First, for Tom Hogan’s opening remarks:
- 2380-ish attendees this year!
- 150 speakers and moderators… wow.
- 60 exhibitors
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Keynote: Search Engine Update, Chris Sherman
Starting to see true differentiation and divergence among the major search engines:
Ask:
- Jeeves retired. first-class search engine, as good as or better than the others
- They also have Gary Price
- Many new tools. Web Answers – a natural laguage search that actually works.
- great map tool – better than google and yahoo. Even gives driving/walking directions, depending on what you want to do
Google:
- Google is: advertising company, microsoft killer, ISP, Banker, etc, etc, etc…
- Not just focused on search anymore
- Suggest, Q&A, Desktop, Video, etc – lots of options
MSN:
- still spending money to develop a search engine and a search advertising network
- You need version 3.0 with all microsoft products… so wait awhile
- Clustering (sorta like Northern Light used to do)
- Birdseye and street level imagery – nice satellite imagery
Yahoo
- Pace seems to have slowed at Yahoo
- turning into a “people mediated” search – with tagging and personalization
- Yahoo Mindset – a version of the search engine that has a slider that can be dragged towards shopping or research to personalize search results
Google and Books
- Google is probably legal
- Publishers VCR myopia factor – it will probably be better for publishers in the long run – it will help sell more books
- Publisher will control how much content is displayed – they alwo authorize Google to scan the books
- You can’t copy or print the text…
- They plan to link to Worldcat pretty soon
- Browse full text of public domain materials
- He thinks they are scanning books so Google can learn and improve search technology…
- lots of lawsuits
Google’s DoJ Request
- asked for 1 million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for one week. Other search engines complied! Yikes
- Google refused because of privacy concerns – good for them.
- 50k random URLs & 5k queries will be ultimately provided
- many problems and absurdities with thte request in the first place:
- won’t show what people are searching for…
- random URLS don’t show searches, relevance, algorhythms, etc
- also doesn’t factor in automatic queries
China and search:
- US is bashing search engines over China censorship
- But the search engiens are simply obeying the law
- The Chinese people prefer the censorship to not having search engines at all
- only a relatively few topics are censored
- savvy chinese web users know they can reach virtually any web site using a proxy
Conclusions:
- search is getting exciting again
- new tools are making content more searchable
- threats to privacy and individual liberties are subtly increasing in the US, while ironically things seem sto be improving in China