Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Google and the Limits of Love

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I like Google.

I never liked Microsoft. Windows has never given me much trouble, but it is nothing elegant. MSWord I use every day, and detest – clunky, and filled with bells & whistles I will never use. (Alas, I pine in vain for the long lost simplicity of WordStar.)

I never liked Apple. I’m sure their stuff works great, but Mac fans are so preachy, and the 1960s moderne styling doesn’t move me. Anyway I don’t want Steve Jobs deciding what apps I can run.

I like Google. What’s not to like? Its free! The front page and search results are clean, not tarted up. The ads don’t waste my machine’s bandwidth, or mine. The search results are pretty good. They haven’t beaten SEO spam yet, but has Bing?

My other blog uses Blogger, and though I have separate hosting, Blogger itself is also free, and for my minimalist approach to froufrou it gives me all the tools I need, with only fairly rare glitches.

But when the comment registration button on a blog asked me to join Google Friend, I passed up the opportunity to be closer friends with Google. I have Chrome, but still use Firefox as my default browser. As much as I dislike MSWord, I’m not inclined to switch to Google Docs.

I like Google, but I’m not so in love that I want to become dependent on them.

We Resemble That Remark!

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

We review hundreds of articles every month for TecTrends, and occasionally one strikes close to home. That happened with a recent piece by James Temple for the online San Francisco Chronicle, ‘Personalization moves into the screening spotlight.’

Search is not enough. For all the improvements in the algorithms used by Google and other search engines, robots still have their limits. Savvy online researchers, reports Temple, are finding out that they still need good old fashioned human intelligence to separate the gold from the dross online.

This is no news to us. At Information Sources we have two decades of experience in guiding our customers through the tech industry wilderness to the information they are seeking. We filter out the press releases and speculation, and identify the articles that will tell you where the action is.

TecTrends Reporters summarize this content and – just as important – give you complete cross reference keywords for industry verticals, companies, and products.

These keywords and phrases also go into a proprietary heirarchical thesaurus. As of this year the TecTrends thesaurus provides a relationship taxonomy stocked with over 52,000 individual records.

So we were pleased to come across Mr. Temple’s little nugget of information gold. If you are getting lost in the information wilderness, let us be your guide.

We read the tech press because you don’t have time.