Just getting ready for Day 2 here in Bonita Springs... I see Laurie Peterson from MediaPost did
a nice job covering Esther and David's keynote address yesterday morning.
Another session I caught yesterday was the Future of Search Innovation, a panel moderated by David Berkowitz. It appears that innovation is largely around different ways to determine intent and
deliver more relevant results. Ron Belanger showed us
Mindset. Now, Mindset is a rather dusty beta that's been lingering in Yahoo's basement for
sometime. I
first wrote about it way back in March of 2006. I suspect Yahoo has more recent
things things they're working on, but they haven't been cleared for public exposure. Ravi Raj from Kosmix introduced their twist, which is an aggregator that compiles information from multiple
sources into one page. The future usefulness of Kosmix seems to include a degree of personalization. Raj indicated that aggregated pages for women, for example, would look different than those for
men. Paul Martino's Aggregate Knowledge opening up the promising world of search discovery, where the engine acts as our guide. Going one step further, Aggregate Knowledge "pings" the customer in
various online destinations with an invitation to discover relevant products. Chase Norlin from Pixsy.com rounded out the panel with a look at their image and video search tool. When we got into
the Q&A, it seems to two driving factors for innovation will be personalization and socialization. I've had questions about socialization as a scalable strategy for search (as envisioned by Jimmy
Wales in his search Wikia project) but when I raised the question, Belanger from Yahoo indicated that their research indicates there is a large enough "good samaritan" segment (somewhere around 40%)
that can make social search feasible. Apparently, , according to Paul Martino, everyone wants to be a hero. I hate to be the skeptic when it comes to the milk of human kindness, but let's just say I
remain unconvinced that social search can be scalable. I'm placing my bets on personalization.
