Day 1@CIL2006: Keynote Address

Wednesdays keynote address was from Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of searchenginewatch.com.

Chris gave a good overview of the search engine market, and some of the more recent developments. In his opinion, we are in a similar situation to 1995 where new and better innovations were rapidly emerging.

Some interesting things from Chris' presentation:
* I didn't realize that Ask (formerly 'AskJeeves': Evidently, 'Jeeves' has retired) was so good. In Chris' opinion it is a better search engine than Google and MSN Search. The natural language queries work way better now than they did with AskJeeves. There is a customizable toolbox feature. They also have a Zoom feature where you can preview web sites before visiting them.
* Ask has a maps feature that works in a similar fashion to Google maps, although the directions that it gives
are much better than Google's. A handly feature is the ability to choose between 'driving' directions and 'walking directions'
* Google is no longer the 'laser-like focus on searching' company that it once was - they are expanding into many many new services, such as Google reader, Google video, a blog search and Google Base, which is a competitor to ebay.
* MSN Search on the other hand is spending a lot of money to compete with the other players. One of their new features is SRC (search result clustering). People familiar with the old NorthernLight search engine will find the SRC feature similar to NorthernLight's search folders.

Tag: CIL2006