Andy's Mind

Following my last post a friend told me that switching to Microsoft’s Live Search was not the best idea and I should research other options. So I did, looking specifically for sites that are new and different (because, after all, it is quite possible that in the Google’s shadow a novel and better idea for retrieving information from the Web could be emerging yet unnoticed).

Of the sites I’ve found I reviewed the following: Cuil, Powerset, Clusty, Jux2 and Viewzi.

Of those I like Clusty and Viewzi most.

Powerset is merely an interface to Wikipedia, which is, I think, rather pointless as Wikipedia has a great interface already.

Jux2 simply combines results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search in one Google-ish list of results. It has one feature that can be handy for SEO types – it displays rank of each of the results in each of the original engines. But, I think, there are many SEO tools that do it much better than Jux2 and other than this it is unimpressive. Thumbs down on this one, too.

Cuil is interesting, however the results are ordered in a way I don’t get. How Cuil ranks the results (determines what is important and what is not) is clearly different from other engines, which is a big plus (shows some innovative thinking). I’m not sure, though, I like the effect, because what was ranked best was not what I’d describe as best. On the other hand on my test searches Cuil did return a few pages no other engine did, which is another advantage. This means I’ll keep Cuil in my Firefox search box for those extensive searches when I really want to unearth any piece of info on a given topic that I can lay my eyes on.

Clusty on the other hand tries to organize the results in groups it calls clusters. On some of my test searches they were helpful, on some they were meaningless, but I think they are a good idea overall. The tab with domains is a nice way to see at a glance where there are many sites about a given topic, which is also nice.

Clusty is merely organizing results from other search engines, but it offers different profiled searches – searches for jobs, blogs, images etc. – using different source engines, which makes results interesting. Good starting point, I’d say, when looking for something on the web – especially if you don’t want to see it through Google’s goggles (Google is not included as one of the source engines).

Last of the engines I reviewed today – Viewzi – is different only by its user interface. While it is largely Flash powered (which is a drawback) it is kind of cool. It offers different graphical views for presenting the results and really I like the Web Screenshot view. It allows you to see the pages found without opening them in other windows or tabs, which makes it much much easier to decide at a glance whether a given page is worth a visit or not. Nice for lazy evening searches. 🙂

Last but not least there is our own little experiment at searching – the Sprinters Search. While not as useful as the sites above – after all this is just a concept demonstrator – it shows what I’d like a search engine to do – recognize what I’m after and explain to me what it is, while at the same time return the traditional relevant page results.

In any case – it is good we are not stuck with Google. Let’s not allow our mental inertia and habit to use only them – let’s look around for search companies that just provide searches – not try to shape the society.

I already wrote about how much Google’s search monopoly worries me. Now there is one more reason to be wary of it – Google is officially, as a company, taking a position in the public debate on a social issue. This is more than unusual.

A few days ago a post appeared on Google’s official blog, signed by Sergey Brin saying that Google officially opposes proposition 8 that is to go under ballot in California.

No matter what we think of the issue at hand I think this is both unusual and very worrying if a corporation takes a stand on a social issue like this. It is even more dangerous if the company in question has a de-facto monopoly on search and strong position in other fields that influence what content gets through to the bulk of Internet users.

It is not to say that I’m sure Google is meddling with its search results or – say – YouTube content. But it is a possibility that is hard to dismiss. If Sergey Brin feels about an issue strongly enough to put the weight of his company behind his private opinion (as opposed to just his name) there will be a strong temptation to extend the “fight” with those holding a different position one step further. And if it happens it will be very hard to fight with. First, it would be very, very difficult to prove. And even if proven it would be fully legal, because being a private corporation Google is under no obligation to provide fair and balanced treatment to Internet content representing all opinions on issues of today.

I think in the long run this is a threat to freedom of opinion and expression on the Internet. For now, though, the only thing I can do is use Microsoft’s Live Search. And think of moving my e-mail off Google’s GMail.

A high profile case of personal data leaking onto Internet because of poor design of a web application just occurred in Poland. It is worth looking at, I think, as it shows clearly one problem with how many web applications are created today.

First a brief recap of the situation: one of major Polish banks – Bank Pekao, part of UniCredit group – started a hiring campaign. As part of that they hired a PR agency that also built them a special website – zainwestujwprzyszlosc.pl (“Invest in your future dot pl”) where candidates could submit resumes and cover letters. And submit they did – hundreds of them. Then one blogger noticed resumes submitted showing in Google results when he searched for his last name and found someone’s resume available for download. He checked the link and to his amazement found that under http://zainwestujwprzyszlosc.pl/files/0 you could find a listing of more than a thousand resumes and download them. Hundreds of files full of personal details and – as it is usually the case – people making fools of themselves in cover letters.

Following his blog post getting immensely popular the story was picked up by mainstream media, someone notified the authorities and the bank. By Monday the whole nicely designed site was replaced with a brief message posted in a hurry saying that the site is closed.

Now this classic story shows many things one could write about – for example total ignorance of media exploited by bank’s PR who said that this situation “was due to a hacker attack” when it was clearly a major design flaw. Or the fact that after the bank officially stated this and added that they closed the page and people’s data is now secure everyone could easily pull those files from Google’s cache. Or that – worse even – coupling of ignorance with arrogance when they accused the blogger and others of “stealing data”.

But I want to concentrate on the root cause of all this mess which I think is not treating web applications as serious software.

I reckon that all this happened because web is still treated as “pages” – not software. So everyone worries about how their sites are designed in terms of graphic beauty, not engineering. Consequently, building web sites is entrusted to “web designers” or “interactive agencies” or – even worse – PR firms (as in this case). Those well meaning companies or people are usually good at whatever their primary business is (graphic design, communication) but lack knowledge of software engineering.

In fact there are many people now who even claim to be “programmers” because they can build a “script” in PHP or even put things together with Ruby on Rails. This obviously doesn’t make them programmers – just like being able to replace oil in your car doesn’t make you an engine designer – but they still claim that to totally ignorant customers who, let me restate that, don’t treat their sites as software. Bank in question has – I’m sure – a very capable IT department, but I bet this website was ordered by someone from marketing or HR who never bothered to consult his own IT colleagues – because it is just “some pages”.

This approach might have been ok 8 years ago when few web sites were rarely anything more than pages + images. But by now it is hard to find such “pages” anymore – the web abounds with true applications. And applications means software – with all the things to consider “interactive agencies” never heard of like data models, database design, scalability and – yes – security!

But failing to recognize web applications for what they really are (software, getting more complex every year) companies hire wrong people or outsource to wrong teams. And then they have problems.

At Code Sprinters we take a totally different view. We don’t claim to do “pages”, we don’t call ourselves “interactive agency”, openly admit we suck at PR and are not good at graphic design. We are a software company specializing in delivering web applications and systems.

And that we take seriously. We hire only true software engineers, that is people who know what data model is, how database design works, what design patters are – and are trained (and mentally capable) to consider consequences given design will have for scalability and security. Work done by such people does cost more – not only because they are more expensive than “web designers” (which is not always true), but also because they put more work into building each web application – and that because they don’t skip building it to be secure, don’t skip building a suite of automated tests around it and do take care to write the code someone else will be able to read & extend in the future.

To be honest I won’t say we never ever have bugs in our applications – but major design flaws like in this case are simply not possible (leaving important files on a publicly accessible directory and feeding it to Google to index them is outrageously bad design). We would die of shame if anything this bad would ever be delivered by us.

The Peako incident shows clearly that is not wise to entrust building software to people who don’t have a clue about it. Pekao has just learned the hard way what the real cost of doing that is. Consider how much will this bank have to pay now all the people who will be smart enough to sue them for damages? Consider damage to their image and reputation. And take into account that under EU privacy protection laws they even face penalties from the government and are under investigation now.

Others should learn from this example. After all this is a huge bank and it will survive it – hiring is not their primary business and most of their clientele is not geeky enough to understand the problem. But think what would a blunder like this do to an HR company?

So, to sum it all up:

• quality – and security – do cost,
• web applications are software,
• software should be built by people who are qualified to do it,
• “interactive agencies” or “web designers” on average don’t have skills and experience to build complex software.

If you save on your web applications or hire wrong people to build it well – you’re in for trouble.

It is always with amazement that I find looking at my statistics, that the set of key words that brings most of random visitors to this humble blog is “Dilbert Scrum”. This is so ever since I’ve commented on an episode of Dilbert in which agile is mentioned. Based on it I’ve moved on to discuss Scrum – and probably no one else did exactly that, because if you type “Dilbert Scrum” into Google that post of mine is now number 1. I suspect this post will strengthen that effect.

Interestingly, I’m not sure Dilbert ever referred to Scrum directly but even so people think he must have – so they look for it. Also, this shows that people want to find an image, not a text. Texts are boring, you have to concentrate (which is hard) and think sometimes (which is even harder). Images are much much easier. Which is, probably, why Dilbert brings so many visitors to my page who come for only one thing: the link to the comic strip (BTW: It was wrong, I just fixed it).