Enterprise Search

Some Good News in Tech Support

With all the complaints about customer service these days, we wanted to give a shout out to FAST Tech Support for a recent set of positive interactions.  Very professional, very patient, and they were able to "track the sun" by reassigning the call to various call centers around the world to continue working the issues beyond local business hours until everything was resolved, real team effort.  Ironically we had attempted to do this back at Verity in the early 1990s, but back then the technology wasn't quite up to it.

Come to think of it, we've also had some good interactions with some other companies' tech support and customer service folks recently, also worth a mention: AT&T (voice line), Verizon (in-store wireless card), GoDaddy, Dell (on-site service), GE (on-site service), Apple (in-store iMac and iPhone), HP (new HP tablet) and Tivo; HP is still working with with us on the new tablet, but they've made some progress and I'd give them an "A" for effort, and to be fair this is a brand new product.  Lest you think we live in some alternate universe, rest assured we've had less pleasant experiences with a few other household names lately, but calling those folks out in public is not our style!

And thinking about this a bit more, some higher level points come to mind:

1: As technology products get more and more complex, all products will have issues; zero problems is not a reasonable expectation when you're living on the crest of a technology wave.  But having a reputable company to call when the tech hits a glitch, and having the option of speaking to an actually being when none of the automated tools can handle it, is what sets these companies apart.  The open community support model can also work, albeit in a different way, if there's a critical mass of people, but not all technologies have this critical mass of energetic expertise.

2: We've noticed that many of the companies we've had good interactions with do conduct customer satisfaction surveys, either on an ongoing bassis, or after a specific tech support or customer service issue.  They seem to actually care about customer service.  To his credit, Bob Bramley had started a similar program back at Verity in the early 90's, which I inherited after he left.

3: Miles tells an anecdote about IBM customer service back in the day, also being content if something minor occasionally went wrong, seeing it as an opportunity for prompt and positive customer interaction, to help solidify customer loyalty.  This is still true today.  I've suggested Dell to many friends and colleagues because of their onsite support options, which do cost extra, but which are well worth it.

Yes, staffing with humans is more expensive then not doing so, but advanced technology really needs it.  And it's fine to try offering automated service as a first line of defense, if it's done well, and if there is clearly an escape hatch to talk to an actual person if the customer wants.  And if you already knew all this, forgive the platitudes.

So again, kudos to FAST, AT&T, Verizon, GoDaddy, HP, Dell, Apple, Tivo and GE for giving customer service a good name.

Google, dates, and UAL

In case you didn't hear, UAL stock tanked over the last two days. The Wall Street Journal reports that the parent company for United Airlines saw its share price fall from $12 a share at Monday's opening to a low of $3 a share by Tuesday afternoon.

The cause? A Google 'news' story reporting an impending bankruptcy filing for UAL.

Only there was no impending bankruptcy: Google picked up a story in the south Florida Sun Sentinel reprinted from the Chicago Tribune - dated December 2002. Today they have an interesting description of the sequence of events that lead up to the fire sale on UAL shares.

We've written before about the problem with information systems like Google Alerts. If you only look for a story new to your crawler, you risk believing you're discovered something new when in fact it's ancient. Verity, in its Topic Real Time, addressed these problems in the late 80s, but Google's philosophy that dates are not really important leaves us open to more such stories, more such panics, and more such headlines.

When you're dealing with spiders and freshness, it's never been sufficient to trust the web server date. But spidering technology can parse the article, looking for datelines and the like. And, if you've indexed the world's content, you can certainly look in your archives to confirm that the story isn't virtually identical to a story you found years before.

In your organization, you can have your spider generate a checksum 'fingerprint' to identify new content from new postings. You can also store a 'first seen on' date so you can identify new content, even on those systems where the web server lies about the freshness.

The end of the WSJ article tells a frightening possibility. To quote:

"Amid serious storms in Florida and on the East Coast, Web surfers checking for news about travel delays may have stumbled onto the old UAL story by mistake, and a small number of fresh hits may have been enough to drive it onto the list. A Tribune spokesman declined to say how many hits the article received but said there was no indication of fraud."

Well, good. NO fraud, just one of those things. Still, if this is all it takes, a small group of hackers around the world can decide to make an old story popular by viewing it enough - personally, or even programmatically. Google thinks the story is hot and fresh and publishes   it in an alert. Investment bankers pick it up and sell-sell-sell. If the hackers get greedy, they'll likely be found out in the subsequent investigation. Or not. Mad money, anyone?

Do You Plan to Attend ESS West 2008 in San Jose this month?

The Enterprise Search Summit - West starts Monday September 22 with  pre-conference workshops, and the show kicks off Tuesday the 23rd. We'll be exhibiting once again- please stop by and say hello at Booth 229! 

Early bird pricing ends  Sept 3!

  You can register here and get a special rate through New Idea Engineering. Use promotion code VIPIDEA.

Don't miss our sessions.

• Tuesday Sept 23 2008 at 11:45 - 12:15 pm
  A101:  The Nuts and Bolts of Selecting a Search Engine
  Companies often spend huge sums of money and months of work effort to replace an existing enterprise search engine only to find they still are not happy with the results. With a little planning you can avoid this disaster. Kehoe will outline a phased approach for selecting an enterprise search engine, verifying quality of results against your existing solution, and transitioning to your new infrastructure. This talk takes a hard look at the fix vs. buy decision by focusing on methodology as well as on technology.
• Wednesday Sept 24 2008 at 3:00 - 3:45pm 
  B206: Search and the Virtual Machine
  Enterprise search is incredibly demanding on hardware resources. Virtualized solutions allow server consolidation and higher server utilization. Virtualization also allows the IT staff to better allocate resources—processors and memory—to optimize performance, yet there are trade-offs to be considered with any approach. This session will examine virtualized solutions in the context of real-world implementations to help attendees understand how this approach can impact operation and performance.

Our Top 3 Google Search Appliance Tips

Many of the operators available on the public Google site are useful within the Google Search Appliance. Here are a few of the most interesting ones.

1: The tilde prefix (~) is the Thesaurus / Synonym operator:

Instead of searching for
    error

Try searching for:
    ~error

A memory mnemonic, remember that in math the ~ is often used as "approximately equal to" symbol.

2: Dot dot (..) does a range search:

You can do:
    47..49

Or even use it for search years (though not full dates):
    2000..2005

3: And who could forget site: operator, useful for double checking your own spider's indexing of your public site:

For our site as of this writing, Google shows 44 docs that mention 'microsoft':
    site:ideaeng.com microsoft

When you search for 'microsoft' from our home page, you get  gives 48 docs.

Try this on your own site - if the number in your search engine is lower than the Google count, your search is missing something!

There are of course a whole bunch more Google operators, and on the other Google Web Search Help Center, but  some of these tips came from MakeUseOf

 

New site for quality search tools and components

We're happy to announce that we've kicked off the beta of a new site to help the community of intranet, customer facing, and local search by proving a directory to the best of open source, no cost, low cost and commercial software tools, components, and products.

That site, mentioned by Steve Arnold this morning in his interview with Mark and I, is

SearchComponenetsOnline

We're beginning to post the tools we've been following for a few months now, and will have many more over the coming days, weeks, and months. Let us know if there's a tool you want to see listed by replying with a comment.

Outside of the Box

Last week I spent four days in Houston Texas, enjoying humidity in the 90s with temperatures to match. The event was the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, the first since Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, and the first sporing several pretty good search solutions from Microsoft across a wide range of capabilities and cost.

At one of the final sessions, Rob Lancaster of FAST, like many others nowadays, described search as having gone "beyond the box" to the point that search is everywhere - it is the platform that enables collaboration, customized content, and a wide range or "web 2.0" capabilities. I certainly don't disagree.

The sign of a true visionary is being ahead of the curve. Philippe Courtot, CEO of Qualys, pretty much saved Verity on his own in 1991 with his management skills and drive. His mantra back then? "Search is ubiquitous". It's just taken the rest of the industry 15 years to catch up.

Visit the NIE Booth at Enterprise Search Summit, New York, May 20-21, 2008

You are invited to visit the New Idea Engineering booth at Enterprise Search Summit, May 20-21, 2008 in New York.  The Enterprise Search Summit is the premier event for information, IT and search professionals.  Meet other professional, exchange ideas, learn strategies and build skill sets, you need to make your organization’s content not only searchable but "findable."

---------------------------------------------------------------------                  

        Enterprise Search Summit

                 New York  

             May 20-21, 2008   

Register using the New Idea Engineering link for a discount.

Plan to attend NIE sessions,  

•       The Nuts and Bolts of Selecting an Enterprise Search Engine
  Miles Kehoe will outline a phased approach for selecting an enterprise search engine, verifying quality of results against your existing solution, and transitioning to your new infrastructure.  This talk takes a hard look at the fix vs. buy decision by focusing on methodology as well as on technology.
•      Search Security Issues
  Mark Bennett will cover document and information security issues, whether to protect intellectual property rights, undisclosed strategies, and employee privacy for personal information such as medical, retirement, and personnel data.  You can download the white paper  "Mapping Security Requirements to Enterprise Search"  at http://www.ideaeng.com/pub/wp/.

   

We will be joining the SearchDev.org group for dinner on Monday night May 19, at 7pm, tentatively scheduled for the Bice restaurant  located at 7 E 54th Street. Stay tined for details here and on searchdev.org.

 

 

 

Deep Web proposes federation resource site

Sol Ledeman of Deep Web Technologies wants to create a one-stop demo center for federation technology and has invited all of the major vendors to participate.

Federated search is becoming increasingly popular as more corporate customers are looking for ways to delivery results from multiple enterprise search installations, often from many different vendors. Sometimes the issue is technical, sometimes political, but nearly all companies have three or more search vendor technologies running somewhere behind the firewall.

The one thing we'd like to have seen in Sol's challenge is security, since that's what we think separates the winners from the also-rans in federation. It's not always easy, but it is 'real world' in companies. Nonetheless, a demo site where users can compare vendor solutions 'apples to apples' on the same data sources would be nice.

By the way, we've seen some confusion among our customers and prospects on the subject, so we've taken a shot at defining 'federated search' in our Enterprise Search newsletter. We hope that helps some.

Adding a Search Box / Search Form to a TypePad Blog

(mostly raw notes, not fully tested, proofed)

It's nice to have a search box on your typepad based blog.  These notes were assembled from the TypePad help posts and some of our own notes.

Step 1: TypePad FAQ: Adding Custom Content and HTML in Your Sidebar (AKA: a sidebar Notes TypeList)

Step 1.a: Creating a new TypeList

Step 1.b: Adding an item to a TypeList and possibly give it a blank name (to avoid having too many labels around the search form)

Step 2: TypePad FAQ: Adding Google Search to your Weblog (via a "Notes TypeList")

Step 2.a: add in the HTML

Step 2.b: CHANGE DOMAIN name in THREE places

Step 2.c: maybe change radio buttons to single hidden field just pointing to your domain

Step 2.d: maybe comment out div tag with white background and big google logo

Step 2.e: maybe change text of button

Step 2.f: maybe add target="_new" to <form> tag

(other tweaks to HTML  form)

Step 2.f: Go ahead and accept the offer "The first item has been added to your new list. Would you like to publish this list on a weblog or your About Page?" (Publish)

Step 3: Display the custom TypeList in your blog

Step 3.a: do it... see above.  FAQ is out of date, it's in the right column under "TypeLists", and may already be checked / enabled by default.

Step 3.b: May need to Adjust the Ordering (placement) of the Content

Step 3.c: May need to adjust the width (near the bottom of Step 2's link)

Step 3.d: may need to adjust names of forms, typelists, etc.

(held as a draft pending actual testing)

Google Public Search: still not the freshest...

You do it, you know you do!  Moving aside the gallons of milk at the front to find one at the back of the shelf with a longer expiration date.

I find myself doing that with Google's public search quite a bit.  Sure we all use Google's public search... but they STILL haven't sorted out the "dates thing".  We first debated this with one of the Google founders back in 2000.  Yes, it's hard to do dates "perfectly", I get that, but there's certainly room for improvement, at least tracking when a page was *first* *seen*, so you can tell it's at least N years old.

Context: I did these searches on Tues Jan 15, 2008.  After the Iowa cauces and NH primaries, with California to vote in  a few weeks.  Mac World is today, and the start of awards season in Hollywood.

Check out this lame-ness: (one example courtesy of Miles)

Look for: steve jobs keynote time
Top result: Live from WWDC 2006: Steve Jobs keynote - Engadget
He'll be speaking later today, 1/15/08, but this is from 2 years ago.

Look for: california propositions
Top result: decent, 2007, 2008
Second result is from 2005:
http://www.smartvoter.org/2005/11/08/ca/state/prop/

Look for: election results
First result: Virginia State Board of Elections : View Election Results
But I'm in California... no disrespect to the fine folks in Va, but their local elections are probably not what the average surfer is looking for.
Second result: CNN.com Election 2004
3 to 4 years old, amazing.

Look for: java for palm os
First site is pretty good, pointing to the IBM WebSphere site.
But the second result is from 2002!  (http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2002/jw-0531-palm.html)

Search for: new england patriots score
First result OK, but second is from December 2007, and of course they have been playing in the post season since then.

To be fair, Google does get some other items spot on:

Look for: CES
Good, all from 2008

Look for: new season of lost
Good, most are recent

Look for: Iraq
Good, Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook, etc.

Look for: golden globe
Good, mostly points to main web sites.

I will say it again:

Yes, it is difficult when parsing random web text and HTTP headers to know with 100% certainty when the content was authored, for various technical reasons.  References to dates might be in regards to discussions of past events, etc.

BUT you can certainly figure out when the first time your spider saw that content.  You might not know whether it was authored in February or June of 2007, but when it's 2009 you'll know it's at least 2 years out of date.  This isn't quite as easy as it sounds, as the text on web pages change slightly, so raw "checksums" won't cut it.  But I'm sure some smart guys from Stanford could figure *something* out.

And when 4 digit years are part of the URL, with other numbers that look  like dates, that would often be another good hint.

Web content now goes back more than ten years.  All engines need to keep this mind.