BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Last week was the annual gathering of search engines and folks from search industry at SES in San Jose. It is amazing to see how mature the search industry has become by seeing 1000’s of people show up even in a down economy. Many of the key industry thought leaders including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others were present to share their ideas and thoughts.

Here are  my top 3 takeaways from the conference:

1. Search enhancements continue to focus around relevance and engagement. Relevance is highly dependent on user intent and search engines are spending a lot of time analyzing ways of getting to user intent. I was on a semantic search panel and we had a very thoughtful discussion around the future of open search and how semantic search could increase relevance for consumers. Here’s some very good coverage about the session by San Francisco Chronicle, InternetNews.com and ClickZ about the session.
2. Long tail is becoming highly relevant and more companies are beginning to capitalize from search and advertising perspective. There were a couple of sessions that discussed how advertising on the long tail networks such as looksmart or quigo could be significantly advantageous compared to the larger networks ( although the volumes still aren’t available). Consumers are also beginning to explore the power of search engines by trying long tail queries specifically for products and local services. Infact we here at BooRah are also seeing a decent increase in long tail volume for restaurants.
3. Though mobile wasn’t a big topic nor was local search, many of the keynotes and other panels discussed how small businesses were still behind the 8-ball and how newer phone platforms such as IPhone were really driving adoption ( not just in the major metro areas but also middle America). Kelsey group hosted a couple sessions around these themes and were very informational.

I could only attend the first day and a few other sessions of interest, but all in all, the conference was very well organized with some good keynotes and networking opportunities. Thanks to staff of SES for a great conference!

Tags: BooRah, San Francisco Chronicle, semantic search, SES, SES San Jose 2008

This entry was posted by Nagaraju Bandaru on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under BooRah, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.