John Battelle's Search Blog Thoughts on the intersection of tech, business, and society.

Corporate Search Is Sexy

Before there was the web, there was the corporate database. Remember those days? Back in the mid to late 80s, when the Local Area Network was the Next Big Thing, when everyone was madly installing client-server databases, when applications like dBase III and NetWare ruled the roost? You don’t? Sigh. I must be showing my age. I was a cub reporter back then, covering the relatively new beat of “networking” as well as the corporate database market. Yup. Somehow I found that stuff fascinating. I thought this whole idea of connecting disparate networks of information was a hoot.

Anyway, to the point. About 1987 or so a new class of applications developed. Called Executive Information Systems (EIS), these were essentially interfaces to data, designed to live on top of corporate databases and cull the stuff Really Important Executives needed to know so as to make Really Important Decisions. The coolest part of the spec was the fact that the data was queried from the desktop – EIS promised easy and intuitive access those unintelligible databases the geeks kept buying. The idea was sexy, but the category never really took off. The design was too rules based, too top down. For them to work, you had to literally redesign your entire infrastructure. Oh, and the Executives in question had to give a shit.

Fast forward to now. As most of the world remains fascinated with search’s more public face, a significant shift seems to be occurring in the corporate data world. I’m not saying EIS is back, exactly, but the overwhelming presumption of webwide search on your desktop is certainly rewiring how corporations think about their more private databanks. A robust market has grown up around “enterprise search,” (some companies, such as FAST, were spun off from consumer search companies, and Google maintains a unit focused on the market). There’s a crop of interesting startups to boot, including Tim Bray’s company, Antarctica. It’s entirely possible some of the next big ideas in search may well be developed in this more focused, less public field. Any readers out there have suggestions of cool companies in this space I may be overlooking?

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The Mayo Database

Wired News reports on a massive database project from Mayo which has interesting, scary, and rather exciting implications for diagnosis and treatment. Genetic information will eventually be included. Excerpts: During an office visit, a medic will be able to do enough quick data mining to ensure the most accurate diagnoses…

During an office visit, a medic will be able to do enough quick data mining to ensure the most accurate diagnoses and most effective treatments while the patient waits, de Groen said. “Ideally the computer would query both our own database of patients (and) the complete medical literature.” ….

Health-care professionals look forward to the eventual addition of patients’ genetic information to databases like the MCLSS — a field known as clinical genomics — as a major advance in medicine. Among other things, such access would allow doctors to divine with great speed and accuracy what drugs have worked best on a certain type of person with a certain illness. …

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Thoughts on 2004

I am not sure why all of a sudden I am struck with the urge to prognosticate, but all weekend long I've been thinking about what might happen next year in the search/tech/media nexus. I think it has something to do with the book – my plan is to finish…

I am not sure why all of a sudden I am struck with the urge to prognosticate, but all weekend long I’ve been thinking about what might happen next year in the search/tech/media nexus. I think it has something to do with the book – my plan is to finish it by about mid year, then pray that nothing major changes for another six months while the manuscript wends its way through the vagaries of the publishing process. It’s either that, or Jeremy envy.

So I’ve been thinking about a number of things, some small, some not so small, which might happen in the next twelve months. Given that I’m writing this on the eve of Winter’s Solstice, I give you Battelle’s First Annual Solstice Hopes and Predictions for 2004. I refuse to say which are hopes, and which predictions. This way, I can claim to be right next year one way or another. Take it for what it cost you on the way in…. (see list via link below)

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Gurley on Cable Regulation: Counterintuitive Thinking

I subscribe to Bill Gurley's Above the Crowd newsletter, and always find his insights worth the read. (Bill is a VC at Benchmark, and a former partner of mine on the Internet Summit conferences.) His latest missive, "Cleaning Up After the Ninth Circuit in an Attempt to Save the Internet"…

I subscribe to Bill Gurley’s Above the Crowd newsletter, and always find his insights worth the read. (Bill is a VC at Benchmark, and a former partner of mine on the Internet Summit conferences.) His latest missive, “Cleaning Up After the Ninth Circuit in an Attempt to Save the Internet” is an exercise in counter-intuitive thinking. When I first read about this decision, I thought it was a victory against the evil cable companies, who I am always willing to believe have nothing but their own monopolies at heart. The ruling said, in short, that cable lines had to be viewed as telecommunication services rather than information services. The distinction was important, as it meant the cable lines were subject to the same sharing rules as phone lines. In other words, it could open cable up to competition, similar to what the RBOCs already face.

Given that for three of the past four years SBC felt my neighborhood was not profitable enough to offer DSL, and I had to get it from Speakeasy, which offers service on top of SBC lines, I thought this kind of a ruling was a good idea – maybe there would finally be someone like Speakeasy who could offer me cable modem speeds and who had a clue about the internet (Comcast clearly does not – don’t get me started on that one).

Bill makes the case that while the intent of the court may have been good, the result could be crippling. I am not sure I agree with everything he writes – much of it is pretty rigid anti-regulation sentiment – but he makes some good points. Among them:

LinkedIn+Vertical Blogs = Interesting Microcommunities

(Updated) I think it'd be cool if you could join a network of folks who read the same blog(s). I've always maintained that any good publishing effort understands and reflects its community – that it is both a mirror to the community members, and a window into that community for…

(Updated)
I think it’d be cool if you could join a network of folks who read the same blog(s). I’ve always maintained that any good publishing effort understands and reflects its community – that it is both a mirror to the community members, and a window into that community for folks who are interested in joining or understanding that community. Conferences have always been a neat way for readers of a publication to meet each other, for example. Foo Camp was one of the first I’ve been to where “blog ecologies” ended up meeting FTF, and it was quite something to see how folks who’d been connected mainly by blogs ended up working together in real space.

So think if you could “see” all the other people who read this site each day (and who opt-in to be seen, of course) – and invite them into a LinkedIn like network if you wished to. I wonder if that’s in the cards for LinkedIn – to do vertical OEM stuff like that? Are there others working on stuff like this?
(Thanks for the meme, Matt…)

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RSS Marches On…Net-based Aggregators

I keep meaning to do this…I've noticed a bunch of net-based aggregators out there, I'd be curious if anyone uses them. One of the earliest is Bloglines, founded by the same fellow behind eGroups. There's also a new one over at Feedster call myFeedster. And there's FastBuzz. And of course…

I keep meaning to do this…I’ve noticed a bunch of net-based aggregators out there, I’d be curious if anyone uses them. One of the earliest is Bloglines, founded by the same fellow behind eGroups. There’s also a new one over at Feedster call myFeedster. And there’s FastBuzz. And of course the one Meg’s working on, Kinja (still in stealth).

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The Salesforce IPO

So Marc's company will go first – the first of the companies on everyone's list of '04 IPOs to drop an S-1 at the SEC's doorstep. Here's the Merc's story on it……

So Marc’s company will go first – the first of the companies on everyone’s list of ’04 IPOs to drop an S-1 at the SEC’s doorstep. Here’s the Merc’s story on it…

How the Information Age = The Dark Ages

This meme has popped up a lot over the past decade: We're increasingly putting everything on digital media, which is great, but we're failing to archive it properly, and even when we do, we're not archiving the machines we need to read the data. A librarian at the British Library…

This meme has popped up a lot over the past decade: We’re increasingly putting everything on digital media, which is great, but we’re failing to archive it properly, and even when we do, we’re not archiving the machines we need to read the data. A librarian at the British Library makes this observation again in an article entitled The Great Digital Information Disappearing Act. (Thanks Gary for the link).

But we’re missing a larger point. It’s not just the data – the emails, MP3s, the websites. It’s also the data about the data – the traces of our digital culture that are kept in the database of intentions. That data – what people wanted, when they wanted it, how they asked for it, what they got, where they went – represents no less than the cultural artifacts of our day, equivalent to the pottery shards and stone tools left by our forbearers. Imagine yourself an archaeologist 2,000 years from now. Wouldn’t you like access to MSN or Google’s database of intentions, so as to plumb the traces of an ancient culture emerging into the digital era? But to date, most search companies are either not archiving that data, or if they are, they are keeping it to themselves for competitive or legal reasons. There are huge privacy issues, of course, in insuring this data becomes part of our digital history, but they are solvable. What we don’t have is the cultural will or foresight to realize what we’re creating.

In any case, this is one of the larger informing concepts I am working on for the book. Your comments and input greatly appreciated.

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A New Class of Google Results, With Interesting Implications

I just read a piece by Bambi Francisco (it's here, scroll down in the story) in which she claimed in passing that typing "ugg boots" into the main page at Google returned a subcategory of results – above the regular "pure" search results but distinct from the advertising – called…

I just read a piece by Bambi Francisco (it’s here, scroll down in the story) in which she claimed in passing that typing “ugg boots” into the main page at Google returned a subcategory of results – above the regular “pure” search results but distinct from the advertising – called “Product Search.” I tried it in quotes – “ugg boots” – and it didn’t work. Without quotes – ugg boots – it did. I then tried “digital camera” and there it was again.

What do you know – a new class of results (from Froogle, see my earlier post which missed this) nested rather uncomfortably between the sponsored results at the top and on the right side, and the pure results below. Also interesting was the fact that the results were in the same white background as the regular “pure” search results, though they are distinct in look and feel.

This is a very interesting development with significant implications. Many would claim this is a major step toward Yahoo or MSN-like approaches on the part of Google. Others would argue that Google in fact is simply trying to do its users a favor, inferring that most searchers who type such queries are in fact in shopping mode. But it is a clear departure from the conceit – and I use that term nuetrally – that Google has always maintained, which is that the results offered by their engine are free of human intervention – that they in fact reflect the results of a carefully tended algorithmic secret sauce applied to every site without bias. Clearly, humans have decided to put that category of Product Search on top of the main results. And certainly those results are not subject to the same secret sauce which sifts the rest of the unwashed web. (One can imagine merchants racing to game Froogle, now that Froogle results are showing up – in first position no less – on the firehose of traffic that is the main results page of Google). No matter how you slice it, this marks a departure.

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