Search Engine Report Chris Sherman Executive Editor SearchEngineWatch.com

Overview  Big four update  Web 2.0: What it is and isn’t  What’s the big deal with social search  Future trends

Is Google God?

Remember this?

Ask  “We’re 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 R&D budget going forward  Goal: To be the “Avis of Search”

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?

Google ProdDev Strategy  The 100 most important projects list  Projects classified as  70% projects are mostly focused on search and ads  20% projects focused on “internet user pain points”  10% projects are blue-sky

Google Data Center, 1999

Google Data Center, 2006 Source: New York Times

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

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

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

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

Keep an Eye on the Blogs  Ask blog.ask.com  Google googleblog.blogspot.com  Microsoft blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/  Yahoo

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

Some Cool Web 2.0 Search Tools  Ask Maps  Liveplasma  Last.fm  Zillow  Dataplace  Wizag  Farecast  Kayak  SeatGuru  The Real Underground  Corkd.com

What the heck is social seach?  Simple definition: Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment  “Informed” can mean many things— including egregiously uninformed  No good industry standard definition yet

We’ve 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

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

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

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*

Types of social search  Personalized verticals Eurekster, Rollyo  Collaborative harvesters Digg, Netscape, Reddit (popurls.com aggregates these)  Social Q&A sites Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag

Problems  Scale & scope issues  Tagging issues Ambiguity of language Lack of a controlled vocabulary Human laziness And… idiots!  Spammers

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)

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