Is desktop search over?

In his remarkably detailed review of Windows Vista, Paul Thurrott wrote:

One of the most impressive features in Windows Vista ... is instant search.

Anyone who's struggled with the lousy search functionality in Windows XP or previous Windows versions will be happy to hear that the Vista version is fantastic, delivering near-instantaneous search results while providing the types of advanced features that power users will simply drool over.

Throughout Windows Vista, you will see various search points, all of which are context sensitive.

[For example,] in the right side of the Start Menu ... you can search your ... documents and other data files. As you type a search query in the windows search box, search results begin appearing immediately. The speed at which this happens is pretty impressive ... You can [also] search for applications, ... IE Favorites, email, and other items directly from the Start Menu.

The opportunity for third party desktop search applications like Google Desktop Search only existed because Windows XP desktop search was so pitifully slow.

As I said before, the moment Microsoft corrects this flaw, this opportunity will evaporate, as will the numerous also-ran desktop search apps. It appears Microsoft finally has fixed desktop search in Windows.

Paul's review goes on to say that "Microsoft will work to make instant search more pervasive in [the] future". Integration of search into Windows has long been expected as part of the search war. From a NYT article:

Internet search, according to Microsoft, will increasingly become seamlessly integrated into the Windows desktop operating system, Office productivity software, cellphones powered by Windows, and Xbox video games.

"Search will not be a destination, but it will become a utility" that is more and more "woven into the fabric of all kinds of computing experiences," said Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services division.

And, Bill Gates said something similar over two years ago:

Search is a very pervasive thing. You want to search the Web, you want to search your corporate network, you want to search your local machine, and sometimes you want search to work against multiples of those things.

Now that Microsoft has fixed desktop search, they will integrate search throughout Windows and Windows applications. The easiest and most obvious option for searching will be the search box sitting right in front of you. That box will be powered not by Google or Yahoo, but by Microsoft.

See also my earlier post, "Using the desktop to improve search", where I looked at how several Microsoft Research projects might be used to improve search.

[Paul Thurrott's review found via Joel Spolsky]

Update: Two months later, Mary Jo Foley writes:

One analyst's survey doesn't make a trend. But a Global Equities research analyst said this week that he found "many Vista owners that once used Google's desktop search feature have switched to Microsoft's" desktop search which is built into Windows Vista.

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Top Geeking with Greg in 2006

The posts with the most unique views on this weblog in 2006 were:

1. In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power
   Highlighted notes that Google accidentally left in a PowerPoint presentation. 50k unique views.
2. A chance to play with big data
   Discussed a release of search log data from AOL Research. 7.5k uniques.
3. Google's BigTable
   Described a talk by Google on their Bigtable database. 7k uniques. I am a little surprised this is still so popular now that the Bigtable paper has been published.
4. Lowered uptime expectations?
   Bemoans the unreliability of websites. 5k uniques, mostly because it was featured on Reddit.
5. Kill Google, Vol. 3
   A piece describing the strategy I would use to attack Google if I were at Microsoft. 5k uniques.

This weblog had 265k unique visits overall in 2006. 83k of those were through Google. The other search engines did not appear in the top five referrers, but Bloglines and Reddit do.

Top search terms that got people to this weblog were "bigtable", "2006 predictions", "geeking with greg", "greg linden", and "aol search data".

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Google makes 20 cents per search?

Google apparently now makes $0.20 per search from advertising revenue, according to Caris & Co. analyst Tim Boyd as quoted in the BusinessWeek article, "Why Yahoo's Panama Won't Be Enough".

Using data on total search queries, released by comScore, Caris & Co. analyst Tim Boyd estimates that Yahoo made on average between 10 cents and 11 cents per search in 2006, bringing in a total of $1.61 billion for the first nine months of the year.

Google, meanwhile, makes between 19 cents and 21 cents per search. As a result, it made an estimated $4.99 billion during the same period.

Quite an increase over the dime per search of two years ago.

The BusinessWeek article also has some interesting tidbits on Yahoo's Panama, the difficulty of monetizing non-search page views, and the potential of behavioral targeted advertising to improve targeting on non-search page views.

On the topic of early efforts at advertising targeted to past behavior, Barry Schwartz's post, "How Microsoft's Behavioral Targeting Works" at Search Engine Land has a nice excerpt from a recent WSJ article on how Microsoft's adCenter does coarse-grained behavioral targeting.

See also my previous posts, "Microsoft adLab and targeted ads", "Yahoo testing ads targeted to behavior", " AdSense will not do behavioral targeting?", and "Is personalized advertising evil?".

[BW article found via Don Dodge]

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Defining geek

I kind of like this weblog post, "Geek vs. Nerd vs. Dork", and their description of geeks and geeking.

[Found on Valleywag]

Update: See also the Wikipedia entry on "geek".

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Five things about me

I have to say, this latest meme strikes me as an unpleasantly narcissistic version of a chain letter. But, I have been "tagged" by three people now -- Mark Fletcher, Rich Skrenta, and Jeremy Zawodny -- so I will play along.

Here are five things that you probably do not know about me:

I was a lifeguard at Rinconada Pool in Palo Alto when I was a teenager. No, not very geeky, but it was a long time ago. I assure you that any coolness I once had is now gone.

I occasionally brew beer, but I am not very good at it. I once tried to brew a batch of Russian Imperial Stout, a very heavy beer, and bottled too early. 44 of 50 bottles exploded with enough force to embed shards of glass in a nearby wall.

As an undergrad, I had an odd double major in Computer Science and Political Science. Geeking out on political economy and game theory is great, but there is precious little overlap between that and computers, so I spent most of college with my nose buried in books.

I used to mess around with artificial life. It was more fun than useful, but I did help develop two simulations that were used in undergrad classrooms, the LEE Project and an iterated prisoner's dilemma simulation (PDF).

When I was a grad student, I got a black lab and named her Pavlova. If you think that is funny, you, like me, probably are a geek.

And now, I am supposed to share the love. How about Andrej Gregov, Steve Yegge, Brian Dennis, Scott Gatz, and John Battelle? You folks want to play?

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Findory in the UK Guardian

Findory was listed as one of the "The new 100 most useful sites" in an article in the UK Guardian today.

More information can be found on the Findory Press page.

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Talk on eBay architecture

Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett gave a talk on scaling eBay, "The eBay Architecture", at SD Forum 2006. The slides are available (PDF).

The parallels with Amazon are remarkable. Like Amazon, eBay started with a two-tiered architecture. Like Amazon, they split the website into a cluster in the late 1990's, followed soon after by partitioning the databases.

Like Amazon, they soon encountered poor performance and difficulty compiling their massive, monolithic binary (150M for eBay, Randy and Dan say). Like Amazon, they started a major rewrite of their monolithic binary around 2001, eventually building a services architecture on top of partitioned databases.

They even built their own search engine because "no off-the-shelf search engine met [their] needs." Amazon did that as well.

It is interesting that their new architecture basically gives up on transactional databases. They say eBay has "absolutely no client side transactions", "no distributed transactions", and "auto-commit for [the] vast majority of DB writes". Instead, they apparently use "careful ordering of DB operations". It sounds like mistakes happen in this system, because they mention running "asynchronous recovery events" and "reconciliation batch" jobs, which, I assume, means asynchronous processes run over the database repairing inconsistencies.

In all, a very interesting talk for anyone who is working or wants to work on big websites and big data. As Tim Bray said, "This ought to be required reading for everyone in this business whose title contains the words 'Web' or 'Architect'."

See also Dan Pritchett's weblog post, "You Scaled Your What?", where he mentions his talk and these slides at the end.

See also some other interesting commentary ([1] [2] [3] [4]) on this talk.

For more on the early work I did scaling Amazon's systems, see my older post, "Early Amazon: Splitting the website". If you liked that, you might also like the rest of my Early Amazon series.

For more on what big companies like eBay, Amazon, and Google need and are not getting from databases, see my previous posts, "C-store and Google BigTable" and "I want a big, virtual database".

[Slides found via Rich Skrenta]

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