Chris Sherman discussed search. Notes:
Ask - increasing R & D budget. Goal of being #2 but with a dedicated following. Think of Apple’s computers.
Google - company ranks top 100 projects using some kind of cool ranking algorithm (not sure on details). 75% of projects are search and advertising-related. 20% are pain-points on the internet. 10% are “blue sky”. Google Books is a project that will teach Google how to read. Think about it.
MSN Live Search - great new features marred by confusing and inconsistent interface. He thinks their image search is the best on the web.
Yahoo! - he thinks Yahoo! is having a lot of internal debates right now about company direction. He thinks Y! has not lost any ground technically, but the company is having some communication issues around what we’re doing. I like the way he expressed this. I think it’s fair. He also pointed out that we have 12 Economics PhDs on staff. I presume they’re in Yahoo! Research Labs.
He also mentioned that search engines (I believe he specifically mentioned Yahoo! and Google, though presumably it applies to all four) take privacy very seriously.
I liked his talk, but wanted him to say something, anything, about core relevance and quality of web search results.
