Search Engine Report

Chris ShermanExecutive EditorSearchEngineWatch.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 70-20-10 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 www.ysearchblog.com/

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