Reportlinker's blog : Web 3.0, Vertical Search, Information Industry and Market Research News

The International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the University of Calgary organize the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007).

Organized by the IW3C2 since 1994, the WWW conference is the annual gathering place of the international community to discuss and debate the future evolution of the Web.

Two interesting things this year :

1. Tim Berners-Lee, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, has been confirmed as a plenary speaker. He will speak about the "Two Magics of Web Science"
2. A workshop is organised on "Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization", during which Semkey, a semantic collaborative tagging system, will be analysed.

Pandia search news published this week a very interesting interview of Andrew Goodman on the future of Google and the search engine industry. Andrew is the conference chairman of the forthcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto in June.

Without clearly naming it, Andrew gives different keys regarding the Web 3.0.

He explains where general search engine limits are, taking the example of the so called invisible web. We’re supposed to think that shining a light on all information is unproblematic, but of course it isn’t.

He also gives its opinion on how Google is setting up personalized search. Done right, it’s a natural extension of what search ought to be. The lite version of course simply orients results to likely intent, geography, etc.; it helps disambiguate queries.

But Andrew, as François Schiettecatte, is pointing privacy concern we can have through the way Google is personalizing search. Reportlinker, and new entrants in the web 3.0 in using tags provided by semantic technologies make easier the browsing through document without gathering users personal information.

We do not have much information on how google is doing (well, if anyone has, he still can leave a comment here !), but one thing is sure. Google "Big Brother" reputation will make them difficult to implement such technology !

SCIP’s 2007 International Annual Conference & Exhibition is your opportunity to enhance your skills and increase your value. You can select from over 70 sessions divided among five key tracks of education necessary for the competitive intelligence professional. In addition, you will have access to 22 pre- and post-conference workshops for more intensive and hands-on professional development.

Two news were published last week, telling that search engine are mixing "classical" with news results into their results pages.

The start up Hakia (Founded in 2004, based in New York City) has developed a Web’s new meaning-based search engine, utilizing a semantic approach to deliver search results. Basically, Hakia is running its search engine since several months, and announced this week an increases of News Content Volume by 100%. Thus, Hakia is the First Search Engine to Mix News with Web Search Results !

Google also announced its desire to do so. At the moment, as Google news bot crawl sites fastest that Googlebot, Google will add news results in a top box. But news and other results will be merge in a near future.

So we can wonder why search engines are today using this strategy ? The answer is detailled in the Hakia blog. Using this strategy is the "only proper way of handling long tail searches". That also gives a clue to bloggers that are wondering if Google use semantic technology into its results. Because matching web pages with news, without over ranking one of this type of content, can only be done with a semantic search engine....

Red Herring published at the beggining of April an article called "First Semantic Search Engine?" The technology business newspaper is asking an essential question on the future of this market : Are the newcomers, such as Zoominfo or Reportlinker, the first ever semantic search engine ?

The answer is YES ! The new vertical search engine structures open access information already on the web, which is a true revolution. Industry leaders, such as Google and Yahoo are able to offer you the broadest database of results (12 Billion pages ??).... But soon, only search engine experts will be able to find out what they are looking for in this mountains of data, even if experts agree to say that Google is probably already using semantic technologies to improve quality of its results.

So basically, the first benefit to the use of semantic search engine is time sparing. That's definitely good news for CEO's ! Actually, time spending on research over the Internet for business purpose increased by 40 % between 2001 and 2006, Outsell Inc said. And this is time that professsionals won't use for analysis and decision purpose. To summarize, getting more information makes you less efficient.

This point of view is shared by a research team from Wright State University in Ohio. Developing a semantic search engine technology, the team is working on usage in the Healthcare industry, but also terrorism, defense, and financial services.

The strenght of this new generation of search engine is to allow users to identify information described in another way than they formulated it in their query : - HR professionals will identify best applicants - Doctor will idenitify potential danger of medecine usage - Information professionals will easily get open access industry reports.