Stephen E Arnold will be delivering a talk about the challenges facing open source search vendors dependent on venture funding. The presentation reveals new information about the relentless commercialization that is changing open source search into mirrors of proprietary software companies.

The talk will be on Friday, November 8, 2013. A text version of the presentation will appear in the December Honk! newsletter. If you do not receive this free, registration required newsletter about search and content processing, you can sign up at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/honk/.

The ArnoldIT team’s work on “getting through Google’s bulletproof vest” has surged. On October 29, 2013, Stephen E Arnold and Constance Ard, a law librarian working as a project coordinator for ArnoldIT, addressed more than 450 law enforcement and intelligence professionals on this topic. The presentation focused on the use of little-known methods for digging substantive information out of Google’s indexes of different content “silos.” In the last year, Google has made it easier for users to see advertiser-sponsored information, not the nuts-and-bolts of information directly related to the user’s query. ArnoldIT provides specific methods to get through the “bulletproof vest” of personalization, paid content, search engine optimized content, and advertisements.

In addition to the presentations in Washington, DC, Mr. Arnold will be addressing an international law enforcement and intelligence group in Dubai in March 2013. If your organization wants to know how to get “beyond Google”, contact us at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.

Be sure to check out Mr. Arnold’s blog, Beyond Search. The editors are covering the “beyond Google” topic by profiling other online resources that can answer professional questions and important developments in search and processing. You can subscribe to a feed of the stories. At this time, the archive of Beyond Search contains more than 10,000 articles, provides one-click access to the more than 60 interviews with search and analytics experts, and straight talk about the weaknesses of many online and analytics systems. You can tap into the Beyond Search information pool at arnoldit.com/wordpress.

Finally, last month we began posting drafts of profiles of search, content processing, and analytics vendors. So far we have profiled Convera, Delphes, and Entopia. Coincident with Mr. Arnold’s lecture at the search conference in Washington, DC, he will post a profile of Dieselpoint, a Chicago, Illinois vendor with a very low profile. After the Dieselpoint profile, the Xenky site will post a profile of the Siderean Seamark semantic system. One client of ArnoldIT’s business consulting services said, “It appears to me that most vendors are indistinguishable.” Read the profiles. Each is a case study that suggests a number of lessons about search and content processing. When the profiles project is complete, there will be information about more than 50 vendors. I anticipate that the mid tier consulting firms will suck down the information, “improve” it, and roll out numerous, over-priced analyses. Save your money. Read the Xenky cases.

Stephen E Arnold, Updated November 1, 2013