Tuesday, November 18, 2003

K-Praxis - Pre-IPO Google Dossier: An Experiment in Opinion Mining

K-Praxis - Pre-IPO Google Dossier: An Experiment in Opinion Mining: "K-Praxis treated this as an opportunity to try out text analysis based opinion mining using a combination of text analysis software, methodologies and a text analysis processes-metrics to create what we call a 'Pre-IPO Google Dossier'. This is an attempt to understand a company, its technology and the buzz it has been able generate through and across the dot-com-boom and bust era. More than looking at just the business aspect of the company, this is an attempt to look at the whole phenomena of Google in a holistic and multi-dimensional manner...

Google's uniqueness also partly stems from a style that very often represents a spirit of non-commercialism yet in the end turns this perceived non-commercial attitude into a business proposition. Take for example Google Location Search, an attempt to provide a geo-spatial information retrieval solution rather than just providing a paid directory listing - something that eventually could lead to unleashing a huge revenue potential...

DeskBar. This could be seen as Google's bid to take control of users' desktop, getting Google inside the day-to-day workflow of a knowledge worker. There are suggestions that Google could create a "global command key" ('control, alt, G,') that could allow users to search through another application.

Since many businesses now depend on Google search and the decisions it makes affects the way people business, there are bound to be legal issues - as shown by the SearchKing Case that showed that a search engine has rights to present search results (invoking the First Amendment) in any order it wants. But the case underscores the importance of the issue in the minds of many Web site owners.

Another future search battle will be fought on the grounds of local search—Google will be fighting here for local advertising dollars from the Internet Yellow Pages vendors. Google has already started showing interest in this area launching a beta location based search through Google Labs.

"Problems with Google
Google users have reported a number of problems recently: some of them are related to the heavy influence of blogs in search ranking, problem with the behavior of the PageRank system, the vulnerability of Google to those webmasters who are ready to try every trick in the book to romp up the PageRank. Given these problems, Google's search supremacy and leadership is not guaranteed. There is a great deal of abuse going on of PageRank. People use link farms and redirect pages and identical mirror sites to improve page rank. "

"we need to think of relevance of a web page from a different perspectives other than PageRank. Wee may want to judge the relevance a page based on the user's personal choices or a particular field of knowledge/ domain /subject category the user is interested in. The new dimension of these combined efforts could be that the meaning and the philosophy of PageRank itself would get overhauled. Personalized and contextual computation of PageRank could mean you are able (at any given time) to compute three very important aspects of a web page a) its total rank across the web, b) its content -through content analysis c) its relative rank within a specific context.

Google as competition to Amazon & Ebay
"Companies like eBay too have started feeling the pinch of Google's expansion plans. E-Bay executives think that Google could prove to be a competitive threat. E-bay - a company adjudged by the analysts as one of the most successful dot.com survivors with an operating profit of $986 million in 2004 on sales of $2.9 billion and a company that spends a great deal of money advertising on Google itself - understands that Google could lure away advertisers from its site by directly placing ads on Google search or local targeted listings.
Amazon on the other hand, started its own foray into search recently with its new Book Search. Amazon unveiled this new book search service, including a keyword search that returns text snippets from pages of some 120, 000 books listed on Amazon.com. So it could be said that in a way Amazon too is looking to grab its own share of the search engine pie. Apparently it has started its own search company, iconically named: 'A9'. Just within few days of this announcement it came out that Google too was talking to publishers to introduce similar service."

Should always remain aware that: the other problems with Google is that not many of its features are either understood or used by the general searchers as many of their features remain in beta testing phase for long time - note that Google News is still in beta testing as are many other features.

Who owns Google? Some of the principle owners are: Larry E. Page 15%; Sergey Brin 15% ; Kleiner Perkins ; Caufield & Byers 10% ; Sequoia Capital 10% ;
Yahoo 2% ; David R. Cheriton (Professor at Stanford who lent some money to the founders when they started off) 1% ; Cisco Systems Inc 1%

Hypothesis: Google Brand and Google Business

Google's dominance in the search space is dependent on the perceived non-commercial attitude to Internet Information Retrieval that Google has exhibited. Non-commercial here means that they have tried to solve the problem of hyper linked web information retrieval without tampering (to a large extent) with results for plausible commercial gains. Even though it is unlikely that Google will lose its dominance in the search arena in short term, in the long run Google will have to play a balancing act between importance of unfiltered results and commercial gains.................

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