Search SIG: Battelle on Search

Thanks to the 200 people who joined us for the November session of the Search SIG (at least 30% of them working on a new vertical search play - based on a show of hands I did before the panel).
I found it extremely interesting and engaging, and want to thank Dan Farber, Adam Beguelin, Pete Flint, Gautam Modwhani and Tony Gentile for this. A special and warm thank you goes to our host, John Battelle who despite family circumstances managed to be with us, and share his views and “tough” questions regarding the vertical search space.

There was really a lot of good thoughts covered during the two sessions. The one that made a lot of sense to me was Gautam's statement that vertical search engines will grow in footprint and differentiation through value added features that can be deemed "search applications" - where the search part becomes a utility, and what matters is the semantic and the business/community process. Nothing surprising: this happened with databases and structured data a while back. There was a time when the value was in the ability to store and retrieve data in a structured manner, albeit through very crude UIs and tools - they are now a pure utility and value is many layers above.

Here are a few posts related to our session:

• John Battelle: From Service to Application
• Dan Farber/Between the Lines: Search engines turning into applications
• Om Malik/GigaOM:  Web 2.0 Exit… what is that? (Make sure to go through the comments)
• Josh Jaffe/TechConfidential: Vertical search gets crowded
• Mike Arrington/CrunchNotes:  Battelle talk at Search SIG
• Ian Kennedy: SD Forum Search SIG, Privacy Wall
• Jean Bedford: Next Generation for Search: The  Money is Flowing

Some of my own pictures:

   
John Battelle & Dan Farber           200+ attendees!             John kicking off the panel

 
     Kevin Burton hacking        The panel: Gautam, Pete,
           TailRank                            Adam and Tony

Tag: SearchSIG