Still in Boston as we just completed the Search Engine 2007 meeting. The last two days have been a jam-packed information session and dialogue around some of the most interesting innovations taking place in the search industry. The structure of the two days was really made up of two different lenses. The first being product demos. The second, and more interesting, was study presentations where industry experts presented their findings around technology, strategic approach and overall philosophy. Many of the players were quite specialized which really shed light on some of the distinct thinking taking place in the industry.
The conference overall was quite technology focused but there was a good mix of a business/solutions focus as well. On first blush, part of me wants to say that a lot of the search players in attendance are trying to be “everything to everyone”, doing everything ranging from analytics, mining, entity extraction, clustering and search. Even so, the level of advanced analytics and technological approach was quite impressive. There are certainly a number of companies that I now have on my mental radar that I plan to follow over the coming months and year to see how they do. Several I believe will make their mark in some fashion on the industry commercially.
Here are some (not all) of the players that had representatives at the event, took part with speaking roles and contributed greatly to the collective intelligence of the event attendees:
There were simply too many too mention and this list above is not exhaustive. I did not exclude anyone intentionally. Also in attendance were Sue Feldman from IDC and Stephen Arnold from AIT, both of whom took part in a panel conversation to close the session. I will post again shortly with some summary notes that I found interesting from the conference.