wow.ly co-founder Kevin Marshall:

The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in ‘realtime’ and the more interested I become in ‘over time.’ When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set.

I couldn’t have said it better! Not that I haven’t tried: you look back at my post about Topsy, you’ll see where real-time and over time meet. Recency matters, but the signal is far too sparse without some way to aggregate and analyze over time.

I’m thrilled that Twitter plans to open up its platform in a way that could enable analysis over semantic, social, and temporal dimensions. Now I’m curious to see what that access will look like, and what everyone has been clamoring for that access will do with it.

I discovered today that I’d been hacked earlier this week by a spam link injection attack. I’m still not sure how it happened, but I believe I’ve cleaned out all of the offending PHP from my WordPress installation. I’ve also removed most of my plug-ins in the process, and I may have broken some things in my zeal to clean up the site. My apologies for any inconveniences, and my thanks to @awaisathar and @gsingers for helping me resolve this quickly.

According to Wikipedia, user experience is “the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design.” While I’ve never labeled myself a designer, I have always cared deeply about user experience, even back before my information retrieval days, when I was working on graph drawing. Indeed user experience is the defining problem for HCIR.

One of my favorite resources for learning about user experience is the UXmatters blog. This group blog boasts a set of authors that represent a diverse collection of industry practitioners (and one academic) and offer concrete case studies and recommendations.

For example, in “Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters“, Greg Nudelman offers a constructive critique of the Office Depot search user interface. Some of his material will be familiar to those who have read my faceted search book (particularly the chapter on front-end concerns), but the focus on a single example makes for a compelling read. I also liked Greg’s most recent post, entitled “Cameras, Music, and Mattresses: Designing Query Disambiguation Solutions for the Real World“. I was amused that he and I use the same “canonical” example for the need to offer clarification before refinement. 🙂

Here are a few more posts from other authors to give you a taste for the blog:

• “First, Do No Harm” by Pabini Gabriel-Petit
• “The Five Competencies of User Experience Design” by Steve Psomas
• “Beyond Usability: Designing Web Sites for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust” by Eric Schaffer

If you are a user experience professional, in name or in deed, then you should be reading the the UXmatters blog — or perhaps even contributing to it. Of course, you’re always welcome to contribute a guest post here too.

My new role at Google (yes, it still feels new after not quite a month!) has given me a professional interest in local search. I’ve adjusted my reading materials accordingly, and I’ve started reading blogs that focus on local. Here are a handful that I’ve discovered so far:

• BIA / Kelsey Blog
  • By The Kelsey Group, a division of BIA Advisory Services that provides data and analysis on directories and local media.
• Exploring Local
  • By Mike Dobson, President of TeleMapics, a company that provides consulting services focused on local search.
• Local SEO Guide
  • Andrew Shotland‘s blog on local search optimization, small business marketing & search engine optimization strategy.
• Localsearchdatabase
  • By Gib Olander, Director of Business Development for Localeze, an online content management company serving businesses, local search engines and consumers.
• Mihmorandum
  • David Mihm‘s blog on local search engine optimization and marketing.
• Screenwerk
  • Greg Sterling‘s thoughts on online and offline media. Sterling used to run The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program.
• SEO Igloo Blog
  • By Solas Web Design, which specializes in web design and search engine optimization for small businesses.
• Understanding Google Maps & Local Search
  • By Mike Blumenthal, whose company offers consulting services and market research advice relating to maps and local search.

Not surprisingly, these blogs offers me a critical perspective on how Google and other search engines serve the local space.  Granted, everyone has their own motives–and it’s hard to avoid some tension in a space with the competitive dynamics of local search. But now that I’m no longer an outsider myself, I appreciate having others to help keep me honest as I work to make local search better for users and businesses.

I’m no longer in the enterprise search business, but I know that many readers here are. If you are one of those readers, then I strongly encourage you to consider participating in the Enterprise Search Summit, which will take place next May in New York. I presented there last year and enjoyed the opportunity to meet fellow presenters and attendees. You can read my recap of the event.

The deadline for proposal submission is November 30th–you only have to submit a 250-word abstract.

Here is the call for proposals:

We seek dynamic speakers who can talk knowledgeably about detailed aspects of how to implement and maximize search within an organization. Search can no longer be viewed as a stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise. This year’s Summit will examine the ways to leverage search tools, information architecture, classification, and other strategies and technologies to deliver meaningful results—not just in terms of information, but to the bottom line.

Ours is a well-informed, tech-savvy audience, so proposals should be specific and detailed. Consider topic such as:

• Integrating search into enterprise systems and workflow
• Customizing your search solution/ Task-specific search
• Compliance, records management, and eDiscovery with effective search
• Migrating your search engine
• Social search and social tagging strategies & solutions
• Search-enabled decision making
• Business intelligence, data mining
• Search as the gateway to enterprise information
• Optimizing the interface and user experience
• Navigational tools—context, facets, entity extraction, clustering, and visualization
• Emerging trends, the future of search
• Overcoming information overload
• Categorization techniques
• Semantic Search
• Query Federation & Federated Search
• Enhancing an existing solution

If you represent a company that has an enterprise search software product, your best bet to be on our program is to collaborate with a customer to submit a case study to be presented by them, following the guidelines above.

If you need more information–or more time–I encourage you to reach out directly to Michelle Manafy, the conference chair.

As you might imagine, it’s quite a switch to go from criticizing
Google from the outside to being on the inside. Jeff Jarvis, who was
gracious enough not to make fun of me in public, nonetheless admitted
to me privately that the news had made him chuckle.

As I finish my first week, I can sum the experience in a word:
overwhelming. The tools for accessing internal information are better
than I expected, but both the volume of baseline knowledge–technical
and cultural–and the relentlessness of the update stream are
daunting.

Indeed, the internal ecosystem is so rich that it’s easy to forget
there is a world outside it–ironic given Google’s enormous role in the world outside it! Then again, this is just my first week–it will take me
some time to pop up the stack from the build system to the surface.

I am without my own laptop for a few days as I manage a transition between jobs. So I apologize in advance if I am slow to respond to email, comments, or tweets over the weekend. I’ll be back at full steam early next week.

This is my last week at Endeca. The decision to leave has been a heart-wrenching one: not only have the past ten years been the best of my life, but my experiences at Endeca have defined me professionally. Moreover, Endeca is riding a wave of success with recent advances in our products, new relationships with key partners, and fascinating new deployments.  (You can read Endeca’s latest announcements in our newsroom).

Ironically, it is this very success that compels me to move on. In the past several years, I have developed an increasing passion for search on the open web–an interest only furthered by the explosion of social media.

That is why I’ve decided to accept an opportunity at Google’s New York office. Readers here know that I’ve been a very public critic of Google’s simplistic approach to user interaction on the open web. I’m being offered an opportunity to help fix that approach–and it is an offer I can’t refuse. My mission is to apply my passion for human-computer information retrieval (HCIR), an approach that Endeca has pioneered in the enterprise, to the world’s largest information problems–and where better to do that than at the company that aspires to organize the world’s information.

This moment is bittersweet: I am excited about the new experiences that await me, but I have a heavy heart as I turn in my badge and part with a world-class team that has succeeded against incredible odds.

Given my role and tenure at Endeca, I want to say explicitly that this move is about my personal ambition. My passion for web search and social media, which have grown exponentially over the past couple of years, simply doesn’t align with Endeca’s focus in the enterprise.

Also, I want to make clear: Google hired me because of my values, and not in spite of them. I know that some folks will find it difficult to reconcile my criticisms of Google with my decision to join. That’s why there’s an opt-out village! Seriously, though, I take my values with me. Google is offering me the opportunity to channel my passion for HCIR into action, on the world’s largest stage. I’m well aware of the magnitude of the challenge, but hey, I’m feeling lucky.