ResearchBuzz

I thought the Internet was the Internet, but you can also consider the Internet as “the Cloud”. And there’s a lot going on in “the Cloud,” from applications to hosting to content delivery systems. Several companies provide products and services to the Cloud, and Cloudbook has a directory of over 1200 of them.

(If, like me, you are somewhat confused about what Cloud computing is, Wikipedia can give you an overview. There’s also a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg that helped me understand it better.)

So anyway, the Cloudbook Products and Services Directory is available at http://www.cloudbook.net/directories/products-services-directory. The products and services listed there are divided into several broad categories, including applications, platforms, and network services. I decided to take a look at the applications and got a list of subcategories that included sales, marketing, data, collaboration, and human resources.

The “Collaboration” subcategory seemed interesting so I looked at that. I got a list of companies and basic description of the services. Some of them I had heard of (Zoho, Basecamp, SmugMug) and some I had not (Brainshark, GoView, etouches). Applications are listed in company name’s alphabetical order, not application name alphabetical order, which can be a bit confusing at first.

I still don’t quite understand what makes Cloud computing different from, say, applications that happen to be hosted on the Internet, but maybe I’ll get a better idea by exploring this directory. I was interested to see that this site was supposed to have more listings for government and research clouds as well as cloud groups, but alas, every one of the links I tried led me to a 404 error….

Wow, I haven’t covered one of these in a while. TechTarget has launched another information site for a technology: cloud computing. SearchCloudComputing.com (http://www.searchcloudcomputing.com”>) was made available on June 5.

The site includes information on several aspects of cloud computing (including security, data management, infrastructure, and applications) as well as news. There’s also a webcast and some white papers available.

What I was really looking for was a “What the Heck” document — you know, “What the heck is cloud computing” — which would have given everything else more context. I didn’t find it. What I DID find was an overview of key cloud computing platforms, which did answer a few of my questions.

I think I might start with the overview from Dave Taylor or this presentation from Justin Souter to get my head sufficiently wrapped around cloud computing before I go back to TechTarget.

Kumo isn’t coming out until this week, so let’s take a look at something else, shall we? A new search engine in beta provides search results from Yahoo with a cloud of related words. It’s not clustered searching, it’s more like auto-generated tag searching. Hulbee’s at http://hulbee.com/.

Hulbee’s front page actually starts out with a cloud of search words — everything from shopping to soccer to cars to loans. You can either click on a term here or use the regular search box at the top of the page.

I did a search for Hawaii. Hulbee did pretty good, with the Hawaii visitors’ bureau and the Wikipedia article in the top ten out of the 31 million results. As you’ll see at the bottom of the page, the results here are “Powered by Yahoo XML.” On the right side of the results page, where you’d normally see sponsored text ads, there’s one text ad under the header “More information”. That makes me a little uncomfortable; are these sponsored text ads or not?

On the left side of the page there’s the tag cloud. This cloud extracts terms from the current page of search results, I think. (The cloud changes as you page through the search results.) This is neat: as you move your mouse over a term, that term “lights up” — becomes highlighted — on the list of search results.

Click on a term in the cloud to add it to your search and the search results page will refresh along with a new cloud. I found this an interesting, if a little slow, way to narrow down my search results.

I can see where this would be a useful way to both learn about keywords associated with a particular search term and narrow down search results when you don’t know too much about your topic. There’s only one thing I would ask of Hulbee — that it gets rid of the “stop words” in its tag cloud. You know, words like “click” and “home” and “contact” and “site”. These words are too generic to Web sites to add much to a search. Get rid of “tag cloud stop words” and there will be more room for useful, informative additions to the cloud.