Walking into the Hilton this morning. I immediately ran into several people I know at CIL. It is great to see familiar faces. Although some may be missing because they are at PLA. I also got to meet Meredith Farkas (yeah), which made my morning. I hope to talk wikis with her later. According to Tom there are 2386 people at CIL this year from 49 of 50 states. No one from Mississippi is attending. There are also several people attending for countries other than the United States.
Day 1 Keynote Search Engine Report - Chris Sherman
For the first time in years, we are seeing true differentiation and divergence. Ask has improved their search technology tremendously so that it is as good as Google, Yahoo. Also hired Gary Price to do outreach and act as a conduit to libraries. Ask has new features: Smart Search, Web Answers, Zoom, new toolbox with highly flexible access to may types of searches, new maps and directions with animated tour, different directions for driving and walking.
What is Google these days?
- Suggest
- Q&A
- Desktop
- Google Reader, blog search
- Googlevideo
- Googlebase
- GoogleMars, GoogleMoon
- Google and Books - publishers suing Google
- Print Publisher Program (Google Book Search)
- publishers authorize Google to scan the books
- bib info, etc
- Links to where to buy and (coming) OpenWorldCat
- Users can browse full text of books in public domain
- Books not in public domain only show snippets around the search terms
- potentially using this to improve search results
MSN
- creating demographical and behavioral targeting
- spending lots of money on developing their own search
- no traction yet, but don’t count them out
- virtual earth, direct answers, SRC (search result clustering)
- Windows Live
- New Windows Live Toolbar
- Bird’s eye and street level imagery in their mapping tool.
All of these experiments are a prelude to a redo of local search tools.
Yahoo
- turning into the champion of people mediated search (tagging and personalization)
- Yahoo Research is ramping up in a big way.
- Y!Q, Mindsets
- MyWeb
Personalization
- exploding privacy concerns
- convenience and utility vs. confidentiality
- threat from hackers and other security breaches
- DoJ data requests
