I found my way to San Jose this morning to attend Search Engine Strategies. My flight departed early so I had to get up at 4:30am…so yeah, I’m kind of in a bad mood.

So far I’ve only attended one session. It was regarding Universal/Blended Search.
Moderator:

• Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:
• Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
• Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online
• Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing, Commerce360

Q&A Speakers:

• Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com
• David Bailey, Engineer, Google
• Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Mostly, the various search engines discussed how they see the future of blended search evolving. Obviously the engines want to include more and more content (video, images, etc) to keep users in front of their ads.

Some stuff to look for:
• Google News currently only provides text and images. Video should be available soon.
• Google Universal search will begin to shuffle features in the SERPs. For example, (as of 8/20/2007) a search for “Alex McArthur” returns 3 pictures of the actor and 10 standard web results. If a video or blog post about Alex McArthur became popular in the future, then a Google Onebox result may be added to the first SERP page.
• Third party videos showing up in blended search results.

Erik Collier, from Ask.com, reported a 30% drop of searchers going to second page as a result of blended search. Also, a 15% drop on searchers performing more than 1 query. According to Erik this means that people are finding what they want quicker.
*2nd page just won’t cut it any more. ;-)

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Yeah, my widgets are getting out of control, but most of my readers use RSS apps anyway. Aren’t crazy amounts of plugins half the fun of blogging?

My latest site “enhancement” is my Ban That widget you can see on the top of my sidebar. It’s a fun site to tell the world about things you hate and why.

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I’m a fan of the Daily Searchcast with Danny Sullivan, but I have a gripe. IT’S NOT DAILY!

Oh, and while I’m in the mood to complain please prohibit Bruce Clay from advertising more than once a year on the podcast. Their ads nearly explode my speakers.

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I’d have to go with Msdewey.com.

I’m sure this site is simply an attempt at link bait. Yes, it worked. I’m a fool.

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Does anyone else remember Google’s April Fool’s joke back in 2002? I remember reading it years back and not finding it funny.

You can view it here:
Google’s Pigeonrank, April Fool’s Day Joke

I just spent some time reviewing some things on G’s site. I periodically do this to look for new tools and came across this joke. After reading it years later I decided it still isn’t funny. Now don’t get me wrong…I use google daily, but this attempt at humor doesn’t get better with age.

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