After the morning break there were four more talks in Session One: Searchers and Search Behaviours. The first up was Tony Gentile of Healthline. His talk dealt with medically guided search. In his own words "Healthline connects consumer and medical vocabulary and provides medically guided search". The talk focused on this vertical search and how to make the results relevant to them. A couple of the points I found interesting were:
- users don't know what they don't know
- there's a difference between search for something and researching something
- really know your audience, almost 30% of their searches are done on behalf of someone else
- make the user feel confident in your product, if they feel confident about the results they get, they'll be back
Overall a good talk on vertical search product. Vertical search is something aTerra (my company) has been working on for some time, primarily in the biotech and space sector. The morning sessions have given me some new ideas which I'd like to develop for these and other niches.
The next talk was by Max Copperman of Knova Software. Max talked dealt with WYSISWIG search crafting. His company makes makes call center applications and call service applications. It was a more technical talk dealing with what he calls "tuning". Tuning, as in tuning all facets of your search engine.
Next up was Joseph Tragert of EBSCO publishing. He focused on concept searching of RSS feeds and structured content repositories. Their latest product is Executive Daily Brief.
What many consumers don't know is that top search engines like Google do not index many of the best sources of information available on the internet. This is because much of that information is in databases or on pay per use sites that Google can't access. So services like the Executive Daily Brief offer access to these resources. The daily brief monitors the full text for over 10,000 periodicals and other sources, including:
- 1,470 Scholarly Journals
- 1,455 Trade Journals & General Business Magazines
- 153 Monographs
- 1,419 Country Economic Reports
- 3,921 Industry Reports & Yearbooks
- 76 Market Research Reports
To monitor these sources they contact each publisher and ask for permission and make deals to access their content.
Of note, with RSS Feeds becoming ubiquitous it's becoming easier to build indexes for vertical search products.
The last talk in the morning sessions was Alan Feuer of Blossom Software. Alan's talk was "Towards Restoring Conversation to Search". I have to admit I was not that interested in his talk. He didn't capture my attention and his talk seemed to drag on.
More on the afternoon sessions later.