Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Thursday, June 22, 2006

From Search to Eternity

Moderator Chris Shipley, Guidewire Group, discusses the future of search with the panelists:

Kapenda Thomas, Jookster
David Sifry, Technorati
Jim Lantzone, Ask.com
Leila Boujnane, Idee

Technorati: the leading provider of real-time search, currently tracking about 45 million people and what they’re talking about on the web. Technorati indexes within five minutes of when people post on their blogs. That leads to a different way of thinking about search. It’s not just about keywords and hyperlinks. Its an understanding of time and when something happens.

Ask: The fifth ranked general search engine. General search is the doorway to the overall web,. We have the sixth ranked web properties. Our focus is narrowly on search. Compared to five years ago, the needs are still similar. People do billions of searches across hundreds of categories. Our innovations are squarely on search, including images, maps and blogs.

Idee: Software developer focused on image and video search, based on image attributes. We look at the attributes that make the image look like it does to you the user. We do searching for similar images and we track image usage. We find images for customers and show them how it has been used. We are at the very early stages of what can be done with pattern and image recognition.

Jookster: We’re a social search engine, enabling users to find info on the web through a network of friends. Unlike Google and Yahoo, our key innovation is degrees of separation search. You search based on how many degrees that person is away from you. We can create web personalization based on your associations.

Q: Search is the technology, and finding is the application. That begs the question, how do you integrate these techs with other apps, how they can affect user interface. How do you reconcile search and application.

Technorati: Search is core to understanding the web in a new metaphor. The technology has been based on where the web has come from. We think about the web as the world’s biggest library. After 15 years of commercial use of the Internet, the metaphors have started to change. The core insight is, you can’t think of it as pages an documents. You need to think about it as a conversation flow or event stream. We live on the web. People are producers, not just consumers. Documents get created by people at a certain time. If you use aggregation technology like crawling, you have new metadata – when something happened, and who did it. You apply social network analysis to understand not just page rank, but the people in the network. You can get a snapshot of what is happening on the web at this moment. This change in point of view enables us to build new applications.

Q:There is a need for transparency. If you do social search, how you present the results has to be transparent to the seeker.

Jookster: The key is to determine context, so you know what the person is searching for, jaguar the car or jaguar the cat. They get the results they want based on their relationships with other individuals. Google is based on a citation based algorithm, where the popularity of a site affects rank. We look at personal rank. What sites are interesting to members of the network?

Ask: Search has become an on demand medium. How do you present the results when people want relevance, speed, and ease of use? What tools can you give them to get the right results faster. We have useful features, like binoculars to preview sites.

Q: People want confidence that when they search, they’ll get what they’re looking for. Confidence will be a winning attribute of the companies that rise to the top in this space.

Technorati: We strive for comprehensiveness. We get spam out of the results and provide people with a more comprehensive service for finding out what people are talking about. You can click on the cosmos link to see what people are saying about the person whose talking.

Jookster: Jooster was similar to LinkedIn, with the degrees of separation. So we offer implicit trust, by allowing people to select how close a circle they want to search within (how many degrees of separation).

Ask: The average user doesn’t look for a better way to search. We need to wake them up to the fact that search is still evolving.

Q: Where is search evolving to?

Ask: You have to start with where people are today, and how they perceive the conventions of search. What we’re doing is on the backend, the features and tools that help them search faster, without having to think too much.

Idee: We’re not a user facing company. The technology is not available as a public search engine. But these are the very early days of innovation in image search. Image search online today is very poor. Having comprehensive list of images is not good enough. Relevance and similarity are important. Keywords are very poor image descriptors. Better indexing technology and algorithms will improve the process. You have to look at attributes.

Jookster: The Internet is about communities now. Kids start with their social networks, not search engines. They look to their friends for recommendations on videos, music, etc.

Q: What business model supports search?

Ask: The average cost per page delivered by search is a fraction of the cost of yellow pages or direct mail. It’s a perfect union between users, advertisers and publishers. As long as they have the inventory, there will be plenty of revenue opportunities. The intersection with TV and video will be interesting. If you put a video ad in, it gets a greater clickthrough rate. The ad industry has been slow to recognize how they can use video advertising.

Q: How will you display results on mobile phones? What’s happening in mobile search?

Ask: We’re bringing Ask up to speed on mobile. What American users want is the Internet the way they get it on their computer. It’s about delivery. SMS (short message service) isn’t the solution yet, because not enough people are using it.

Technorati: Mobile is about location. In the US, getting the GPS location from your phone and trying to use it with web service is locked up. The user doesn’t want to have to tell the device where to look. It’s also about notification. People want to be notified so that they know about World Cub scores, for example.

Q: How will consolidation affect search?

Technorati: We’re excited about the idea of micro formats. A problem with the web is making more structured data available. You end up organizing the data in silos, like auctions, classifieds, etc. Why does BusinessWire still exist for press releases? If this information were on your own site, we could display things in context. Vertical search will stay here for that very narrowly focused data.

Ask: Consolidation is creating portals where people initiate their online activities.

Q: How do you get the best search results, when some data is buried in the deep web and behind firewalls?

Technorati: There will always be people out there who want to be found. But there will also be opportunities for people who run the behind the firewall sites to offer a different experience. I’m not concerned about the entire Internet going behind a firewall.

Ask: Data is more valuable to them if they keep it behind the firewall. There is deep web info available. The question is how you surface the right info at the right time.

Q: What happens to privacy? Will search extend into presence, where I go in Second Life, etc.?

Technorati: That’s an enormous issue. We only make available public info, what people choose to share. As providers, we have an enormous responsibility in deciding what we make default features of the service.

Jookster: We give customers the option whether the info they share is public or private. Giving the user a choice is the direction to take.

Q: What is the future of search?

Technorati: Thinking beyond keywords and search results, we’ll start thinking about how we can find things that interest you, send you notification when we found it, give you the delight experience of discovery.

Ask: Search engines still do a poor job of understanding user intent. We need to build technologies that meet their needs in better ways. Search engines will make things more seamless for the user, for example shorten the gap between finding the restaurant and making a reservation. And, once you find things, you want to track them.

Idee: The future of search hinges on the introduction of new indexing technologies, particularly in image and video searching.

Jookster: We need to simplify the process of finding information on the web. Tagging, for example, has innovated in that area.