Slashdot Mirror
Is Tableau The Next Google?
Roland Piquepaille writes "At least, the founders of Tableau Software, a small company established in 2003 and based in Seattle, come from Stanford University, where they worked down the hall with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1997. In 'Tableau making name for itself,' the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that Tableau intends to make structured databases easy to use the way Google did with unstructured data. So the company is turning databases into easy-to-generate graphics. Tableau doesn't say who are its customers, but claims that it has more than 100 installations and that it's already profitable. This graphical data mining tool runs on desktops and costs $1,000 per user for a standard edition and $1,600 per user for a professional version. Will this company be successful and become another Google? Read more and decide after looking at an example of database drilling."
Seems like every tenth article is there to provide a link to Piquepille (or however you spell that asshat's name) and his blog. Why can't he just write a long story submission, and the editors display the first paragraph of it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just so you people know, Roland Piquepaille (the submitter of this story) has a growing repuation as a "blog spammer". That is, he sends in stories to slashdot compulsively (and I assume sometimes repetitively to get it on the front page) which always include a link to his blog at the end which provides him revenue from the ads on his site.
I'm not going to go as far as a lot of people who post about this and claim that this makes him an inherently evil force that must be stopped, it doesn't, but I'd just like people to be aware of this. I mean, his blog entry on the topic is usually just a rehashing of the articles submitted adding nothing. I really think the editors should edit out the compulsive blog link, but whatever, there's a lot of things we all think the editors should do that they don't.
Let me just give you the one feature which I think makes this extremely useful:
Don't get me wrong. I'm a CLI type of guy, but the truth is that we live in a graphical world, and I get paid to provide users what they need to make their jobs easier.. I'm pretty sure this will help them.
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There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly.
Unstructured data? What are you talking about? Data is by definition structured!
This is a common term in the database, search and information retrieval fields. Broadly, "Structured data" refers to information that is split up into well-defined component fields; "unstructured data" is data in one undifferentiated field.
As usual this is context-specific and not truly a binary distinction, but consider an HTML web page that has been generated from a database. In the database the information is highly structured: stored as fields that have both syntactic and semantic rules associated with them. On the web page you have essentially a block of text, usually with minimal structure to it. Both contain the same information but one has lots of structure, the other has much less.
SQL is a good language for querying structured data, Google is a good "language" for querying unstructured data.
Sailing over the event horizon
took into account the links _to_ a page as a measure of it's relevence.
The idea being that the more linked to a page is, the more value it has - thereby using people as a way of meauring the worth of a page. By examing the words people link with, as well as allowing Googlebombing, it sidesteps meta-tag pollution etc.
Been de-emphasised, compared to other sub-algorithms, but it's not just the appearence that set google apart in the early days. Before they had ad's.
"Early days" *shiver* I can remeber when AltaVista was the pinnicle of web searching, and using Archie and Veronica.