great takes on family travel in the U.S.

Here are a few photos from this morning’s Conde Nast World Savers Congress to give you a sense of what the event looks like.  Also on my Flickr photostream.  I’ll try to keep updating this with more pictures throughout the day.

Awards:

Klara Glowczewska introducing the conference and Matt Damon’s work:

Andrea Ross of Journeys Within

Standing next to her is Narla Phay, who is a graduate of their first class of programs and now is on the Board of Directors of their community foundation, JourneyWithinOurCommunity.org.

Wendy Perrin blogged about Conde Nast Traveler’s efforts to recognize travel industry players doing innovative things to bringing social responsibility to their business.  She invited bloggers to attend the Conde Nast savers Congress (press release here)so I decided to invite myself to the event and get myself New York to cover it!

The awards were announced in the September issue of Conde Nast Traveler and can be found on the web here.

So what is "social responsibility"?  Conde Nast has organized this concept into five categories:

• - Poverty - creating economic opportunities for people in poor countries
  - Preservation - positive impact on the environment
  - Education - providing educational opportunities
  - Wildlife - sustain wildlife habitat
  - Health - access to healthcare and services

I’m seated next to Pam Mandel of NerdsEyeView who was invited to live-tweet the conference!  Follow her on Twitter to see her tweets.

Agenda for the Day
7:30 a.m. – Registration & Breakfast
8:30 a.m. – Opening Remarks by Condé Nast Traveler Editor in Chief Klara Glowczewska
8:45 a.m. — Keynote Address by Jeffrey D. Sachs
9:00 a.m. – World Savers Awards Winners Announced, by Klara Glowczewska
9:50 a.m. – Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award Winner Announced
10:00 a.m. – Breakout Panels

Panel 1 - The Consumer: Is Social Responsibility Smart Business?
Panelists:
Robert Katz, CEO, Vail Resorts
Sven Lindblad, Founder and President, Lindblad Expeditions
Adam Steward, CEO, Sandals Resorts International
Tensie Whelan, Executive Director, Rainforest Alliance
NEW - Andrea Ross, Director of Tours and Marketing, Journeys Within
Moderator: Wendy Perrin, Consumer News Editor, Condé Nast Traveler

Panel 2 - Technology: How Green Can You Be?
Panelists:
Susan Chapman, Global Head of Operations, Citi Realty Services
Daniel J. Hanrahan, President, Celebrity Cruises
John MacKinnon, Senior Vice President, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
William McDonough, Founding Principal, William McDonough & Partners
NEW - Dennis W. Quaintance, CEO and Chief Design Officer, Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants & Hotels

Lunch

12:00 noon – Lunch
12:30 p.m. – Ashley Judd announcement regarding Conde Nast Traveler’s Five & Alive Fund

Keynote

1:00 p.m. – Keynote Address by Queen Rania

1:30 p.m. Breakout Panels
Panel 1 - China: Expansion and Accountability

Panelists:
Barbara Finamore, Director, Natural Resources Defense Council’s China Clean Energy Program
Edwin D. Fuller, President and Managing Director of International Lodging, Marriott International
Albert Ng, CEO, WildChina
Orville Schell, Director, Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations
Moderator: Dorinda Elliott, Deputy Editor, Special Projects, Condé Nast Traveler

Panel 2 - The Middle East:  Development and the Road to Peace
Lyndall De Marco, Executive Director, International Tourism Partnership
Maha Khatib, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Jordan
Gerald Lawless, Executive Chairman, Jumeirah
Mounir S. Neamatalla, Founder, Environmental Quality International (EQI) and Siwa Sustainable Development Initiative
NEW - Malia Asfour, Director, Jordan Tourism Board in North America
Moderator: Susan Hack, Contributing Editor, Condé Nast Traveler

So you spend $18,500 to launch with 70+ startups on a big, prestigious launch event.  Then blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t even going to be there because he is watching another 50+ startups at another launch event, says that almost all the 70+ Websites that are part of that show basically sucks.  Its enough to make a grown man cry.

Well, Robert, TravelMuse doesn’t suck.  In fact, Travolution said if TravelMuse sucks, then there isn’t hope for 100s of others. And according to travel industry blogger Alex Bainbridge, they are unveiling their secret plans, showing the world they are more than Yet Another Travel Content Site (YATCS?) and in fact are rolling out workflow tools to aid travelers in the complex travel planning process.  Well maybe Robert Scoble didn’t get it, but we’ve been on to TravelMuse’s secret plans for world domination for some time now, and blogged about it here, here, and here.  That’s why we partnered with them!

TravelMuse launches TravelMuse Planner

The TravelMuse Planner is the next installment in the suite of planning tools TravelMuse is developing.  Here’s a screenshot from their press kit that shows how the TravelMuse planner allows multiple people to collaborate on trip planning if they are all part of TravelMuse.

Once you have created multiple itineraries, you can manage them in a queue using drag-and-drop to rearrange and move them around.

It’s a logical extension of what TravelMuse has already done with the bookmarking widget that we’ve choosen to incorporate into the UpTake site, even in advance of our own pre-alpha trip folder feature.  It allows you to bookmark content from across the Web–including the hotels, alternative lodging, things to do, beaches and restaurants at UpTake– and manage and save all of that into one trip itinerary or many.  Trip plans can be managed by dragging and dropping different items from one day to another.  Then you can manage the trip planning process with your friends and family who are involved in the process.  Sharing out the trip plans with friends and family will allow everyone to contribute their ideas.

How is this different from TripIt and other itinerary tools?

By combining TravelMuse Planner with their Inspiration Finder and Bookmarking Widget, TravelMuse aims to be useful during the early-stages of trip planning, before anything is even booked.  In our own research, we have found that people do a tremendous amount of trip planning, in fact visiting over 22 sites and using Web search over 12 times, according to a comScore/Google study.  Post-booking organizational tools like TripIt are fundamentally different from TravelMuse because they are looking to help you organize your itinerary AFTER you have booked it.  So you could conceivably use both TravelMuse and TripIt.  Dopplr is probably more useful in the early planning stage, but its really about discovering what your friends are doing and doesn’t have the same bookmarking tools that TravelMuse has.  Dopplr’s strength is that it comes bundled with a social network.  TravelMuse, like TripIt, requires you to email invite your friends to share your itinerary.  On the other hand, my wife won’t even use Facebook and I don’t have any friends on Dopplr anyway (friend me please!) so maybe this isn’t such a big advantage.

Solving the Travel Planning problem is hard–its going to take a village to be successful!

We’ve been happy to work with TravelMuse because they have an open, collaborative approach and share our philosophy that its going to take many different approaches, and lots of consumer choice, before travel planning can improve in a big way.  Our travel meta-search approach is complementary with TravelMuse because once you’ve made a decision with UpTake, you still need the find the right tool for the right job.  There is no way that UpTake alone can provide enough for everyone to complete the trip planning process, and we think the TravelMuse Planner provides a great choice for people to inspire, to plan, and to share trip planning information so they can have better vacations.

Congrats to the TravelMuse team for another exciting chapter in their launch!

Sheila Scarborough (About her, Twitter, LinkedIn) has developed one of the top family travel blog franchises out there, previously at http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Seafarer/ on BootsnAll. On August 18, she moved out of her comfy old home and into a fresh new domain called FamilyTravelLogue. Frankly I can’t think of a bigger stressor for a Website owner or blogger than moving your domain! I know, cause we just went through with this at UpTake.

Sheila told me that she is focused on independent family travel for “non-Martha Stewart” parents! Not sure what that means, but I have loved the independent, can-do, spirited, “grab life by the horns” feel of the blog.

The blog has the following areas of focus:

FamilyTravelLogue Accomodations include:

• All-inclusive resorts
• Hotels for Families
• Resorts

Theme parks:

• Six Flags
• Walt Disney World

Vacation ideas:

• Beach vacations
• Road trips

Destinations

• all over the place!

Travel guide with specific topics like:

• Travel insurance
• Why travel with kids?

This last category is something that many of us feel strongly about here at UpTake. Some of Sheila’s thoughts:

For the enjoyment of travel with kids to outweigh the aggravation, you must thrill to the demands of teaching and the delights of discovery. You must be willing to make up your own lesson plans and be able to appreciate having the entire planet as a classroom.

Finally, you have to enjoy being a teacher even when your student doesn’t grasp the lesson immediately, or even that day/month/year….

Patience has never been one of my virtues, but through my travels with two very different children, I have learned that things sink in when you would least expect, and that’s why you must gently persist, sometimes even in the face of intractable opposition….

Kids learn that there is no substitute for actually being there. There’s nothing more magical than being able to say, “I’ve stood on that spot and met those people and eaten their food and learned about their history.” Every continent becomes your children’s neighborhood.

With enough travel and exploration, they are at home in the world.

As a parent, that is the finest reward.

Amen. As a dad with a 2-year old and a 6-year old, I know it can be a PITA to take the kids along. But equipping my kids with a global perspective is one of the best things that I think I can do as a dad. And, by the way, I’m not going to let them stop me travel anyway, so they might as well come along!

Dear friends, please help us tell The Google where we are.

Well, we did it. In March, we shared that we were changing our name from Kango to UpTake. We weren’t happy about having to do this, but we stopped whining and got over it. But we were too busy with our public beta launch in May that we put off the actual redirect of the Kango site to UpTake until now. On Friday 8/23, we flipped the switch.

Now our Google and Yahoo! traffic is GONE!!!

Ok I’m being a bit overdramatic, its not all gone. But its well known that when you do something called a “301 permanent redirect” it takes a little time before you recover. Its as if you are lost to Google. The 301 redirect tells Google where to look, but it takes some time before Google eventually believes what you are telling it. Please find us Google, and please believe that our new domain is a good one! (ritual Google rain dance)

Case Study: eMomsatHome.com switches to Sparkplugging.com

I follow Wendy Piersall (@emom) on Twitter. As Founder of eMomsatHome.com, Wendy decided that she needed to rebrand her site to set it up for broader marketplace success. And she picked a great name, Sparkplugging. Her post entitled “What I wish I had known about Naming a Website and Changing a Domain Name” shares some insights into the process and Wendy also has a nice interview in ProBlogger about her rebranding.

Wendy also knew that there would be a loss of Google traffic:

I knew it was coming - and I really thought I prepared myself adequately. But within 6 days of changing our domain name, even though every single page was redirected accurately, we lost 90% of our traffic from the search engines. And although I won’t tell you just how much that was, suffice it to say that I didn’t sleep for a couple of weeks.

Now, we’re in the “When we’re not Sleeping Zone”

I can’t share our traffic graphs because we’re a venture backed company, etc. etc.   But we’re about 1 centimeter to the left of the “When I Didn’t Sleep” arrow on Wendy’s chart! So looks like we have some sleepless nights ahead. And I’m already pretty sleep deprived from the Olympics!

How you can help.

There is a way you can help. By telling Google you love us.

Google assesses the trust of a new domain based on the links that it receives. With a 301 permanent redirect, Google will eventually credit the links from Kango.com to UpTake, but that will take some time. Fresh, new legitimate links from relevant sites to the new domain may us get our mojo faster back with Google!

We’ve reorganized our content around different topics. With Hotels, Lodging, and general vacation ideas that includes:

• Hotels
• Family Hotels
• Romantic Hotels
• Pet Friendly Hotels
• Camping
• Bed and Breakfasts
• Family Vacations
• Romantic Vacations
• and many more…

With Attractions and things to do, that includes

• general things to do on vacation
• Family things to do
• Romantic and free things to do
• Golf Courses
• Spas
• Parks
• Theme parks
• Beaches
• and many more…

If any of these topics are interesting and can be woven into a blog post, a blogroll, or some other link on your site, it will tell Google that you love us and that they should crawl us again!

I know we will be ok eventually, but with your link love and support, maybe we get Google moving a bit faster.

Thanks in advance and the love will be returned if you ever find yourself in this situation.

UpTake’s mission is to provide the best way to sift and filter through all the travel information, lodging options, and attractions that people need plan a great trip. But in our research, we’ve learned that trip-planning is a complex, circuitous workflow that can differ based on the type of trip or the type of traveler. TravelMuse is one of those companies that are trying to tackle this complex process.

Question: What’s new with TravelMuse?

TravelMuse just announced a new trip planning widget called “Plan-It!” that is kind of like the “Delicious” of travel. You can bookmark pages that you see on the Web and pull it into your TravelMuse Planner.

Question: Isn’t this competitive with UpTake?

No, in fact its complementary. UpTake has already created the comprehensive catalog of travel content out there, based on over 1000 sites. If you are using UpTake, why wouldn’t we you to bookmark our content so you can find it again?

Question: Does this mean you won’t create a trip planner or a bookmarking tool?

No, we never promised to Kevin (TravelMuse’s CEO) that we wouldn’t also have a bookmarklet or planner! In fact, we have one in private alpha. But our philosophy is to give our users choice, and when Kevin came to us with this option, we wanted to stay true to our philosophy by offering access to 3rd party tools like TravelMuse.

Actually, what we really want to focus on is a tool that will allow our users to post reviews to whatever site they are already using. We want to keep our platform open and complementary, and only in that way will we create a great service for travel planners out there.

Question: How does it work?

Over the last week, according to our Google Analytics, one of our top 50 destinations is Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So lets say you are looking for Gatlinburg Hotels, and you discover the MountainLoft which has some pretty good reviews at TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Orbitz, and Yahoo:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you see the Plan-It widget:

The Plan-It Widget pops you to a new page on TravelMuse that allows you to add it to a Trip Plan. The name of the hotel and the link have already been added:

Note that you don’t have to sign up to use this. That’s pretty slick. You just enter your email and TravelMuse will partially register you pending email confirmation. I already have an account, so I’ll log in and add it to a new trip plan. I repeated this process with some activities I found in UpTake, like the Gatlinburg Space Needle, Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies, Gatlinburg Guiness World of Records.

Once I’m at TravelMuse, I can add more information based on what I found in TravelMuse, to the TravelMuse Planner.

This is a partner friendly solution because the links in the TravelMuse planner go back to UpTake, where people can book their trip. Of course, in the process of exploring the editorialicious travel content of TravelMuse, you may find other hotels or activities to book!

This is just the beginning of our experiment in taking an open source approach toward travel innovation, and partnering with other visionary companies to solve the huge, complex problem of travel planning!

What other cool features does TravelMuse have?

This is what Jennifer Hwang of TravelMuse said:

• Original editorial content written by seasoned journalists and local experts
• Destination guides with more than 100,000 points of interest, plus stunning photography
• Inspiration Finder helps people discover and plan their best trips based upon their specific wants, needs and constraints
• TravelMuse Planner provides a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research.

TravelMuse has done an exceptional job integrating Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos into their site. They also have nice destination guides for the top destinations.

Look forward to working even more closely with TravelMuse and other travel planning companies in the future.

I had a chance to meet with the Juha Huttunen and Leo Koivulehto when they came to the April Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I was especially excited because they were from Finland. American competitiveness in the post-American world depends on our ability to attract foreign entrepreneurs like Juha and Leo to build successful businesses in the U.S. and/or targeting the U.S. market. So I’m excited about the progress they have made with TripSay .

We also shared our passion for travel and the different and complementary strategies that UpTake and TripSay are taking. At UpTake, we are a travel search solution focused on aggregating word-of-mouth across all travel communities out there, including TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and TripSay. TripSay, on the other hand, is pioneering social travel tools to enable you to get filtered tips and recommendations from a network of passionate travelers and your friends.

TripSay is just getting started. Be forwarned that social travel “is about the people” so TripSay feels like a bar or club where you’ve arrived about an hour before the rest of the crowd is coming. So it will feel more full of life once more people sign up.

TripSay Groups is a nice way to get started if you don’t have many friends

The issue with new social sites is building up your network from your existing friend base or connecting with people with similar interests. Groups are a great way to get started if your friends haven’t adopted TripSay yet.

Examples of Groups

I joined the hiking, beachbums, and New York City groups.

Tips from the Group

Within the group, people can offer tips. You can also add tips to destinations and things to do when you add them to your profile. For interest-based groups, the tips are pretty spread out across geography. But for a destination specific group, like New York City, there is the potential for group members to share tips with each other with a focus on that destination.

Group News Feed

You can also see a group “news feed” that highlights what the group members are doing within the TripSay site. This is very Facebook-like in seeing what other people are doing. As people build relationships with other group members

Group Message Board

Groups also have a new message board where people can share ideas and ask questions.

Maps-Based Approach is Great for Discovery

TripSay also has a nice maps based approach that allows you to find other points of interest or destinations. Its graphically interesting and complementary to the search-based approach that we have taken. It is somewhat reminiscent of TripAdvisor’s well hidden map-view of products, but more community-driven, or new entrant PlanetEye .

Other Social Travel Sites

I confess I haven’t spent as much time looking at other Social Travel sites other than TripSay. But here is a list of some others that might have different strengths and good ideas.

• WAYN - Largest, most succesful social network for search
• TravBuddy - Well established travel social network with forums, blogs, community.
• Dopplr - social network of frequent travelers, share upcoming itineraries and trips
• RealTravel - travel blogging platform
• Tripwiser - focusing on road trips, people create itineraries, sort of like Yahoo Travel! Planner
• Tripwolf - New travel social network that just announced 10,000 users.
• YowTRIP - looking for investment; finding travel partners; experts, groups, good tips and good travel companions.
• Hereorthere - travel blogging site with community comments
• Driftr - photo oriented sharing site, create your itinerary, share phtos, tag items. Sort of like real Travel and yahoo! Planner
• TripTie - remixing travel itineraries. users share trip itneraries and then you can use that to create your own

Congrats again to TripSay! We wish them success in this new phase of their company!

First of all congratulations to Yahoo! “Rebel Alliance” for taking this first step on what might be a disruptive move to compete against the Don’t-Be-Evil Empire! (h/t Dave McClure who coined this phrase). Now you will have to Use The Force and go much further to power an industry of distinctively unique Alternative Search Engines, like Uptake. (Disclosure: we are not using BOSS but plan to evaluate BOSS Custom for our use on providing backfill results)

BOSS: one of Yahoo!’s last hopes

Photo courtesy: Revell.de

But it took more than an X-Wing to destroy the Death Star. It Took the Force.

Here are the salient features of BOSS and where we think it has to go further to truly power innovative new search experiences.

Three levels, but only BOSS Custom has real potential for a highly differentiated service offering.

There are three levels to the BOSS program, according to SearchEngineWatch:

• self-service API
• BOSS University for academics
• BOSS Custom, designed for companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies. Or alternative, companies with proprietary data that can help as an additional signal that factors into relevancy.

I’ll go over all the aspects of the BOSS program below, and then come back to BOSS Custom as evidence that Yahoo! just might Use The Force. But the basic features looks like a free version of Google Custom Search Engine.

Four primary functions of search are addressed by BOSS

TechCrunch highlights these 4 functions of search that BOSS provides as service:

This is a good framework. Lets start with indexing and crawling.

Crawling and Indexing: Not the real barrier to vertical search

According to Yahoo! Bill Michels, as reported by ReadWriteWeb, “niche search engines often aren’t very good because they have access to a very limited index of content. It’s expensive to index the whole web.” This is just wrong, in my opinion. It may be expensive but that isn’t why niche search engines haven’t been successful.

Lowering the cost of crawling can be good for startups, of course. However, with cloud services and vendors leveraging low cost computing and crawling, crawling is already becoming a commodity. In building Uptake, “buying the web wholesale” is the least of our worries especially because we are focused on one vertical.

We have used a stealth mode vendor to crawl the entire Web and build the most comprehensive structured database of travel products, at least 30% larger than any other source, and it didn’t take us $300 million to do that. According to SearchEngineLand, there is a vendor called CommonCrawl who aims to provide a complete index of the Web on a white label basis. So “buying the web wholesale” is possible today.

Building a repository of documents is only the beginning. The key is extracting meaning from the documents (and the relationships between the documents) to power your ranking algorithm.

Ranking: Some new ability, but still built on top of a black box

Building a ranking model for a specific purpose is probably the most difficult task for a search startup. BOSS can help jumpstart a new companies effort by providing an acceptable but not differentiated result.

Ranking: Add your own search signals so you can re-rank results

Proprietary signals are needed to deliver better precision through better ranking matched against user intent for any given query. BOSS breaks new ground by allowing you to add and blend your own search signals into Yahoo!’s black box. Example from SearchEngineLand:

Me.dium is the example highlighted by Yahoo! Silicon Alley Insider points out that Me.dium is adding social signals to Yahoo! ranking and calling it “Social Search” which ironically is “using a name Yahoo! has already attached to a failed product.” VentureBeat has a more positive spin on the Me.dium demo application, although Dan Kaplan concludes:

The question that hangs over Yahoo, BOSS, and Me.dium is whether or not any search player will really be able to change user behavior and get people to consistently use something other than Google; the results would probably have to be a noticeable leap forward, and even then, it would be hard to break Googling habits.

Dan is absolutely right, and BOSS will have to go a lot further to deliver a true “leap forward.”

Ability to blend results:

In addition to re-ranking, Yahoo! BOSS also allows you to blend results. This has potential for much more interesting SERPs that are more tailored for a specific vertical or search intent state.

Blend: Mashup Framework

As an added plus, Yahoo! is providing the BOSS Mashup Framework. According to Yahoo! Search Blog: “We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data source”

Blend: Web, news, and image search availability at launch

This seems like table stakes. Vanessa Fox at SearchEngineLand points out that at first glance, the API looks similar to Google custom search API and Microsoft’s Live Search API

Query handling

This is also a big challenge for new search startups. Yahoo!’s service provides for this as part of the overall service. But as far as I can tell there is no way to insert one’s own query parsing into Yahoo!’s so as to affect the search results. UPDATE from Huanjin Chen: I guess a developer can always use his/her own GUI to get the user query and parse it and then form a Yahoo query. If so, the developer can insert his/her own query handling.

Presentation: Total flexibility on presentation

According to Yahoo! Search Blog: “Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements” This means no attribution required! But this is a red herring because…

Business Model: Advertising strings attached

According to GigaOm, you have to use Yahoo! Search Advertising. And Om makes the point:

Notably, they are asking startups to sign up for their search monetization system — the very same system that is going to use Google to drum up ads. That isn’t a very confidence-inspiring move. And if this monetization tool was so great, Yahoo wouldn’t be in the kind of trouble it’s in.

Indexing of the Semantic Web not included.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb asked if the indexing of the semantic web would be included, and they said not. But this is no big deal because semantic tags and microformats have yet to be adopted in a huge way by the most important sites, who would rather focus on traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google rather than use immature tools to expose semantic meaning.

Business Model: Unlimited queries

Business model friendly pricing, although you have to sign up for their advertising platform.

BOSS Custom: Now you’re talking about Using The Force

Everything above was just for the Jedi Apprentice. But if you are going to confront the Dark Side, you need BOSS Custom. Here’s what they provide and why it is critical (and may or may not be far enough):

Near real-time indexing of public or proprietary content

Real-time indexing is appropriate for time-sensitive information like news and blogs. This could be an advantage over other wholesale crawling and indexing methods that other private label providers are providing.

Blending training datasets to produce advanced, customized ranking models that scale to the Web

This is probably one of the most interesting aspects of BOSS custom. This suggests that a training dataset and our own proprietary signals can be integrated into the Yahoo!’s existing ranking models. So the real question is: how much of that ranking model will be opened up for tuning by the search startup?

Federating web and proprietary content in a single search display

This can already be achieved using Google Custom Search Engine in a rudimentary way. The larger issue is that most proprietary content in structured databases are not just unstructured (or semi-structured) Web documents but more structured database objects with attributes. How does BOSS Custom make it easy to integrated the right Web pages with the right products, without really understanding what entities are on those Web pages?

Integrating query suggestions (Search Assist technology)

Query parsing services is one of the most interesting aspects of BOSS Custom. Search Assist is very well done already, and if it could be integrated with our custom, industry-specific ontology.

Leveraging highly trained query and document categorizers

Also very interesting, if indeed this is being opened up to developers. Our own query categorizers are still fairly early stage and if we could understand Yahoo!’s query categorizers work and could integrated our own understanding of natural language into that categorizer, this could be a real accelerator for us in parsing queries better.

Structured search (range queries, refinement)

This sounds interesting, but I’m sceptical that the horizontal approach to refinement will provide for a truly differentiated experience unless the specific needs of that customer, as captured in an ontology, can be integrated into the refinement controls provided for by BOSS Custom.

UPDATE: Here are some additional thoughts from our China search team and Huanjin Chen, our search architect:

Structured search and query/document categorizers can be useful tools for driving improved relevance for niche search engines. There are many ways of making search results more relevant. One is to understand the user intention better and refine the search, which structured search addresses. Another way is to build the ontology/taxonomy/directory to classify queries and documents, which can benefit from the categorizer.

Unlimited queries are essential to build a commercial search engine. Google search API might be more structured and flexible than Yahoo’s, but they only allow 50K queries per day. Potentially, a search engine could use both. One could build ontology using Google’s search API, and then use Yahoo BOSS for user search results.

Yahoo also does not allow access to their ranking signals. Agreed, this is a huge limitation, but it is understandable. The Yahoo ranking order is still useful. At minimum, one could use it as one of the relevance factors. If one can query Yahoo search engine in different ways, then one can kind of guess their ranking signals. The drawback is that multiple queries may be a performance concern.

Crawling is not a barrier to vertical search engine. It is true. However, first, it still makes an under-funded startup to get start easily; second, Yahoo data helps on time-sensitive data; third, some startups may want to try semi-horizontal market, such as content for kids and shopping, which is more costly to crawl.

New search startups have to take a different approach to differentiate from Google and Yahoo! How will BOSS support this?

Huanjin: In general, I think this is a very important event for all search startups. It opens new opportunities. Google has pushed search relevance to the limit that the current approach can achieve. To significantly improve the search relevance, we have to take drastically different approaches, i.e., not solely by keyword matching, not solely by statistical signals, and not treating every user the same. My take on the direction of search technology is

(1) Meaning based (semantic and/or syntactic).

(2) Context aware. The same word means different things in different contexts.

(3) Must be able to treat different users differently

(4) Opinion based.

(5) Leverage human knowledge base

The BOSS Custom roadmap needs to envision supporting these innovative approaches, because that is the only way that new startups can create a reason for people to leave their horizontal search engine like Google and adopt an alternative.

UPDATE:  Andrew Chen’s take is totally on target

Andrew Chen makes the point that Yahoo! BOSS just allows search mashups, and what Yahoo! really needs to do is open up their search and network traffic:

Andrew:  “The extreme approach - well not even that extreme these days, given Facebook - would be to let developers build extensions to the search engine that actually run on top of the *.yahoo.com domain. They can provide an API, do app approvals, and direct only small bits of traffic to each app to test them out - then ramp up the ones that perform better than anything else. There are difficult pieces necessary to make this work, but if done well, it has the potential to change the search game by letting developers target small groups of queries the way that advertisers have been able to.”

But when Marshall Kirkpatrick asked about this, Yahoo! responded “oh, that’s a different department.”  Will Yahoo! bring their disparate fiefdoms together into one integrated strategy to truly Use the Force?!

And much, much more…

This will be interesting. BOSS and BOSS Custom is a bold, dynamic approach to the ever-increasing hegemony of the Don’t Be Evil Empire! Competition is good and we wish Yahoo! the best of luck. Our advice is to Use The Force and go far enough to equip players like us to create highly differentiated experiences from general search.

Death Star here we come!

Source: Wikipedia