Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Quick notes from SearchSIG last night:
This month’s SearchSIG featured John Batelle along with Dan Farber and a panel discussion on vertical search by Gautam Godhwani (SimplyHired), Pete Flint, (Trulia), Adam Beguelin (Truveo), and Tony Gentile, (Healthline). If you look carefully at the photo above, it’s nearly self-documenting, as the web page with the speakers and agenda is projected behind the stage. If only they had sat in order…

Best quote of the evening, from Gautam Godhwani: “I have yet to see Google do applications well”. This in response to a question to all panelists about why Google / Yahoo / Microsoft wouldn’t end up squashing them like bugs at some point. In the background, John Batelle ran a search for “search company ceo” on SimplyHired, which came back with 1020 matches…

Tony Gentile from Healthline had a more defensible reason for existence, in that they’ve built a domain specific taxonomy and onotology for mapping consumer names for health-related topics into the professional medical namespace, and has a quote from Eric Schmidt to the effect that “health and law are two areas that they wouldn’t approach now as they require too much domain knowledge” or something like that. Truveo has a lot of branded content, and claims to do an excellent job of digging out metadata, thus letting you quickly filter for recent gossip, sports highlights and adult content. Trulia works with real estate agents to map their listings onto a Google map, with filters by price, zip code, etc. I have a hard time keeping Truveo and Trulia straight.

A quick show of hands turned up something like 1/3 of the attendees were involved in building a new search engine, most of them not Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft employees. Hmm. This might be correlated with the large number of search company CEOs.

Update 11-12-2005 16:10 PST - more from John Batelle, Dan Farber, Om Malik, plus a pointer to an Information Week article with the quote from Eric Schmidt regarding domain knowledge requirements for law and health search (via Tony Gentile)

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