Vertical Shopping Search as a Service

Here's an interesting news item about google's commerce search, searching in a SaaS model for shopping verticals. This is a serious threat to the Endeca's, Omnitures and FASTs of the world.

More intent -- will Yahoo! catch up with this?

Interesting overview of new features.

The best thing since sliced bread?

Read a seemingly very biased article about Sphinx.

The author seems to resent the Apache Foundation in general and Lucene/Solr and Java in particular, so whatever else he says I will take with a grain of salt. But for people who think that text search as supported by RDBs is the only search you need it might open some eyes ..

Cloud computing and Ford

This article

Cloud is Bigger Than the Internet - II
— Finally coming to grips with cloud means coming to grips with its high-level potential. This thing is bigger than the Internet, probably not bigger with fire, but maybe on a par with electricity.

surmises we have no "father or mother of cloud computing".

Depending a bit on how you define Cloud Computing, one might argue that we do have one: Jeff Bezos. People tell me he pushed hard on the project to make Amazon's infrastructure available as a service, which made Cloud Computing available to everyone with a credit card.

Sure Cloud Computing is built on virtualization and sure it uses technology honed during the waves around grid computing, utility computing, all the way back to "time sharing" on Mainframes. But all of that relates to Amazon Web Services as Arpa/Internet relates to the World Wide Web.

Of course Werner Vogels would be the person who made AWS happen technically, and I'm sure he didn't do it alone, so maybe pinpointing an exact person isn't so fruitful.

I do think that Jeff Bezos/Werner Vogels/Amazon are to Cloud Computing what Ford (Motor Company) was to the car industry.

Interesting company that performs language engineering for Enterprise Search in Dutch

I just discovered Gridline, a Dutch company that performs the type of language engineering for Enterprise Search we have been doing at Openwater for the last 2.5 years.

Too bad their website is in Dutch. Google Translate actually does a decent job of translating their home page.

Yet another proof point on how important language, and specifically the language of a community, is for Search.

First Woman is Dutch, two in total, both from Delft

Fun to discover the Dutch women among the Anita Borg Scholars. UK and Russia have more of them, though.

Mandatory Reading On Search Results Ranking

By far the most informative article I've ever read about how Google ranks its results:

Official Google Blog: Technologies behind Google ranking