Search 2.0

Future of Search
Keynote Speech
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Widely considered a leading "search engine guru," Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade. Danny's expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC's Nightline. Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines," a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines. link

Two of Danny's predictions about the future of search have already come true, personalized and blended results. He cited Google's Universal Search as an example of "blended" search results.

Google's Universal Search blends video, local, news and book content into the top 10 list. Ask.com's new 3D approach is designed to make vertical results blend into a more seamless search experience. Yahoo and Microsoft also both give vertical results a presence in response to default search. This session looks at how these changes impact life for the search marketer. link

If monster searching's not for you, don't worry. Search developers are also working on "vertical search" opportunities. Vertical searching lets you limit your searches to a particular area like careers or news. Ideally it will provide more relevant hits.

Danny's personalization predication has come to life in Google's Web History. Let Google officially monitor everything you search for and view, and it will list pages you've visited before higher in your rankings. Spooky. (Optimizes ego-searching, though. Did you know there are actually other Karen Kleckner's out there? It's so tedious sorting through all of their mentions to find the really juicy stuff about ME.)

There were a lot of sessions about searching at the conference, but this was the only opportunity I had to learn a little bit more about the future of search. As we're all becoming more sophisticated searchers, search engines are hard at work to meet our growing demands. I look forward to seeing who wins the breadth v. depth wars.