Search Engine Meeting Will Cater To Serious SeekersSearch Engine Meeting Will Cater To Serious Seekers

The 11th annual gathering of the Search Engine Meeting, an assorted group of underground but influential search specialists, will be held this year with something new: the opening keynote speaker will be from the search establishment, from a Google executive.

David Girouard, Google's enterprise search manager, will headline the meeting that has traditionally been dominated by firms and experts on the fringe of search, ranging from the offbeat to the cutting edge. The meeting will be held in Boston from April 24-25.

"We don't get many people with a casual interest in search," said Harry Collier, managing director of the conference, in an interview. "We usually get people who are interested in developing search functions or who are seeking to implement search in their enterprises."

What are the major changes in search over the past decade, Collier was asked.

"At first you were happy to find almost anything," he said. "Now people want intelligent searching. They want hits sorted and presented intelligently. You can do good search work, but when you try to scale up, everything bogs down."

Collier operates British technical publisher Infonortics Ltd. He added that he picks Boston for the site of his conferences, because it's relatively convenient to both North American and European audiences. He said European searchers have the additional problem of often needing "cross-language search," due to the multiplicity of languages used in the European Union.

The two-day conference will feature some 25 speakers and be preceded by a half-day pre-conference dissecting Google, by Stephen Arnold, president of Arnold Information Technology. The Google watcher recently published a book on the leading search firm, which has nailed down a search engine market share of more than 40 percent. Other presenters include Mike Moran, IBM site architecture manager; Pete Cipollone, a strategic development director at Factiva; Laurent Proulx, CTO of Nstein Technologies; and Joseph Tragert, market development director of EBSCO Publishing. A senior management team from Fast Search & Transfer will discuss the new challenges of mobile searching.

Collier said interest is developing quickly in search clustering. That is the specialty of Vivisimo Inc., whose president, Raul Valdes-Perez, will outline new ways of assembling data for easier viewing.

"Visualization is a hot area now," said Collier. "People want to see their searches well displayed and visualized so they can see it easier. The problem now is there's this immense load of data available from searches."

Companies involved in search tend to leave the big search engine work to big three searchers Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft as they develop their own niches, Collier said, noting that value-added data mining and specialized searching for governmental databases are hot items now.

The heart of the conference, Collier said, is still centered on new and offbeat developments, some of which are likely to become mainstream in the future, and he noted that Google's participation this year won't deflect from the conference's main objective of getting search freethinkers and pioneers together.