March 01, 2006 | Wednesday

Scoble, Zawodny, and other searchgeek celebs

By Richard Gregory - COO in Events |News |Search Engines |Google |Yahoo |Microsoft |Search Technology

Day 2 of SES kicked off with the first ever “Search Pundits” panel with the top searchgeek celebrities: Robert Scoble from Microsoft, Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo, John Battelle was supposed to be here but he couldn’t make it (because he’s in London), so Matt Cutts from Google stepped up, along with Bill Gates lookalike David Vise, author of The Google Story.

The session started with a question on the impact of IE7 with integrated search on the major search engine players, but as Danny Sullivan pointed out, search has been a part of Internet Explorer since v3 so little impact was to be expected.

The panel spent more time debating the impact of vertical search (I couldn’t attend yesterday’s session on Vertical Creep but am digesting the PowerPoint presentations) and how vertical search engines could be deemed as the “tail” of search distribution. Matt Cutts raised the important point that there are very few barriers to entry in creating a niche vertical and Google (and Yahoo, one expects) can great vertical search results extremely easily.

A lot of discussion then followed on the relevance of sites, such as de.licio.us and Technorati for delivering topical search results, which lead to Jeremy starting on a rant on the danger of search engines using a tabular interface.

The final part of the session dwelled on the rise in importance and complexity of mapping tools, and Robert Scoble announced that MSN is launching new street side browsing for maps. Read the launch detail, then visit the beta.

More on the rest of the sessions later. Now back to that Markovian modeling and A level stats website…