Googzilla - Search Engine Meeting Morning Notes, Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Posted by: Marc Boucher in Search Engine TechnologyWell we’re in a break right now and the three morning talks were all interesting, especially Stephen Arnold of AIT. Arnold is a long time information knowledge technophile and pulls no punches when discussing the industry, and that’s a good thing, as we need perspectives from all angles on search. So his talk “Google: The Erosion of Relevance” is one I’ve been anticipating. And he did not disappoint.
He started by calling Google, Googzilla. This drew some laughter from the crowd. He pointed out that all the talks from the previous day touched upon Google in some way. We’re obsessed with Google, we love Google. And since everyone loves Google we seem to be missing something. And that something is that search relevance is being eroded. And he wasn’t just critical of Google. He said all the major search engines, Microsoft and Yahoo included, and everyone else is eroding relevance. So exactly what does he mean by this?
His basic premise is that content is being steered, thus its relevance is being eroded. Search engine results are being skewed as people learn how to manipulate them. This erodes relevance. He cites emerging social tools, that, while people find cool, actually are doing us all a disservice by skewing the results. Some examples include del.icio.us which he says poses big problems, as we are overlooking what happens when humans use random terms to classify links. He cited Flickr who use “word” tags which erode relevance. He also cited digg, and how it appeared to be more popular then Slashdot but has recently run into problems in that some users had figured out to skew the results so their posts ranked at the top.
What about the search engine themselves? Are they allowing relevance to be eroded? His answer is not a simple one. A part of him says yes while another says no. Are they doing it intentionnally, no. However users are learning how to manipulate the results. To me it’s an ongoing game between the search engines and the users who want to rank high. He also notes that current search compnies are not focusing on the problems of search. Not everyone would agree with him on this point.
Not everyone agrees with him concerning eroding relevance, some counter that young people don’t necessarily care about relevance. I for one agree with him to a point. He points out that a search engine marketing conference happening today and tomorrow in Toronto with some 2500 participants is geared towards gaining an advantage in the search engine results, using techniques that skew relevance. Of note, this conference which deals with search engine technology has less than 200 participants. And it should also be noted that after today’s sessions I’m headed to Toronto so that I can learn what’s new in the search engine marketing side of things with the goal to improve my business and that of my clients.
The next talk was by Borge Svingen of FAST, “The Challenge of Mobile Searching”. He started his talk by mentioning all the different types of mobile search FAST supports. They include local search, maps, blogs etc. Challenges modile developers face:
1. the small screen size
2. navigation issues
3. low bandwidth, low battery
4. differing phone capabilities
I know something about this as I spent some time researching how to develop an interface for SpaceRef Mobile. And basically in its first iteration I had to create four interfaces to support the various phones. It was not an easy execise. Now I’ve settled on one format that is supported by a majority of the phones and works for our user demographics.
The last talk before the morning break was by Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo, “Web Vortals are Back, and Why”. Vivisimo offers consumer search through it’s Clusty metasearch engine and enterprise search. They specialize in vertical searching. he notes that vertical search engines:
- avoids becoming a commodity
- get linked to as the go-to-site for your speciality
- and is making a big comeback
i enjoyed his talk as it reinforces my opnion and what I’ve been telling people the last few years. I’m looking forward to launching new vertical search engines in the coming years. Stay tuned.
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