Attending Search Engine Strategies San Jose
Several of us from ChannelAdvisor are attending the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference this week in San Jose. SES San Jose is historically the largest search conference and this year is no exception.
Highlights thus far:
Keynotes - very solid keynotes from Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com and Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience at Google. Both stressed that search technology still has a long way to go to help users find what they want faster. Search is an “impatient activity” and both sites are changing how they display results with the goal of getting users what they are looking for, faster. Interesting to see how this develops as they have taken very different approaches to solving this problem. Google believes the best way is to integrate other types of search results (maps, books, images, etc) in the core search results and rank them based on relevancy - this is Universal Search which was rolled out in May of this year. Ask.com has taken a different approach and places different types of results in different places on the page using a columnar approach with what they call Ask 3D. Look for some new commercials from Ask starting next week that attempt to really set them apart in this regard.
Google Dance - as always, Google knows how to throw a party and last night’s Google Dance lived up to high expectations. Between product demos, food from the Google Kitchen, meeting with the Google engineers or just a full on dance party there was something for everyone.
Catching Up - SES is a great event to catch up with customers, partners and other friends in the business not to mention just getting a pulse on what everyone else is talking about.
More sessions and meetings to get to before heading back to the office and putting all we have learned to work.