Attempts to topple Google continue. Microsoft are coming in with Bing (the name has already been criticised). Why do they bother, we ask? I really want to use other search engines, as I never like monopolies, but whenever I try Live Search or Exalead or Yahoo or Ask it always ends up, if not in tears, then a sad retreat to Google. It’s not that I don’t like Google, it’s just I wish somebody would give us a half decent alternative. Evidently, search is hard to do well.
Anyway, I have two thoughts. Firstly is that no-one is naive enough to think that Bing can topple Google, at least not in the short or medium term. But at the moment MS only get about 8% of the search market, and even if they can increase that up to, say, 16%, that’ll still double their income from selling search associated advertising, and that’s a pretty damned big market; the $100 million they’ve allegedy put aside for marketing Bing might not look like such a large amount once the new income starts rolling in.
Secondly, it appears they’re not fighting Google on the “who’s got the best algorithm” front. Google have, and they’ve got the know-how and momentum to keep it there. Rather they’re using semantic search through their aquisition of Powersoft a while ago and will target users after specific, query based information in the world of shopping, travel, health and locating local businesses. This could work, as Bing only has to be better than Google in one area to begin with. If, say, you decide that Bing is more helpful when trying online shopping than Google Product Search, then you’ll come back to Bing time and time again and slowly, maybe, after time you’ll start to use Bing for other queries, even if it’s only nearly as good as Google. New search engines going head to head against Google tend to lose, badly. I guess that’s why Microsoft are encouraging people to use Bing for specific types of query first, rather than just as a replacement of Google as your general search engine.
Well, we’ll see how it goes. I hope they do OK. I don’t really care who it is, but I’d like to see a choice to Google. Actually talking of search engines, has anyone tried Wolfram|Alpha? Nothing if not ambitious… Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.
Interesting article which features homeopathic practitioners arguing that old chestnut about non-trad medicines not be testable using normal RCT like methodology, what because they are somehow outside the placebo continuum? I fully agree that conventional allopathic medicine is indeed not all based on evidence but that striving to make it so should be the aim, not giving up and saying oh well okay then let’s just support anything that makes people feel better. Or worse fund it on the NHS. Possible public spending cuts may bring about the cutting of courses of alt medicine and not because of scientific protest but if the effect is the same I feel better. Much worse is the MHRA ‘licensing’ herbal medicines. As a child my father offered arnica cream for bruises and I don’t think I thought much of it. As an adult however I really don’t think regulating untested treatments actually makes it any easier for people to decide what medicines they should use and what is horrid pharma and what is a quack. Cynicism about medicines and meddling with our bodies is a result of the muddying of such waters. People see cynicism about alt medicines then as being closed minded and dismissive of people’s feelings. Dabbling in whatever works for you is indeed a practising of free will but in a state funded health care system individual whim surely has to take second place to collective rationing based on what works. Although is there not always a place for trying to at least investigate whether something works. At the London book launch of Thinking about almost everything the audience was reminded of the two cultures divide and I can’t feel like sharing CP Snow’s pessimism about the ignorance and lack of interest in science and objectivity as if not listening to someone’s feelings and emotions means you are cold and logical and somehow less human. Interdisciplinary thought is useful but losing boundaries as in the new primary school curriculum is something that will lead to more warm fuzzy postmodern eclecticism and no grasp of what was before.
If you’re like me you would have grown up naively believing that medical charities and patients groups are basically the good guys. They can be trusted to speak clearly and with authority because they represent the best interests of the patients and are not influenced by such grubby considerations as turning a profit, increasing market share, or anything of that ilk. You would have been rather worried when you found out that drug companies often sponsor charities (e.g. here), using such influence to help them get their products adopted, but you tried to retain faith in the notion of the good guys. Now, however, it appears to have come full circle and charities are sponsoring drug companies. The FT reports that:
A British cancer charity is to fund clinical trials of a drug owned by GlaxoSmithKline in a pioneering programme to develop promising experimental medicines that are neglected because of limited corporate funding. Cancer Research Technology, the commercial arm of Cancer Research UK, will shortly begin tests in patients of GSK’s 1070916A, and retain a share of the profits if the drug is successfully launched.
Yes, that’s right, “retain a share of the profits”. Just because they’re a patient group or a medical charity doesn’t mean they have any more moral authority than anyone else. There is no particular reason why they can’t comment on proposed guidance or breaking news stories etc., but as with any other individual or group they have to make clear what their conflicts of interests are.
*Sigh.* Was it easier in the old days? Were the good guys gooder then, and the bad guys badder? As in the words of Mr Adams, “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were REAL men, women were REAL women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small furry creatures from Aplha Centauri.”
Wolfram Alpha is heading up the Twitter trending charts (yes I’m hooked now too) but I wish we had a UK version as I searched for the number of dietiticians (a query on LIS-MEDICAL) and found US figures. The interesting thing about it is that it is not a search engine but a computational knowledge engine, using a private database of public facts, very intriguing.
The Atlantic has an interesting article railing against comparative effectiveness studies in Obama’s much anticipated healthcare reforms. I agree that IT doesn’t always free up time and public health measures may not free up money but are these the purposes for which they were set up? Perhaps the aims and objectives of such measures just need to be redefined as more realistic outcome measures might bring about more manageable projects.
Two tHI (guys, how are we abbreviating this blog’s name?) bloggers attended the CILIP in London event this past Tuesday evening, at the Sekforde Arms, where they are always held. It was my first one and it was well worth it.
Franklyn Tancock, Plant Collections Curator, talked about his long involvement with cataloguing plants for the National Trust. Now they have invested thousands (in donations from Yorkshire and Clydesdale Banks) in the project. It includes a shiny new Oracle and Microsoft Java based database that will house records of every plant in 80 of their gardens by 2011. He also spoke about how GPS technology has revolutionised the creation of garden surveys to aid the planning of gardens and location of plants. It all sounds like great fun-being out in the field, pinging plants with a GPS handheld to accession them, getting a bit of vitamin D.
Just the realisation the plants are catalogued was a delightful and interesting one.
Unfortunately for those who enjoy Cilip in London’s *free* and *catered* monthly sessions, they will be fewer and less frequent in the future, which is a shame. Apparently it is credit crunch-related. Hanna had a good idea about how they could make it affordable. Guess which idea was hers, in the poll.
Who doesn’t like a little qualitative research, especially when it relates to CILIP, a professional organisation for information folk in the UK that is currently on the precipice of becoming irrelevant. New graduates and young professionals, are indeed a tiny group, or perhaps they just never attend events and conferences.
So perhaps this is an olive branch-PARN is conducting a survey on how you would like to communicate with CILIP and what your experience of social networks is. It is open to everyone, not just CILIP members (thankfully), until the end of July.
The Guardian invites you to take a look at Windows 7, with a series of screenshots and brief comments. To anyone who has used Vista it all looks very familiar, though with the promised added functionality, speed and stability (and less of a memory hog). The screenshots appear to confirm the general argument that Windows 7 (with its “numerous new desktop backgrounds, including six specifically for the UK” – ooooh) is what Vista should have been. People who get into the nitty gritty of operating systems seem to like it too (e.g. here) so perhaps there is hope for MS that they can come out of this recession looking OK (unless we all simply give up with operating systems and just use browsers instead, though their share of the market there is pretty healthy too).
Joe Collier on BMJ blogs recommends some manoeuvres he’s been following for avoiding Mexican flu, including not travelling east on the Picadilly line. While the Picadilly line advice might seem rather left-field (I believe it’s a baseball analogy) to some, the advice is on the whole pretty common sense stuff. An interesting angle however is presented by one of the comments on the post that suggests that this might be a good time to get said flu, while it’s not particularly virulent (remember that the 1918 flu [which, and I don't want to worry you, apparently killed around 2.5% of the world's population!] started off mild then returned the following winter with a vengeance). Perhaps we should follow our parents and grand-parents examples of “measles parties” wherein they took their poor little kiddies along to an infected friend’s house so that they too would get infected and so get over it sooner rather than later. So find someone coughing and looking rough, and give them a nice big hug…
If you’re feeling a little down about the flu, then perhaps a game will cheer you up. Sneeze is an online game wherein you’re a vindictive person with a virus and you have to try and get your virus spread by choosing when and where to sneeze. It’s great fun, particularly when you’re infecting the your fellow commuters at the railway station… I’ll have to try it for real tomorrow morning.
As previously reported on this blog – NHS Evidence has now gone live. So what do people think so far? Ben Toth likes it. Fade have put together a quick search guide. Otherwise blog coverage tends to just be announcements that it has gone live with some idea of what you might find if you follow the link.
The giant blue eye will take some getting used to. I await the blue coconut ring liquorice allsort promotional items with impatience.
Search itself is fast and, on early testing, provides good results. Results for a search on a health management topic were excellent with an impressive selection of relevant fulltext source documents retrieved (With SCIE Online to the fore) . The filters / navigators are a good idea but will need careful examination to be clear on how they work.
Output options are currently limited but this is in line with the style of searching NHS Evidence is set up to support ie immediate satisfaction. Worth noting is the fact that all search terms and settings are present in the URL returned post search and it is infact this that is shared if you try and email results.
A good development would be inclusion of search terms in the page title element (a well known search engine does this). This would constitute a simple visible history for searchers.
The links through to the rebadged Health Information Resources (AKA the National Library for Health) are a little clumsy in terms of the way they manage the Athens journey. The link for Athens login, for example, places the user at the registration form with a small section of text for those already registered. These flows will definitely be improved as the site develops.
A useful future development would be some background thesaurus mapping (similar to the complexity hidden by a simple search in PubMed). This would be particularly useful if it could support disambiguation to prevent some of the pitfalls of keyword based searching.
One reviewer on GlassDoor.com called working for the NHS “the death of ambition.” A UK Finance Manager at Microsoft said “Microsoft is a great place to work until you work there”.
GlassDoor has a “give to get” model – information on salaries and job reviews is free, but you must write a review before you have full access to the details of other anonymous reviews. If you work for a small organisation, they say you can maintain anonymity by not divulging your location or job title.
This reminds me of a discussion we had about a site Hanna mentioned called Roll on Friday that discusses City of London law firms in terms of business culture and salaries.
This is vital knowledge for any job seeker, and I hope GlassDoor does not just become a gripe session either, as some of the reviews suggest it could become. Reviews do tend to be polarised in general-or else why would a person be motivated to post a review? They post because they either loved it or hated it. (TripAdvisor is a case in point.) Roll on Friday avoids this by providing anonymous summaries from an independent group.
Any ideas on how to avoid gripe sessions in web 2.0 type reviews?
