great takes on family travel in the U.S.

Charles Knight of Read/Write/Web launched the first Alt Search Engine Day at the Intercontinental Hotel today. Nearly 100 representatives from the alt search world attended.

The day consisted of a series of panels, interspersed with networking opportunities. This is a brief recap of the event. The gathering was casual, collaborative environment. No powerpoints, panel discussions only. If you want to see photos of the event, go here. The main topics discussed were:

1. Federated search for alt search–finding us all in one place
2. User’s First: Give them WHAT they want, the WAY they want (and need)–How to improve user experience
3. Re-aggregation of User Generated Content Intent–how to use all the UGC efficiently
4. Monetization and the Next Five Years–a round-up and more in depth discussion of earler panelist’s points
5. Making Search Visual–no more lists of irrelevent results, visuals instead with better results
6. Semantic search–creating ontologies that work

The key opportunity for alt search is to improve relevancy overall. The question remains, once we accomplish that, will the users embrace us? The first three panels will be recapped today and the following three tomorrow.

The first panel discussed the opportunity for a federated search solution for alternative search. Many panelists discussed their approach to semantic search, the use of ontologies to improve search results .

Panel 1-Federated Search for Alt Search Engines
Panelists-Charles Knight of RWW/Alt Search Engine Blog, Richard McManus of RWW, Nitin Karanikar, Software Abstractions Blog, Henrik Kac of Blog Dimension

Charles of RWW/Alt Search Engine introduced the panel. In his opinion, we need a single federated search for alternative search. It would help him and give consumers a single location to find all the new search sources. Right now, consumers have Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask plus 227 alternative search engines to select. The alt search engine market share is 1.7%, he suggested that this could grow by working together to create a single interface.

He suggested a few ideas from the web:
Sputtr-can create an alt search engine home page with logos and names only.
Symbaloo-gives the name and the type of the search engine, which he found helpful. It is also customizable.
CityPixels-use them to allow a person to intuitively understand where to find information
Multiverse.net-is where he would go to build to build a home page to show people how to find a vertical search engine.

I found the idea intriguing, the audience was thoughtfully quiet in its response.

The next panelist, Nitin Karandikar, Software Abstractions Blog wrote about this concept the other day.

He said that there is a lot of creative innovation within alt search world and we are forcing the big search engines to be as innovative to stay ahead. He too suggested a single search destination that can compete with the behemoths. Can we cooperate while we are competing? He made five points. Henrik added the sixth.

1. Create federated search site for complementary search engines
2. As the content of the web explodes, it is becoming expensive to build an index. We can support a collaborative index.
3. Google UI is becoming ingrained in consumer’s mind. We may need to collaborate to educate consumers about a better UI.
4. Create industry benchmarks to measure relevance across search engines.
5. Always logged in web-develop a method where context can be carried between complementary search engines
6. Our content should be available anywhere at any time on any device and we should envision a utopia of search working while we sleep…

Wrap-up-Charles thinks Google has stayed too long with the linear search. Kids growing up today will be looking for 3D virtual worlds-a non linear approach to search will be needed to accommodate the next generation.

Panel 2-User’s First: Give them WHAT they want, the WAY they want (and need)

Jaideep Singh of Spock, David Hardtke of SurfCanyon, Rob Rustad of Collarity, Gerd Zobel of HealthPricer Interactive, Siva Kumar of thefind.com.

Each panelist discussed their site’s approach to improving the user experience from: behavioral analysis, real time personalizationunderstanding intent through semantic analysis, or by determining and delivering the most trustworthy vendors and products.

Q: How do you provide a better user experience?

Collarity-Uses a holistic approach to search by using behavioral analysis. They have a long term approach to search. Results over time reflect the views of the largest community, the most users and largest segment of content. Collarity sees all things on the page as equal until they see the audience move through the page (ads and content are equal). For example, they can follow a core group that likes video and if that group likes a specific video, they infer that the rest of the consumers will follow.
Surf Canyon-Deliver instantaneous relevancy. This means they tailor the search as people are searching–aka real time personalization. They dynamically modify the page as you skip through the results. Surf Canyon currently works with Google, Microsoft & Yahoo.
Spock- focuses on people search (baseball players, actors, business associates, friends) and delivers a strong visual experience. Try to understand users’ intent by determining if we are looking for the attribute of a person or a name. For instance, they understand a search for a person like Barbara Boxer or a search for entrepreneurs.

Thefind.com, a shopping search engine-built the engine around how the majority of online shoppers (women) shop for lifestyle items which is not necessarily price-based. They also have 220 million items in the database, much bigger than any competitor.

Healthpricer-built a technology focused on trustworthy merchants delivering trustworthy products, this is especially important in the medical world.

Q: How do you measure a successful experience? The panelists gave a laundry list of measurement tools:

–Unique visits
–Page views
–Qualitative-bounce rate, time spent on site, page views, click outs
–Competitive metrics
–Long term engagement–Repeat audience, referrals, etc.
–Judgement
–Baseline comparison to Google is standard(but may not work for some)

In summary, all agreed, make decisions optimized for the customer for accessing and creating the content and the traffic and revenue will follow.

Panel 3-Reaggregation of User Generated Content

Elliott Ng, Uptake.com, Britta Meyer, Eurekster, Bret Taylor of Friendfeed, Jay Bhatti of Spock, Yen Lee, Uptake.com

The panel began with a brief review of how each participant works with user generated content and each gave samples. The audience was invited to ask questions:

Q: How do you get the public engaged and involved with a site with user generated content?
Make it very easy. Make it fun & entertaining to add content. Encourage content that enhances search and data quality by incenting your participants.

Q: How do you reward participants?
Spock-Uses an incentive program called ” Spock Power.” Leaders get to be on the ‘leader’ board.
Eurekster-Noted that people vote more readily than post a comment. It is essential to make it easy for people to vote, for instance require no registration for voting, but require voting for content contribution because it requires more editorial control on the content.

Q: Does voting add value without registration?
Eurekster–yes, voting on Eurekster improves search relevancy.
Friendfeed–The more difficult it is to contribute content by the user, the better the contribution.

Uptake–Some travel sites like Expedia require that you stay there before you can write a review. As a result, reviews are fantastic. TripAdvisor allows anyone to contribute– from an joyous customer to a malicious competitor and the vendor, themselves, as a result their review quality varies widely.

Q: How do you avoid “vandalism”?
Eurekster-not a problem right now. It is moderated by the swicki publisher.
UpTake-If data set is large enough, then it is difficult to corrupt the data.

Q: How do you provide value immediately to the publisher?
1. Make sure interests are aligned with your publisher
2. Provide attribution, use thumbnails, use snippets, respect the trademark laws
3. Be respectful of the requests that may come in from publishers & partners you want in the eco-system.

Q: Do you see value based on the authority of the source?
UpTake-analyzes the source, the contributor and weights them based on authority. For example,
Content from the NY Times travel columnist will trump the Trip Advisor user. UpTake also looks at a particular individual’s comments and how they relate to the mean.

Q: What is an example of a site that exemplifies the best use of UGC?
This was difficult to answer. Friendfeed suggested sites improve with the number of users on the site and develop systems to incent better content.

Q: How does UGC translate into traffic and dollars?
Uptake-it is about traffic in travel, the ontology & catalog drives the traffic
Spock-if UGC does not enhance search, it has to be tweaked. Need better quality content than other search engines
Friendfeed-we are not a search product, UGC is the core of our business and the driver of traffic, without it we don’t exist.

In summary, UGC can be monetized and can add a great deal of value to the users’ search experience especially if search delivers relevant results from the ever expanding user generated content on the web.

UPDATE:  Working on Part 2