Thoughts about Alternative Search Engines Day 2008

I was at the Alternative Search Engines Day event in San Francisco last week. Organized by Charles Knight of the Alt Search Engines blog (and friends), it brought together key people from over 40 alternative search engines. It was an amazing crowd, full of interesting and bright people, and the overall energy was incredible!

At the keynote, Charles gave a pitch for bringing ASEs together that was very well received. He showed us some examples of what a unified User Interface that combined multiple search engines would look like. I contributed a tiny bit (expanding on the idea that complementary ASEs could band together to provide Federated Searches for enhanced traffic and usability, and listing a few ways for the Alts to cooperate even while competing ).

Opening panel, photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The keynote was followed by a series of panels that covered a wide range of ground. I was going to write up some of my notes, but Patricia Jenkins of the uptake blog has posted such a comprehensive description that I'll just link to her posts:  AltSearchEngine Day - Part I,  Part II.

From my perspective, a few core themes emerged from this conference:

1. Clearly, innovation in search is happening in many areas; search is far from done. As I've said before, I think we're still at "web search 1.0".
2. If this group of diverse and talented folks bands together, even just a little - the result would be instant magic! The combined market share of all the Alts taken together is so low only because there is as yet no synergy, no leverage among them. Also, I clearly saw at the conference that ASEs can work together; I observed a lot of breakaway hallway conversations that sounded a lot like cooperation, rather than cut-throat competition.
3. Even if the eventual competitor is Google, it is better for any small search engine to work with Google, rather than fighting against the current; e.g. initially, you want your results to be found in the Google SERPS, thus capturing users who come from Google.
4. Search users care about two characteristics above all: Speed of Response and Relevance of Results. All other considerations are secondary!

All in all, it was an exciting day. Charles brought to us an extraordinary vision of cooperation; I was delighted to be a part of what was happening here, possibly a significant first step for this group of alternate search engines. I also enjoyed meeting the people from these search engines, and putting faces to names, folks whom I previously knew only by their email addresses.

I'm even more convinced now that the Alts drive a lot of innovation in Web Search - both by their own efforts and also by forcing the major search engines to continuously move forward. I'm optimistic that in the future, an increasing number of the Alts will work together in complementary ways to leverage their strengths, thus improving the user experience and creating benefits for themselves at the same time.

Rock on, Alts!

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