The other night I went to a fascinating panel discussion at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, famous for the mouse and other technological breakthroughs) hosted by BayCHI. There were 5 panelists, representing the cream of today's Search Engines (conspicuously absent was MSN):

Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality at Google
Ken Norton, Director of Product Management at Yahoo (UPDATE: he joined JotSpot in May '05)
Mark Fletcher, Ask Jeeves' Bloglines Founder
Udi Manber, Amazon's A9 CEO
Jakob Nielsen, Usability guru extraordinaire from Useit.com

Peter Norvig

Mark Fletcher

Udi Manber

Jakob Nielsen

The first part was Show & Tell, where each participant had the floor for 5 minutes.

Peter Norvig showcased Google's latest innovations, like Q & A which returns facts above the search results (example: what is the population of Japan?), search and maps by SMS on cellphones, Google Satellite, Suggest and Desktop Search ( all of which I use all the time and highly recommend).

Ken Norton emphasized that Yahoo is interested not only in people finding results, but in sharing and using them. In contrast with Google, he mentioned mostly products in beta like MyYahoo Search, video search , desktop search and Y!Q. Basically, what you can find on next.yahoo.com.

Mark Fletcher's take was that the fastest growing segment of the internet is blog content (hear hear!), and so his service Bloglines is an integral part of that. He also talked about subscribe to future search which alerts you when content containing your search keywords is published.

Udi Manler spent his 5 minutes talking about the process of taking 28 million images of 20 cities to map city blocks in their A9 search engine.

Jakob Nielsen loves numbers, and his time was spent mainly on interesting statistics. In 1994, 81% of searchers used 1 word queries, and 14% 2 words. In 2004, 36% use 1 word and 36% 2 words. He inferred that users are getting more sophisticated. The search success rate is now (2005) 42%, with low experience users scoring 32% and high experience 50%.

Another point made by Jakob was that intranet search engines were miserable failures, with only 33% success rates.

Show and Tell was followed by Q & A, and here's a summary from a blog post of LukeW:

- We are faced with more information (overload) each day [...] BlogLines indexes 1.6 million blog entries a day. This makes information about information increasingly important.

- There’s a lack of context around search queries (esp. social context). Information about information (beyond prioritized relevancy) on the search results page could introduce much-needed context for users.

- Consumer needs are increasingly being better met by “vertical” search functionality (products, local, travel, multimedia, personal, etc.).

- Search queries are becoming more focused on the “long tail” of information. Ask Jeeves has a continually increasing number of unique queries per day.

Adding to this list:

- There is a move away from early-Yahoo style directories, since search result are becoming more relevant.

- Search has failed in not allowing a dialogue such as you would have with a librarian for example. The search box is a command line interface.

- Search engines leach the value out of the internet through their paid ads (that was Jakob).

All in all, the most impressive panelist was Udi Manber, who always had a big picture answer to questions and the most interesting answers.

To sum up, it gave me the impression that there are big changes happening in Internet search, after the relative calm of Google domination of the past few years. If PARC hosts another panel next year, it's likely the participants and content will be very different (apart from Google's presence).

If you look at the bottom of this blog's right hand column, you'll see this box:

It means that you (and anybody else) are free to copy and distribute the contents of this blog, under the following conditions:

Attribution: You must give the original author credit (that would be me).
Noncommercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes, like selling my yoga photos to Yoga Journal without permission.
Share Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon anything in this blog, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

This is different from the default copyright law where no one is allowed to copy your stuff without your permission, even if it's for educational or nonprofit purposes.

More and more content is appearing on the web under various guises of the Creative Commons license, which you can download and use for free. You can search for it on Yahoo Creative Commons Search (beta). Here are some notable examples:

Books: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (how appropriate - a free book on free culture) and We The Media by Dan Gillmor (about grassroots journalism)

Video: MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 seconds ads

University Courses: MIT's OpenCourseWare with subjects ranging from Anthropology to Women's Studies

Music: The Wired CD including the Beastie Boys and Gilberto Gil

I came across a fascinating site, the Annotated New York Times, which tracks online discussions on NYTimes articles. We get the physical version of the paper every morning, and occasionally I even have time to read it. I often wonder what kind of reaction certain articles provoke, and now there's a great way to find out.

A blog tracking blog entries on NYTimes articles

For example, David Brooks, the token conservative columnist of the NYT Op-Ed page, wrote a negative piece on Tom DeLay (for international readers, he is a top Republican Congressman) about some possibly corrupt practices, like getting $500k paid to members of his family.

This was an example of a Republican criticizing another Republican, something you don't see very often, so I checked out the discussion on the Annotated NYT site to see what the reactions were. There were 21 citations of the Masters of Sleaze piece. Some quotes:

we just aren't very 'conservative' anymore

And:

A miracle has occurred. David Brooks wrote a good column.

The Fourth Estate, from Wikipedia, is

the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues

The Annotated NYT is part of the phenomenon known as the Fifth Estate, where the people as represented by the blogs, watch the watchers, as represented by the press.

Since the beginning of the internet in the early nineties, browser market share has wildly fluctuated. As an excellent article on the browser wars at evolt.org explains:

In the First Era of browser history Mosaic and the other early browsers ruled. The Second Era was that of Netscape dominance. Microsoft's challenge to Netscape marked the beginning of the Third Era, the Heroic Age of the Browser Wars. Netscape's bleeding to death marked the start of the Fourth Era of Explorer dominance.

We are now officially in the Fifth Era, where Explorer starts to lose its dominance to an Open Source (freely available) competitor, Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation.

Here are some reasons to switch:

- Inbuilt Popup Blocking
- Tabbed Browsing (viewing more than one web page in a single window)
- Privacy and Security (no AcitveX controls, thus much safer than IE)
- Intelligent Search (Google Search is built into the toolbar, and there's a great “find in page” functionality)
- Lots of neat extensions, like local weather and controlling your music center at the bottom of your browser window

At its peak, IE had 93-94% of the market. As of April 2005, there have been more than 40 million Firefox downloads and Explorer's share is eroding fast. Microsoft originally announced that they would not update IE until the next version of Windows, but now they are scrambling to release an IE 7 beta version by this summer.