Netizen: Real-time computing

Showing posts with label Real-time computing. Show all posts

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Real Time Is Real Time, Today Or Last Year

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Time 1937: Richest man In The World.

Look at this article from Time 1937. The richest man in the world at the time was an Indian. Hello Bill Gates. It was empowering to get to read the article in the raw. I think this is the model I have in mind when it comes to Twitter. What is being said right now in real time is important. But the Twitter archives are also important.

And finally I got it.

I knew Google needed to step in.

Facebook And Twitter Suck When It Comes To Searching Their Own Sites
Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google

Mashable: Google Upgrades Its Twitter Search Features
Google Blog: Replay It: Google Search Across The Twitter Archive
CNet: Google Launches Twitter Timeline Search

This is not Twitter giving the farm away. This is Twitter bringing in Google to enhance the value of every single tweet. Suddenly every tweet in the Twitter archive has become worth so much more. This is a huge boost to Twitter's monetization efforts. (Twitter Does The Deed: Ads)

Being able to search every tweet ever is great. But there is one missing link: visualization. Tweets are not meant to be read one at a time. And visualization is perhaps the best way to read many tweets at once. Google has work cut out for it in the presentation department. Searching through tweets is not the same as searching through webpages. Tweets are a different animal.

Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once

What I say today about Obama's victory in November 2008 is a different animal from what I said about Obama's victory as it happened. It is still me saying it, but real time is a different dimension.

This ability to dig through the Twitter archives is going to be a great tool for many players to go out there and see what people are saying about them, or how what they have been saying has changed over time.

Right now the archives go back only to February. It has to go all the way back. And Google has not even started work on doing the best possible job on presentation. Don't treat tweets like they are webpages. They are not.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Deindexing Murdoch

For Murdoch to deindex from Google and to ask Bing to pay to be able to index, that goes against the basic ethos of the internet. This goes against the spirit of Net neutrality.
Google paying to Twitter is not the same thing. Because Twitter does real time search, Google does not do real time search, so Google pays Twitter to be able to offer real time search.
For the media companies to start playing this indexing, deindexing game would be problematic. Instead of the move resuscitating the old media empires, it might be a huge bonanza to the blogosphere.
In short, the deindexing move would be an act of self-destruction on the part of old media.

Murdoch's Google Gambit - The Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
Google, Murdoch, Madoff « blog maverick
Murdoch: Google? We don't need no stinkin' Google | Blog ...
Suddenly Murdoch is a Real Threat to Google?
Is Murdoch Handing Google a Ransom Note? « J. Nelson Leith
Rupert Murdoch Plans To Hide His Sites From Google, The World ...
Google Boycott Would Only Cost Murdoch About 10%-15% Of Revenue ...
Baron von Tollbooth: Murdoch, Google and money
Google to Murdoch: Whatever, Dude - Rupert Murdoch - Gizmodo

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Search: Pregnant Territory

Image via CrunchBase

Once you have figured out that there are four screens - the phone, the browser, the desktop, the wall - it is easy to see search is pregnant territory, rich with possibilities. Search, content, distribution. There is so much to do.

Search is of special interest to me. There is one clear leader, but the challenger is not lacking in money. And for the leader the competition is but one click away. If there was ever an innovation challenge, this is it. Could Microsoft innovate, or find a startup or two that might? That second possibility is more likely. But then Google has been in competition with itself. It never stopped innovating in the search domain and boasts a larger index than anyone else. And its algorithms are still the ones to beat.

Microsoft should try and eat into Google territory. Google should try and eat into Microsoft territory. The consumer will benefit. Search and operating systems are fair game.

Technology Review

What's Microsoft's Bing Strategy? "We are going to compete hard on the core results, but where we are going to differentiate is in organizing results more effectively and providing tools to help searchers make decisions"
Making Search Social
More-Searchable Flash
Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts
Searching as a Team
Building a Better Search Engine
Q&A: Peter Norvig
Digging Deeper in Web Search
Better Search in Virtual Worlds
Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off
How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed
A Smarter Search for What Ails You

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft Searches for Group Advantage
A Google Killer Stumbles
Search Engines' Chinese Self-Censorship
A New Perspective on Search Results
Social Search
Jennifer Chayes
Wikipedians Promise New Search Engine

How Facebook Copes with 300 Million Users Technology Review Doing things in or near real time puts a lot of pressure on the system because the live-ness or freshness of the data requires you to query more in real time. ...... There's too much data updated too fast to stick it in a big central database. That doesn't work. So we have to separate it out, split it out, to thousands of databases, and then be able to query those databases at high speed. ...... "Like" became one of the most common actions in the system. ........ a tremendous wealth of photos being uploaded and shared ......... Then we went and built our own storage system called Haystack that's completely built on top of commodity hardware.
Twitter's Growing Pains a large-scale, ground-up architectural revamp ...... it will reduce its reliance on Ruby on Rails, and will move to a "simple, elegant file-system-based approach," to replace its original unwieldy database system. ........ a communications-class technical infrastructure that supports unpredictable activity.
Social Networking Is Not a Business
How Facebook Works

More Angry Investors Say, Throw the Boards Out

Monday, August 31, 2009

What's The Big Deal About Real Time?

Image via CrunchBase

Real time has been all the rage. Twitter opened up the Pandora's box. Now everyone wants to do everything real time. The fact that something is real time seems to be more valuable than the content thus delivered. I think this whole thrust for real time is the web wanting to reach its promise. If some event took place 10,000 miles away, I should know about it in real time. That just makes sense. So, no, my attempt is not to belittle real time.

I have tried to content from another angle. What if there were a search engine that would take minutes to find exactly what I am looking for, or even days, months? What if I am doing cutting edge research and there are unanswered questions. I don't know where the answer will come from, but once it does, I want to be able to know, in real time. But can I put my query in now, and have my search query result delivered to me when it is finally available? The result should come to me no matter where it pops up on the web. That is real time, but then it is not. That would be a really smart search engine that knows exactly what I am looking for, and that keeps searching, and that is still searching when the right result is not available yet. But once it is, the engine delivers me the result. In real time.

I want to be talking to people I don't personally know, I want to be talking to dead people, I want to be talking to people not yet born. With real time, sometimes you can get caught among people you already know. That is not a bad thing, but that is such an incomplete circle.

Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google
Search: The Human Vs. The Machine
InRev TwitIn Now Does People Search
Dynamic PageRank And Real Time Search
Microblogging Search: What Took Google So Long?
Square Search
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Dynamic PageRank And Real Time Search

Google beat the old search engines back in the late 1990s with its concept of PageRank. The more sites that linked to you, the more valuable was your site.

If something like real time search were to become possible, the concept of a dynamic pagerank would emerge. It would not be about how many sites linked to your site alone. It would be about do people actually click on those links to get to your site? Google's search algorithms have gone through so much evolution, and since they have been secret about it all for understantable reasons, it is hard to figure out what they have already done.

Google has been smart about constantly finetuning its search algorithms. They try to beat the so-called Search Engine Optimization people. It is a constant tussle.

Another thing would be content itself. After billions of search queries from people, Google should be able to figure out what sites and pages best delivered for what queries, and the number of search terms are for the most part finite. So if you can measure satisfaction, would that affect the way you do PageRank?

What about the content of the page itself? It might be a brand new page, but what if it is the most relevant page to my particular query? I guess search engines are not that good at reading yet.

Content creation and searching content will stick around for a long, long time.

And Bing's recent launch showed presentation is a whole new ballgame altogether. Microsoft decided they can't beat Google at its secret sauce of search, so they decided to take a bite at the other side of the coin: presentation of search results. Calling itself "a decision engine, not a search engine" was also a good marketing move.

They did not beat Google, but they did beat Yahoo, looks like. Now Bing is number two. Shoots for the stars, and you will get the moon.

Microblogging Search: What Took Google So Long?
Square Search
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Distributed Search
Google Is Working On Search
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream

From The Netizen BlogRoll

So, you want to be a Gmail ninja?
The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities
First One to This Standard Wins
Learning from Singer
All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service
A new landmark in computer vision
Search by Author on Google News
Blogger is Turning 10
Designing a lounge for the Day in the Cloud

Pages

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Real Time Is Real Time, Today Or Last Year

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Saturday, November 14, 2009

Deindexing Murdoch

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Search: Pregnant Territory

Monday, August 31, 2009

What's The Big Deal About Real Time?

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Dynamic PageRank And Real Time Search