I'm currently in Boston attending the Search Engine Meeting conference. I'm here to learn what new technologies are emerging, who's doing what, and make some new contacts.
The first speaker today was Dave Girouard of Google who spoke about Google's new OneBox. While the OneBox may shake the industry, I found Dave's talk uninspiring. He spent his 25 minutes leading up to the introduction of OneBox. Some of his key points were:
- The enterprise market is underutilized
- not enough value to end user
- employees are consumers are the same people
Update: I forgot to mention that Dave mentioned that the enterprise search market is about 1/10th smaller than the consumer market and there's a lot of room for growth and competition.
The second talk was by Steve Papa of Endeca whose talk titled "Searching the Long Tail" was interesting in that his company uses a different approach to help users find the nugget of information they're after. He spoke about "the reality of searching behavior" which he characterized as - > predict - adapt - iterate - and then revise. He showed an example of their new technology being used by North Carolina State University and the positive reaction since they've started using it. His talk was pretty good and I'll be taking a closer look at their technology.
The next speaker, Mike Moran from IBM was excellent. His talk "Don't Just Change the Search Engine" was focused on the marketing side of your site/product and what types of changes you can make to inprove your ranking in exsiting search engines and at the same make your corporate search more affective. His talk was concise and useful. He made some points which I already knew about but which many companies fail to learn.
Audit and Optimize your landing pages:
- Your web site title -> Don't use an acronym, use words
- Images -> Don't promote your product first with an image, uses words first then an image below.
- Initial body of the text - Make sure your first paragraph includes the keywords you need to get your page/site/procut found.
I haven't read Mike's book Search Engine Marketing Inc. but after his talk it might make for a good read.
We're in a break right now, I'll post more notes as the day progresses if I can.