CIL2006, Day 1: Opening Remarks and Keynote by Chris Sherman

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

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