As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

This should not be a shock to anyone, and I hinted to this danger in my blog post about the acquisition:

Let us not hope that the Linux, AIX and Solaris versions will be discontinued. I don’t expect that to happen in the short term, as the press release clearly states that they will be supported…

I guessed back then that Linux support would continue for another five years, but it turned out to be less than two While it is an expected and understandable, I think we all hoped that the press release following the acquisition hinted for a new, more open policy from the software giant, but that turned out to be too optimistic. But existing customers are not left completely alone; Olstad continues:

We will support ESP 5.3—the cross-platform search core in the 2010 products—for 10 years as per our standard support policy (5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support).  Non-Windows customers on ESP 5.3 can continue running their core on Linux and UNIX and add Windows-only innovations or cloud-based services by using a mixed-platform architecture.

Many search consultant with experience from FAST ESP have experienced that the product is more capable under Linux than under Windows when you start pushing the boundaries. ESP is also easier to manage on a Linux platform due to SSH and friends. But that is not the major selling point anyway.

What this will mean for the existing and potential future customers is hard to predict. Obviously some organizations, especially smaller ones, demand Linux only in their data centers – these will start looking for another vendor.  Some of the bigger companies already have mixed environments and will easily be able to migrate, and may be happy.

Last but not least, the hint of cloud-support from the blog post opens another opportunity for existing customers running on Linux: Outsource the whole search hosting to Microsoft and don’t worry about the servers or OS at all. This may be the best option for many? Expect to see more references to hosted search going forward!

I could have compiled the source from scratch, but a quick search gave this page from Gdgt providing a VMWare image of a complete install of Chrome OS. So I created a new virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” as OS type and poited it to the .vmdk disk image. See Figure 1 for how that looks.

Figure 1: VMWare Fusion with Chrome OS VM

After powering on the VM, it virtually took only 8 seconds for it to boot into the login screen. Here you fill in a valid Google login, e.g. a GMail address:

Then wait another 9 seconds for the Chrome browser to show up, already logged in to your GMail account. Nice. Everything in Chrome OS are web apps, and the Chrome browser shows App tabs differently than normal web page tabs. This is a nice and clean idea. Signing in to an OS with a web-based user name and password feels strange, but hey, it just works! And if you’re without internet connection, you can still sign in with an account that you’ve used before!

From here, browsing works like normal. You can create tabs, windows, switch between windows with Alt-TAB etc. In the upper righthand corner are some icons which provides you with some menus for battery status, WiFi and network connection and a general menu with access to options etc.

I was unable to test WiFi since my VMWare only provides ethernet to the local OS. I also tried to start the leftmost tab which is supposed to be a quick-launch for Web Apps, but it requires a <user>@google.com account which I don’t have, so I don’t know how to do that:

Glitches

This being an early pre-release of the OS one year before the launch of the first public version, no wonder there are some way to go still. Here are some of the minor issues I found

1. Not possible to change locale in login screen. U.S. keyboard layout is default., which means Norwegians need to search for the @ key and others.
2. Loggin in to a “Google Apps for Domains” account, auto-login to mail and calendar gets lost.
3. The quick-launch tab to the left does not let me login with a GMail account…
4. The whole thing just freezes sometimes Could be due to VMWare?

Read more

Here are a few articles I found useful

• GDGT: Download Google Chrome OS
• Live Blog: The Google Chrome OS Press Event
• PCWorld: Google Chrome OS: Visual Tour

So why leave Apple’s iTunes out in the cold? This is of course part of a battle of online digital music. Although some were guessing that Google were planning its own music service, partnering up with and helping the most innovative services out there may be a just as efficient move, if they manage to get people used to search for music in Google instead of through iTunes. Yes, some of these services let you purchase music as well as listen online.

I could not find any info on when this service is expected to Norway, if ever. I guess that would be with other partners since Rhapsody for one is U.S. only But we surely welcome all competition in this space, as the industry gets used to better models and cheaper music for us consumers.

That would come as no surpise to us who have followed Lucene for some time. And perhaps for intelligence in particular, they do not want to be too heavily dependent upon closed source code. In their press release, In-Q-Tel they say that they want to secure advanced access to Lucene/Solr technology, and state that Lucene/Solr is one of the fastest growing search solutions over the last three years.

This is good news for all users of Lucene/Solr search, also in Norway where Cominvent is Lucid Imagination’s partner. It gives even more credibility to open source search, and makes this platform grow even faster. Time for Norwegian intelligence to follow?

The old kvasir was one of the most used web searches in Norway, but they never really managed to beat Google in popularity, so far. So what’s new in the new version of their search, and has this anything to do with “search 3.0″?

The first page is changed to a fancy logo and single search box, as is mandatory these days. The ide about the result page is that it is segmented into displaying results from different sources:

• Companies (kind of yellow-page results with not only name but keyword hits as well)
• Ordinary web results (From Google)
• Images
• Topics
• Encyclopedia (Store Norske)
• News
• Twitter
• Sponsored links (ads)

A quick test show that this is nowhere near the revolutionary “search 3.0″ as they claim. A search for my own company “Cominvent” shows no results other than web results. Not very 3.0-ish… The same search at Finn.no shows contact information as well as a map to my company.

How about a search for “microsoft fast”? This brings up a totally unrelated company on top, then web hits and some images. But where are the news stories about the Microsoft/FAST merger last year? I had to click “news search” tab to get to those results, why?

Finally, let’s try a search for “kakkerlakker” (cokroaches in Norwegian). It brings be a lot of company hits for insect fighting companies, but no encyclopedia hit. But they have a “did you mean kakerlakker” – ah, I mis-spelled it. Clicking the spell correction, brings up a better result, and that is good.

All in all, searching multiple sources is good, but it is neither new not “search 3.0″. Sesam/finn has been doing this for years, and they just gave up competing on the web search arena. Sorry, Kvasir. It takes more to call something “search 3.0″.

The recent editions has added features which previously were only found in commercial offerings, such as

• Automatic replication for large installations with distributed search
• Java-API (SolrJ)
• Conversion of Office-documents
• Full faceted search
• Advanced tokenization, highlighting and stemming

Apache Solr is being adopted more widely, and some companies even start replacing their expensive commercial engine with Solr with good results. In that way they can spend less on licenses and more on content quality and tuning.

Feeling ready to try Solr? Contact us for a talk, or download it yourself and try the tutorial. Here’s a short video introducing you to the basics:

I will soon write about how to obtain professional support for Apache Solr.

This is indeed one piece of a strange person. When being told that “the floor is yours”, he knelt down on the floor repeating “the floor is mine!”, and later in the show he dressed in black, comparing the Emacs text editor to a religion.

At the end of the lecture, that was indeed the impression I got, that for mr. Stallman, this is indeed all about “religion” and ideology, more than anything else. He is living in his own little ideal, ideological bubble, hoping that all big coroporations will go away and that everyone will be able to copy everything to everyone, and that nobody should be allowed to make money on software licenses.

Stallman’s problem is not that he advocates free software and the benefits of the whole movement, but that he is so completely ignorant of the real world around him – not willing to see that there are other goals in this world than fulfilling his own four degrees of (complete) freedom of use and redistribution when it comes to software (and other works).

Now a few words about the topic of his speech – Copyright. Stallman has designed his own copyright laws which he’d like the world to adopt. Basically what he suggests is a division of copyright into three: A) All software should be free (as in free speech), as should all school textbooks and all encyclopedias and other fact books. B) Works that express someone’s thought or in other ways must be kept as is, should be covered by a limited copyright, say 10 years, and C) works of art should be protected in a limited way – it should be always be allowed to share them with others (copy), and even use fragments of other’s art in your own works.

All this is good – international copyright laws could need a makeover, and limited period of protection. Where I no longer follow is when mr. Stallman talks about copying or “sharing” of e.g. music or movies – he completely lacks respect for legal agreements or law, in encouraging the breaking of such agreements in order to “be kind” and share with your friends. A normal grown-up intellectual human being would not face hundreds of students encouraging such crime, and at the same time demanding to be taken seriously by the record labels, commercial software houses, lawyers and others. Which is unfortunate, because he would be sooo much a better advocat for free and open software if he would not live in his bubble pretending the world was all as he wished. It is ok to encourage people to choose, use and even write free software. But to encourage people to break the law by infringing copyright and license laws, is not the way to go.

Free and Open Source software is a super way to make software. And it can meet the competition fine without turning to legal disobedience, hatred against others etc. Let people choose FREEly what software to use, and spend your time writing excellent Free software which is better than the alternatives, and create an ecosystem of open and closed source which works together to create better and cheaper software for tomorrow!

Attivio

Boston based Attivio (www.attivio.com) is founded by ex-FAST key people with Ali Riaz in the driver’s seat, and promises to bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Search and traditional Databases/Information Warehouses.

Being less than two years old, the new company is already making headlines, and time (and customers) will reveal how much is pure product strenght and how much is the usual marketing blabla.

Many with DB background miss the ability to do real JOINs with traditional enterprise search engines, where typically DB tables need to be de-normalized and flattened before being indexed. For most use-cases that doesn’t cause a big problem, but for some applications the amount of redundancy in the engine just grows too big, and/or the flexibility of doing varied queries along other axis than the index was designed for, gets complicated or impossible.

The problem has been that a runtime JOIN is very costly – where RDBMS’s can spend minutes or hours computing a huge JOIN query, you expect from an Enterprise Search Engine that the result be ready in milliseconds. So if Oracle have not succeeded in combining unstructured search with large structured queries in an efficient way, how can a small startup do it? Or can they?

We’ll follow-up once the product, called Active Intelligence Engine^TM (AIE) has been prooven a bit more in the market.

And IF Attivio’s claims are correct, then both Oracle and Microsoft/FAST really have something to fear, because this is something the information retrieval world have been waiting for a loong time!

The site offers to register an id under one of the two domains myid.no or minopenid.no, for free. MinOpenID.no also aims to be a place for general information about OpenID, such as useful articles, HOWTOs and news.

As a backend provider we have chosen JanRain, the people behind the worlds most popular OpenID provider, myopenid.com. We’re a co-branded affiliate. This means that the feature set and security is state-of-the-art.

We intend to give full freedom to our users. We will write articles about how to setup delegation for their own domain, and although we do not provide delegation of the myid.no ID to another provider (myopenid.com does not allow), we might setup that as well one day.

Visit the site and see for yourself. We’re open for feedback.