Becoming more of a media company than a search engine. Th

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Search Engine Report

• Chris Sherman
• Executive Editor
• SearchEngineWatch.com

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Overview

• Big four update
• Web 2.0 What it is and isnt
• Whats the big deal with social search
• Future trends

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Is Google God?
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Remember this?
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Ask

• Were going to keep Ask on the search path.
  CEO Jim Lanzone
• Will be rolling out more first cousins to
  search over the coming year both tools and
  third party content
• Significant increase in RD budget going
  forward
• Goal To be the Avis of Search

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Google

• Becoming a portal?
• Yes and no
• Google is now an advertising company seeking more
  channels to distribute ads
• Big question Does Google have a strategy?

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Google ProdDev Strategy

• The 100 most important projects list
• Projects classified as 70-20-10
• 70 projects are mostly focused on search and ads
• 20 projects focused on internet user pain
  points
• 10 projects are blue-sky

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Google Data Center, 1999
10
Google Data Center, 2006
Source New York Times
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Microsoft

• Microsoft search and search advertising are
  entirely homegrown now, and things are messy
• Brilliant features marred by confusing
  inconsistent interface
• The Steve Berkowitz factor

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Yahoo

• The major proponent of social search (more on
  that later)
• Revamping all major properties
• Becoming more of a media company than a search
  engine

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The Importance of Research

• Microsoft research has been around for years
• This year, Google started a research group, and
  Yahoo created a new international group
• Gold in searcher behavior

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Yahoo Research

• Disappointed if Yahoo's effort didn't produce a
  Nobel Prize.
• Recording 12 terabytes of searcher behavior data
  daily about half of the library of congress
• Economists influencing search results

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Keep an Eye on the Blogs

• Ask
• blog.ask.com
• Google
• googleblog.blogspot.com
• Microsoft
• blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/
• Yahoo
• www.ysearchblog.com/

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Web 2.0 Hoohaw

• "Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was
  an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of
  course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what
  it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis,
  then that is people to people. But that was what
  the Web was supposed to be all along.-- Tim
  Berners-Lee

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Some Cool Web 2.0 Search Tools

• Ask Maps
• Liveplasma
• Last.fm
• Zillow
• Dataplace
• Wizag

• Farecast
• Kayak
• SeatGuru
• The Real Underground
• Corkd.com

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What the heck is social seach?

• Simple definition Internet wayfinding tools
  informed by human judgment
• Informed can mean many thingsincluding
  egregiously uninformed
• No good industry standard definition yet

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Weve always had social search

• The very first guide to the web was created by
  Tim Berners-Lee in 1990
• Yahoo was originally created by a team of human
  editors
• Meta tags were created in 1996 to help content
  owners influence search engines and were a
  massive failure

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Algorithmic Search is Social

• Fundamentally, search engines reflect human bias
  (programmer choices)
• Also, search engines observe human behavior
  click paths, popular URLs, etc and use this to
  modify algorithms
• New personalization efforts are also used to
  refine search for everyone

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So why the buzz now?

• Algorithmic search has plateaued Innovation is
  much harder than it used to be
• Humans are still better at some things than
  computers
• A major factor many, if not most of the players
  in social search are leveraging the work of
  volunteers

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Types of social search

• Shared bookmarks web pages
• Del.icio.us, Shadows, MyWeb, Furl, Diigo
• Tag engines (blogs RSS)
• Technorati, Bloglines
• Collaborative directories
• ODP, Prefound, Zimbio, Wikipedia

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Types of social search

• Personalized verticals
• Eurekster, Rollyo
• Collaborative harvesters
• Digg, Netscape, Reddit (popurls.com aggregates
  these)
• Social QA sites
• Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag

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Problems

• Scale scope issues
• Tagging issues
• Ambiguity of language
• Lack of a controlled vocabulary
• Human laziness
• And idiots!
• Spammers

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What will ultimately work

• A combination of algorithmic and people-mediated
  search
• Trust networks
• Increased personalization and user control over
  result filtering
• Social search will probably work best for
  non-text content (photos, music, video, etc)

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Future Trends

• The blurring of content and process
• More personalization
• More dynamic interaction with both search and web
  sites
• More vertical/mashup specialized sites