Category Archives: Google

See this CBR (a UK publication, nee Computer Business Review) article entitled Google Dismisses Noise and FUD in Enterprise Search for some great quotes from Google’s Dave Girouard, head of Google Enterprise and Applications.

“There are three things that IT departments and users want in the enterprise. They want the results fast; they want relevance, in that the results they are looking for are in the first few hits they get back; and they want security so it searches what they are allowed to and nothing else.”

“If we can get those right,” said Girouard, “and we believe we have, then we know that everything else the competition can sling at us is just noise and FUD.”

And the topper:

Girouard said that in competitive tender situations, the customer chooses the Google Search Appliance 90% of the time.

Wow. That’s a big claim. And if it’s true it validates everything I’ve been saying about enterprise search being caught between a rock and a hard place. Reinforcing this, the article ends with the statement that Google has 10,000 customers for the enterprise search appliance.

Aside for Marketers and Spokespeople
As a general rule, I always love reading the UK trade press because I think they are often able to “get the story” more effectively than the US trade press. Why?

• Because I think UK trade press journalists see themselves more as reporters, in the classic sense of the word

• The UK trade press therefore use more hard-ball techniques in extracting the story from spokespeople (e.g., buying the question, fake end of interview)

• US spokespeople inexperienced in dealing with the UK press therefore often make major mistakes because they are unaware of these cultural differences.

For example, since Girouard isn’t double quoted in the story above that means that words “the customer chooses the Google Search Appliance 90% of the time” most likely didn’t actually come out of his mouth. I’d bet you $10 that the actual interview went down something like this:

CBR: “Dave, how often do you beat your competitors in customer evaluations?”

DG: “Well, I’d rather talk about us than them. And we think three things matter in enterprise search — ” [Trying to stick to party line.]

CBR: “But — let me dig into this for a second — would you say you beat them most of the time?” [Setting the trap.]

DG: “Well, yes, but I’d like to talk about what –” [Regretting having opened the door, but still trying to hold line.]

CBR: “Well does ‘most’ mean 51% or say 90%” [Tightening the noose.]

DG: “Well, of course it’s hard to put a number on it, but I’d say closer to the latter than the former.” [Thinking he's saying it without saying it.]

CBR: “OK, so you’d say that in evaluations customers choose the Google Search Appliance 90% of the time.” [Going in for the kill.]

DG: “I suppose so. Yes.” [Buying the question.]

Here’s a link to a New York Times article on search and on the general topic of out-Googling Google.

The first company mentioned in the story is Powerset (slogan “natural language search”), a firm that remains mysterious to me and who still has only a shell of a website, here. Powerset’s main competence thus far appear to be PR, having had great visibility at the Web 2.0 Summit and earning themselves the lead in this New York Times story.

The story goes on to mention Hakia, a Web 2.0 Summit sponsor (slogan: search for meaning), which seems to be something of a semantic web play though not using any of the usual suspect semantic technologies (e.g., OWL, RDF). Hakia describes its technology, in brief, right here. (Gee, I wonder where they got the idea for SemanticRank(tm). I wonder if one of their founders is named Larry Semantic.)

The story also mentions Wikia, the for-profit spinoff of Wikipedia, and its search efforts which have generated significant confusion of late. This techcrunch article, which recieved a huge amount of pickup, incorrectly cited the project as Wikiasari, and according to Wikia, the screenshot in question was part of Wikisearch (the search engine that searches Wikipedia) and had nothing to with their efforts to out-do Google by fixing the “search is broken” problem through an effort called Search Wikia. (Anyone wonder why there’s confusion?)

I remember after Oracle made it big in the late 1980s that venture capitalists (VCs) poured around $100M into about 10 object database firms, hoping to catch the next Oracle. Times change, but VCs don’t. The article states that since 2004 VCs have poured over $350M into about 80 search-related startups.

The article adds the sobering reminder that A9 basically failed to become a major search engine, despite some very talented people, some great technology, and the backing of Amazon.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search, weighs in towards the end with a quote that I find pretty non-Google: “search is becoming an increasingly capital intensive business.” Which to me is a pretty way of saying “we’ll win because we’re big.” (I imagine that Google, in character, would say, “we’ll win because we have better technology.”)

What’s more, while A9 may have failed, Bezos isn’t done yet. His elastic computing cloud (EC2), Amazon storage services (AS2), and open access to the Alexa web crawl are all quite deliberate efforts to reduce barriers to entry in the business of web services, and eliminate the problem that Mayer talks about.