Conference http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifnotes from the "Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan" session at Search Engine Strategies New York '07.

Where will search be in 3 to 5 years? It will be called Google... There will be a little box and you'll type in something. But then things will be different - more structured data... [New York Hotel] will return a map of New York hotels followed by traditional results... Maybe they'll have social input or editors. Your flash still won't be indexed and image search will still be problematic.

What companies will make a difference? None, really... Nobody really stands out. He likes Hakia, but doesn't know that they'll really revolutionize things.

WordPress is doing pretty well controlling spam (almost too well) - Blogger needs to do something...

WebPosition Gold - Your analytics package is much more important... Google is more likely to ban a particular IP address. The problem is if you're on a shared IP. In other words, they'll ban the requests, not hurt your ranking.

Personalized Search - Makes spamming more difficult, but SEO is still important because not everyone will have personalized results for your term and the content of the page will still be important. It's smart in that people judge how good a search engine by ego searches and so people see themselves at the top since they click on their own sites. It's been there for a while, but now everyone gets it by default. The results aren't all that different - it just changes one or two things. They're not interested in making it easy to turn off (a toggle button). Another reason is because they want personalized data to charge advertisers more. It's not going to be noticed like the personalization on Amazon because the results will be relevant to the query you just did - unlike Amazon. Plus you can't live without search engines these days...

Microsoft is the only one that has demographic targeting (they just have to try to figure out if you were being truthful when you filled out your profiles - if you're not acting like a woman "they'll make you a woman").

Ads on parked domains should be a third channel you can opt in or out of something. Problem is searches on parked domains are considered "search network", not content network and it's impossible to opt out. It probably won't happen until one of their competitors offer it.

Who will win the local space? Who knows?

Who has the best local search now? He thinks they all have too many features and it's overwhelming.

Google Base takes in structured data - for example real estate data with locations, etc. Craigslist info is going into Google Base.

Being in the supplemental index means your page isn't important enough to be in the "good" index that gets refreshed frequently. It is a problem, but fix the problem with better content and more links.

Tags: Danny Sullivan, Search Engines, SEO/SEM, SES-NY
Categories: Advertising, Search Engines, SEO/SEM