Notes from the last panel of Vertical Leap

Moderator barney pell, mayfield

ofer ben-shacher, RawSugar
julia komissarchik, Glenbrook industries
Paul pangaro, snap.com
bob syman, pubsub concepts

Julia: five words
don't search, question get answers
our company harvests fact form the web to give to users are answers.

bob, pubsub:
we monitor the weblogs real time + many others including FAA, earthquake warnings, specific focused streams

ofer, RawSugar
better search, courtesy of your friends
We define ourselves as a social search engine. you can see bookmarks of freinds, of community. many companies in the same area, our secret sauce is we can show tags underneath the first tags, but go beyond.

Paul, snap.com
an alternative experience for experienced searchers. all search is local search: me. now.
the idea is to put the power in the user's hand to control in real time the ranking process.

Q: what's the economics of creating a microvertical. How to extract the structure from millions of pages?
Julia-- six challenges
1. Dynamic pages versus static is a problem. Not even passworded. Did you have enough intelligence to ask the right questions to get a reasonable result? (Job or flight search) complex queries in dynamic web.
2. Once you've extracted those pages, precision becomes a critical issue.
3. Once you have a fact, how do you get additional information? Once you have a flight how do I combine with car, restaurants.
4. Long tail-- how do you find the smaller players? How do you get the local plumber's website?
5. You have to have flexibility; one vertical may not be enough. Maybe market size is too small, or maybe one vertical leads to another such as travel and local.
6. Speed of processing. Facts are harder than pages.
We do that.

Q: is it always pull
Bob: it's not always going to be pull. Pull just won't do it. Low latency requires publishers inform engines. Push based models are back. That model responds to the publisher’s needs. When a new job, a new flight a new product arrives, people can know about it. A lot of search takes advantage of temporary and anecdotal limitations. Like push-- we haven't had an infrastructure that supported the changing web. The offers that appear and are only good for a day or two. Big sites take weeks to get around. but big search engines have different index cycles for different sites... As we layer in IM, blogging comunity efforts, letting blogs tell search engines when the y update, we'll see changes in push. One place engines can own vertical is when they have structured information. The big guys are good with unstructured information. But structured data allows more. Technorati, semantic web will change things, in the future when someone wants to hire, they'll blog it and the search engines will find it instantly. Another bug in search engines is that they can’t' understand the content, but structured content will also change that.

getting tired. But in the last session. Must stay tough!

Q: will all content be decided by publishers
Ofer: we don’t think so. Sure you can have some publisher decide they want to go for the greyhound market, but more likely you'll have a bunch of enthusiasts who get together. If you look on a search engine you'll find directories made by enthusiasts, and you'll then have to go through them. But with searching on shopping.com you can get listings, narrow by facets. Think about taking all of that and bringing it to everybody. Suppose everybody has access to that. The greyhound and tag their sites and suddenly everyone has a better search.

Q: will people will go to verticals?
Paul: no people will have to spend too much time trying to figure out where to go. On the business side-- what does a vertical mean? But it's so important to everyday life, portals and search engines feel they have to serve it. News is common, real estate is valuable... there is a range of value to help choose. Where will the traffic come form if I am a narrow vertical? If many sites have to build their traffic, it's a problem. Snap thinks of itself as a general search engine, but verticals have promise-- digital drive shaft. Something like a camera is something we understand. As UI, my expectations are clear on travel, or news, I have a cognitive map. But I go somewhere and suddenly the dropdowns don't work and ajax isn't there, a common UI becomes desirable. imagine a world in which whenever I go to an interface, no matter what the vertical is, the UI is always be the same. If you can harness quickly, provide a uniform experience for the user, verticals become like horizontals.

Paul: when we are searching, we don't want to search. we are trying to comprehend things in order to act. when would we want different interfaces?
Bob: yes, genealogy... you have specific needs, and ways of talking. you don't want a list, you want a graphical representation, and you want to see relationships.
Paul: the richness is not in listings, listings are out.
Bob: listings are always nice for basic stuff, but there are places where you want more.
Julia: we can never get semi-structured information that is rich enough to get via tags only. you will always need another layer to help you extract information.
Ofer: it's amazing to me that we're talking about search which is supposed to be about helping us find, but in real life it's always about what people we know that is important. but in search we are not talking about that importance.

Q: why not rss, Bob?
Bob: we do use it. atom and rss, for those who want to pull. we ofer both for politics, since both will work with all the aggregators. we also use push feeds, we use the atom format. But it doesn't really matter. Atom is designed for push. rss is not, which is why we use it in the push environment, but in pull we allow both.

Q: advice of young companies starting vertical search.
bob: unless you have really special access to unique stuff, don't build a walled garden. walled gardens are going to be harder to defend, so build on a better experience not captured data.
Ofer: search is affecting every decision... searching the internet is like searching the world. this will grow in importance. one advice is that this market is still in infancy. think big. many things can be done that no one is doing, and in 0-20 years it'll be different. don’t' think of the next little improvement I can make on this o that engine, think of how you can change the paradigm.
Paul: watch out for tags. tags are not meaning. given all the disagreement, I say it's early and we're in trouble. don't presume everything we do now is everything. the tech is young, the biology is old. technology is disappointing because it's implicit and brittle, but biology is the opposite... start with the conversation.
Julia: find your niche.

first more rules for vertical entrepreneurs
rule 9 find your inner killer ap.
understand the core problems and built tools to solve those problems. make it sticky.
rule 10, let's get vertical.
community is a natural for verticals.

Steve Gilmore of zdnet moderating

tantek celik, technorati
index more than 12 million weblogs in real time, and sue that data for other things like top movies, etc
also trying to create microstandards for verticals.
Scott rafer, people will move to subscription model and there is a biz model for that
Jim pitkow, moreover,
enterprise and provides to big guys like MSN.
Chris tolles topix.net
categorizes news.

Q: Scott can you connect threads across the sessions?
Scott: I wasn't in all of them, i had investor things to do. but one thing I see, is how people see vertical search. vertical search is vertical market. but shopping search is functional in a certain way. and our work is more about a new standard rising. we're connected by rss, and know it screws up pagerank. here is a place where there is an inefficiency between gold standard of google and what some users want. So let's get that together and put a great ui around it and see what happens.
Jim: people read news online every single day, and it's tough, tens of thousand of sources, updating all the time. and end users want to know about it as it happens. search can be slower. and news is old, profitable and has standards around ti, so it's an interesting space.
Chris: in the shopping panel, a good shopping product isn't necessarily a search engine, with news, a big factor in relevancy is timeliness. if you want stuff from the last five minutes, the last hour, that's what ties together this vertical. Freshness.

Q: (Om Malik steps in biz 2.0 as moderator)how do you add context to the same news story over and over.
Chris: one thing we do, is cluster stories so we can cluster all the versions of the same Ap story. So the data structures is an event, not a story. so we don't' have 70 of the same story on top of each other. then we rank, and we have a story picker on the front page, and you can categorize by locality. We create a formula to act as editor.
Jim: relevancy is an interesting point, relevant to whom, when? We see it as a matter of metadata so users can drill down. provide context, so san joses make sense based on hierarchy. Also, add authority so you can create a feed that has locality, topic and authority. data isn't just data, we have metadata on top. you have flexible and agile, we use tech, we add human editors, and allow users to customize.
Scott: dedupe is important, but a lot of what we touch is two/three lines different. and that two/three lines makes the difference. we have to respect not pulling out the information provided. these are not dispassionate users, the energy is incredible. here is heartfelt work, and you can't just dedupe that, we've tried dialing it up and down and you have to decide what feeds are most important and go with that.. pagerank takes to much time to build. so the person provides the authority, that person has been blogging on this topic for a year and a half, and make them a micropublicaiton. it's tricky. deduping can loose publishers and searchers.
tantek: relevance is hard-- freshness, authority, SN? what makes it relevant? you can look at yahoo and see what's emailed and that tells you something, but someone who has blogged it, who has gone to the trouble of providing comments, looking at the hypermesh of bloggers can tell you what is relevant.
We've seen some stories that pop first in blogsphere before mainstream media, such as the tsunami. they can match ads to level of profanity, they can match to kind of consumer (a.k.a. don't want to advertise nokia on sony fan). there were problems with democratic ads on republican sites.. advertisers didn't mind as much as site owners. (tantek... accidentally, right?)
Scott: rotten tomatoes has figured out if the overall is negative is positive or negative. it can be done technologically.
Tantek: it can be hairy also.... we've been working on open standard on publishing reviews. the problem is there are many dimensions, it's a challenge to do. But I want to return to Om's question. With technorati you can see more recent, or least which allows for story breaking. on authority, we-humans determine it many ways, political bias, etc. but we (technorati) we do it abstractly, by (something that sounds like pagerank).

Q: how do you deal with relevancy against the reblogging of things, how to take the most value raise to the top.
Chris: most people don't want everything. maybe when egosurfing. but people offer a different kind of relevance, editorial touch. If many people are writing about a story, such as tsunami, we can put the scoop at the top if it works... but sometimes the scoop isn't important. the story is a commodity-- it doesn't matter who did it first, you want the best story or someone's take/brand preference is bigger than scoop. if you are a fox viewer, you want the fox view
tantek: do we want to encourage that kind of siloing of viewpoint?
Chris: you want to expose people to as many points of view. it's not as important if it's NYT or a blogger.
Jim: Some people care about the source, some want the color commentary. We can ask what is authority, or we can ask to whom? can we give tools so users can choose who is authoritative? these are pieces of metadata and we can use it. We can offer tools.
Scott: mentions "who broke the story", it's hard to tell who did. sentiment, editorial bias... is important to CPC advertisers also.

Q: you all have an editorial slant, what kind of user interface suits that?
Scott: it's religious. We believe in RSS, in which there is no ultimate interface. we are a we service. 99% of data leaves in xml. I don't knwo all the interfaces in which we're being used. I probably wouldn't' like most of them. We keep having to struggle with TOS, because we want people to remix, but we want to get paid. there is no ultimate UI, there is a long tail of user interfaces. and most value is in the one I'll never see?

Tantek: what is the one resource I am short of? Time. I have five minutes to hear something that is relevant to me. the UI's that will be best for me will be the most valuable.
Scott: the interface has to account for other things-- people returning to your site and optimizing for people to return to your site.
Scott: there will be many interfaces with the same core data in the future (lost track, got unplugged)
Jim: for us the interface is the api. that's the beauty of the data layer. you have to have good data, good metadata, and and let the user choose (I wonder if he means the user or the provider)
Scott: if it bleeds, it leads (tantek, you just said the reason I turned off my tv)... we want to see what's interesting. we have a point of view. you build for you users. if you are building for someone whining about a rss standard, that's for you.
Scott: the interface of feedster is fine most of the time, we've got the white page, the box... but if it's red sox, it belongs on the Boston globe and that's the right interface.
Q: not what he meant... can you send me data in the way I'm used to, can you get me the information I need, that's what I mean as UI.
Chris: we're an agregator, so we can't reproduce the NYT way... depends what you mean.
tantek: describe your ideal news reading experience, om.
Om: there is a a ordering of stories, most important to least, but on the others it doesn't work that way. How do you come up what the UI-- i see stories i want to break my head against the wall, i can't find what I want to see.
Scott: here isn't' that much news out there, look at the %of stories in chron that are from the wire. Some days there is no news.
Scott: there are only so many MCI executives to convict
The technorati guy dos these beautiful graphs of story strength, peaks and troughs of attention. I have things that only go bright blue (popular?) every few weeks.
tantek: we talked about different ways of filtering. on NYT that's editorial filtering, humans choosing.
Scott: 12 or 15 hours ago
tantek: or you can show what is most important to the blogosphere. But what it sounds like you want is a persistant search, so that if you are into a specific topic, you can follow it.
Om: a newspaper chooses the story of the moment, so why don't' you do that.
Chris: you can do that with a top page, like googles.
Q; how well is tagging going?
tantek: we've seen amazing results. by allowing people to tag their blog posts, and bring in flickr and furl, you can across. We've seen some spam, but they stick out like a sore thumb. mostly it provides a lot of value. If you have shown interest in one tag, and there is new stuff with that tag, we bump relevance.
Scott: I think tagging your own stuff leads to spam. With stand alone tagging, we're trying to get less sophisticated people to tag, and that is beyond most people even those who have blogs.
tantek: everyone is learning from everyone else-- we've seen so much interest. tagtuesday.com

Q: Micropayments?
Scott: we think google is already a massive micropayment system, it's called adsense. Micropayments to read an article is going to be limited.
Chris: everyone has tried it and it's never works. there is no success story from micropayments. people don't buy that stuff in volume
tantik: I have to agree-- there is an explotion in content, the question is not how can I pay for good stuff, it's how do I find the good free stuff.
Scott: of course I was completely wrong in regards to itunes.
Om: I can tell you for a fact, no one will get rich form adsesne.
Chris: people are making nice money form adsense
<>>dissolves into madness<<>

Two more rules--
Don't be evil (with your results) stick with organic results and don't mess with the paid/pure results.
Rule # buy low, sell high
Combine search with verticals.
All rules on simply hired website

John zappe moderates, from the classified Intelligence Report
The next killer ap is a cell phone knows when it's appropriate to turn it off.

gautam godhwani, Simply Hired
Craig Donato, Oodle.com
Konstantin Guericke, Linked in
Garrett Price, Kijiji

Q: why are classified suddenly hot?
gautam-- classified have gotten hot, and what's going on is we are experiencing a paradigm shift.
Craig: two things have happened that have made the time right-- first is that there is just good solid local adoption. job hunting is local. Plus we see broadband adoption as well more people are getting online. plus classifieds are free, reinvigorated the category
garrett (is he ebay? did I miss an announce?) they have gotten big enough to be interesting to vc

Q: all the sites are free. only Craig’s list changes for jobs. How is free a business model?
gautum: it's tempting to lump us in with other startups with no business models. We are in a space where we recognize that the power is in being free. we want to monetize further down the job cycle, the qualified lead, the hire. that's where the value is. real bmodels in the back of this.
Craig: free is not just startups-- knight ridder is, yahoo is. etc. a lot of people agree that basic listing is free. but it's all about upgrades. print becomes upgrade, virtual tour is an upgrade, etc. upgrades are based on performance. in the past, you give me 40 bucks; I slap you on the back, best of luck. but online we see a performance based model. As a result, we're going to see something down the middle; you make ads that perform better and you charge for them.
garrett: we have a different view on that; we let the community lead us. with gumtree, Craig's list the community asked to charge to create a better experience (no charge=crap?)
oh, kijiji is an ebay company, I get it

Q: how dependent are you on the willingness of you partners to provide you free content.
Gautam: I knew this was going to come up. offerings like ours is because offerings are going up, it's so hard to get comprehensive information. People think an engine like ours will disinterminate them, but in reality we send them more traffic. we are considered a distribution channel. Users will always go to different destination for different reasons, brand, features, etc. but engines help them get there.
Craig: everyone embraces search, search is good. Most people now want the traffic from search; it's a big shift in the last few months. secondly, you have to take care of your partners, provide information on who the lister is, send people to them.

Q; talk about social networking. simplyhired and linkedin just hooked up.
konstantin: you have to look at where social network apply and where it doesn’t. social networks they say are good for cars, palm pilots, etc... but it's a stretch, you don't care that much. with real estate, you want a recommendation of a trusted agent. the third is high value transactions, like hiring a lawyer, accounting firm or hiring someone for your team. this is expensive to mess up. everyone has gotten a job form someone they know-- the fit is 100%.
My bet is SN doesn’t work across all categories. you also have to look at the play-- some SN's are advertising models, and that works, but it's different. Linked in has good audience for job hunting, which is different from myspace. When you testimonials say "this guy runs the lower Manhattan bar scene" you know where what profile goes. when you are in your 20's you want friends, when you are in your thirties you want to keep up with the ones you have, but jobs goes to 65.

Q: are jobs sites ripe for consolidation
Craig: two treads will push it the other way... people can publish their own on their own sites. Plus you want community and small sites are better at that.
gautam: I agree in the short term, but consolidation always happens. one trend you see is the user is continually more empowered.
garrett: there re two axis, one is search axis one is community. we’re always focused on the community aspect (such as paloaltomoms site)
when you fall in between, you have a problem. you have to aggregate well, or have strong community.

Q: buzz is Google is doing a classified product. then what?

Craig: I'll index them and include them.
gautam: Google will shake things up. a large player can really validate the space. Google's will be big and different. what Google hasn't done has shown its market dominance in specialized offering such as froogle, fighting a dogfight in the space. classified takes more than just search, it takes tools. Will Google do what it takes to create a specialized experience it takes to compete?
garrett: is an important partner, and we're sure that what they do will be in the best interest for their shareholders and their partners (wild laughter at this nonanswer)

Q: why can't a hirer just go to the cheapest location, knowing they'll be scraped?
gautam: some users will only go to Monster, so they still need to pay. Some will use simplyhired. some will go to Craig list. Will it change the pricing model? likely.
Craig: a user isn't bound, users can go where they an. a basic online listing will be free, it’s a commodity. the battle for classifieds is how can I create a composition of products that is easy to sell.

Q: ebay hurt private party ads in newspaper. How does this affect traditional models like newspapers?
garrett: the damage is really overrated, because they are different markets. we're happy to be a scapegoat, but we aren’t really responsible. my mom is 70 and she still reads the newspaper... some people will not change. and there are preferences.
konstantin: we're in the unique position at linked in where we do both-- we charge for the listings yet we work with simply hired so why charge when Craig's list is free? But there are advantages, via independent reference checks, you can see if you know someone. you have a pool of people you don't have on monster. You can compete with free if you provide a lot of value.

Q: what does it take to be the leader in your category?
konstantin: provide value and charge for that (pay per interview, etc)
gautam: the winner will make the bet job database
Craig: we just need to be maniacal about getting every listing out there, to tag them rank them assess them and get better and better.

Scott Jampol-- travel search/farechase
Some people are very interested in (misssed the rest)
Vajid Jamfri -- Cfares-- huge, lots of opportunity, the next biggest is illegal. Very fragmented, hundreds of distribution channels. How do we collect this information? You can buy a ticket to London for 2000 dollars, but you don’t know you can buy it wholesale for 500. As search engines create information for the consumer, that information is also invaluable to the supplier to dynamically find price. Try to move form UI's to saver system to a new system (? same as all maps being on top of navtec?)

Q: how do you deal with confusion in marketplace over guarantees, etc?
Vajid: never go to sleep thinking you got the best price... no one can give you that. 20% of billions of travel are in wholesale, and you can't get that? Can search engine provide you that? Only a search engine can revolutionize in this way.

Q: how do you blah blah (the moderator's questions are really oblique. I think he's talking about the relationship between airline sites and the comarison sites)
Scott: we don't crawl without permission. Right now we look to provide value to travelers and companies.

Q: how do you sum up the relationships (between airlines and the comarison travel sites)?
Scott: right now the conversations are really positive. Right now we try to stay unbiased, we do not charge for listing, rankings are not affected. We're working through issues around that.
Vajid: it's all about value-- the low cost carriers are beating the big guys. People are looking for expedience, they are looking for richer content, and they are looking for comprehensiveness.
Beatrice Tarka, Mobissimo-- we've been successful working with carriers who have not wanted to be crawled before. The market evolves. Some people will change-- they are in period of review. They may perceive us as a threat, since we are a new model that is beyond expedia.
Phil Carpenter -- sidestep
You see changes, some people who have pulled out of expedia who will work with sidestep, or others who will do both. Looking for partners that are very partner-centric. They also want partners who have traffic-- you have to be big enough to provide interesting volume levels.

Q: who are competing with? Expedia, yahoo? General engines or online agencies?
Phil-- the easy money is shifting from online agencies. Companies don't really like traditional companies, expensive way to sell. Search engine drives directly to website, allows them to build their own brand, it's attractive to them.
Beatrice: the majority of travel spending is still offline. Radio, TV, newspaper. The first shift is to online. Companies can track directly roi. (Insert 50% of my advertising budget is wasted joke here) Right now Google's and yahoo's of the world are attracting a lot of that money.

Q: when you outline your offer, what kind of cost differences are there?
Beatrice: general search engines are 2-5 dollars a click, but travel engines are paid only on sale and it's much less.
Scott: for ytravel, it's on a search monetization model. So we surround the free results with paid results. It's quite different. When you are talking about trust, you protect that but it's an extremely good value proposition to suppliers.
Vajid: airlines pay 20-30 dollars for acquisition of clients traditionally. From the search engines it's $5. A major spread. It is enough a reduction to make them profitable.

Q: traditionally online is per click, now with verticals it's per acquisition. What does that mean... is it a temporary situation? Immature market?
Beatrice: it's a young market. some clients want CPA (cost per action) some others want cpc, because they have advertising so every view is valuable, still others are driven by brand, so cpi may return. It's hard to get the feeling across in a Google text ad, but an image or a video can send a rich sell, differentiate.
Phil: we think it's very important to be flexible with advertisers, so we offer all types. Who are we as an emerging sector to tell them how to do business? The budget lies in different groups with different metrics so we work with them.

Q: How do reconcile web crawling with real time.
Beatrice; in our industry crawling is the only way to get real time-- we don’t have the luxury of getting a feed. A feed would be a bad experience because it would be a day ago, things move too fast. Fare jumping happens... sometiems you can't get the info fast enough. Maybe xml feeds but she doesn't trust them.

Q: will screen scraping continue?
Vajim: xml feeds are starting, but the industry infrastructure is not able to, it's built around saver system. Some progressive airlines are working on it. It may happen in the next year or so.

Q: Asking about travel planning not just selling
Scott of yahoo: we know travel planning is a very complicated and multiweek planning system. We think of it as a travel funnel, starting with inspiration, research comparison, purchase and post trip. You can offer products are all. Farechase is vertical, but yahoo travel is being integrated... say, a mapping tool that shows you what you can do near that hotel. It's important for travel search engines to get to helping people plan and book travel.

Q: why can't you do searches around the dates you want, + or - a few days.
Scott: we depend on what's offered us, some airlines have it and some don’t.

Q: what incentive do suppliers have to work with one or more of you versus everyone else? How do you differentiate?
Beatrice: we are most comprehensive. Half the queries are international. We don't spend money on ad sense etc, so we aren’t competing with hotels on search engines. We provide rare information. And the query management system. But we drive traffic-- you can't just send a query because many of the companies have old systems and queries are expensive, but we take on the cost and send only qualified leads.
Vajim: the value to the suppliers is important if you want to build a large company. The suppliers feel the expedia model is broken, too expensive to difficult. They spend too much, they have unsold inventory, and the customer is owned by the travel sites, not the supplier. They want to own the customer. Any travel engine that solves that problem will get the suppliers.
Phil: you have to provide both qualified leads and enough of them.

Q: what affiliate programs are useful?
Vajid: today there is no search engine that is leading yet. For them to get traffic, leverage they have to team up, they have an aggressive affiliate program.

Don't know why they are doing this, but... they are suddenly spouting rules)
rule #4 pick the right porridge (good data
#4 mind the metadata allows for structured search, helps defensible position.

moderator gary stein, of jupiter-- this convention center is between landfill and roller coasters... great analogy for the Internet.

Michael yang, become.com, founder of mysimon.
saw opportunities for structured and unstructured data to make a better search
graham jones, pricegrabber. recently added travel and autos. will be working with MSN to enrich their offer.
Chris Saito, Yahoo shopping.
use combination structured data via feeds and scraped to get breadth and comprehensiveness. just added auctions back in finally also added free listings. now have new and used. integrating yshopping across network.

Q: consumer benefit of breadth.
price is important, breadth is important. people don't' shop just on price. brand of merchant is incredibly important, credibility. community to rate merchant is critical... being able to rate, review merchants. If a merchant knows they have a good brand, they welcome this.
graham: a big myth is many merchants aren't' participating in comparison shopping because they can't compete in price, but the reality is their brand carries them through, and they spend money on tv to acquire, but they could be doing comparison shopping and reaching out. They have trouble with SEO too-- are buying "bed bath and beyond" but they aren't buying "bed" or "bath". Consumers want to comparison shop, they have to be there.
Michael-- people today use general purpose search engines to buy, and they provide junk. It's not trustworthy, it's spammed, it's not helpful. It's more than price, it's quality of product, it's what others think of the product-- so they are doing a algo based on multiple types of information.
Q: is there a shift yet form general search engines to verticals?
graham-- we provide black/whitelabel to websites to reach out, such as cnet or pcworld. people are using the product, learning to value it, and looking for more. syndicating functionality. google adsense is not a feature, it's money but we provide a real feature and real value.
Chris-- integrate product search throughout the whole network. many people start with a search engine like yahoo, and we integrate with a tab, with actually results called out, integrate in the rest of the network, providing purchasing on say, yahoo movie reviews, so you can buy the dvd then. Also provide rich tools like saving lists of things you are researching, ad community is mixed into that.
Michael-- search has no reason to be unless its good. We have our own ranking called AIR, affinity something ranking. as you type in the query, we show you different suggestions. So if you can't articulate what you want the tool helps. it can suggest things you haven't thought of.
Q: what about narrowing?
Michael: what's nice is you have context... general purpose search does everything but not well, but vertical search engines can do certain things better so that people will migrate over. swiss army knife versus power drill. (hah! marissa loves to call google a swiss army knife)
Q: issues around feeds and crawling.
Graham. you can crawl as many sites are you want, but that's just half of it. You need to categorize it.. bbq grill, car grill. it's hard to categorize when you crawl, automated. but it's easier when you have a product numbers, part numbers. but you don't' always get that and if someone clicks through on what hey think is a bbq grill but it's a car grill, you aren't sending a qualified link and your clients are bummed. feeds help solve this.
Michael: we think there is a lot of qualified info on blogs, buying guides, etc, but merchants don't' give you that. So we think there is a need for crawled data and merchant data feeds. value in both.

Q: talk about crawl& feeds. also, merchants complain about nonstandard feeds.
Chris: we embrace both. feeds give you high quality information, crawl helps fill the tail. better to provide results to the user, even if the data is not as clean. About comprehensiveness. regarding standardization. we are in favor, like to work with others to do so.
graham notices that feeds are starting to converge.

Q:have you seen improvement in comparison engine consumer quality?
Michael: we've seen coverage of 46%, but on become.com it's 96%, so shopping customers are much more focuses, targetable. much higher click through as well.
raham: i never discourage people to use google or overture, because they are good campaigns. but you don't' get the same kind of targeting. a search engine search for grill, it might be a person looking for cooking tips.. but not on pricegrabber?

Q: how reliant are you on the big three for ad revenue
chris: integration is key. want users to stay on yahoo.
a search will tell you yahoo buys keywords
graham: we buy keywords, and it's worth it.
Michael: we aren't reliant on search engine marketing yet, but we plan to. still it'll be a small part... we have our own algo engine.

Q: do you know how much of your traffic are doing online versus offline purchasing.
Chris: we know the majority of people buy offline. Local search helps address that problem.. still hard to measure. people print things out, take to store. clipping service and you can send to telephone so you call store helps bridge.
Q: what are people researching?
Chris: definatly product, but also consumer reports, trust in merchant and often they want a map. everything.
Michael: working to get inventory info in so if you want to buy local, you can see on their site if a local merchant has it. we don't' care where you buy it. it's a research site.
graham: we'd love to get feeds form merchants on their inventory, it's hard. often out of date, unavailable. story of online and offline site.. the online site had great conversation, the offline one horrid, and it was that people liked going to the physical store.

Q: how do you sort through the products and categorize them efficiently.
graham: feeds, plus a standard taxonomy they send out. incentive is better conversion. also, part of company does categorization. bad categorization is so bad, they won't even list it.

Q: how do you balance revenue and unbiased relevency.
chris: we have special programs for advertisers, but relevancy stays untouched. merchants can do special guides, bold names, etc. but if you game results, users won't use the site.

Q: would standardized feeds make it easier for startups to cannabalize?
graham: I'm not worried about it... they can do it now. we don't' treat the taxonomy as company jewels. we feel if we can provide a quality product we'll do fine. it takes time to build trusted relationships with merchants.

Q: what about outgoing feeds, rss, api, persistent searches.
chris: we're using standards to open up our data. we have rss feeds for top and new products.
graham: we have 300+ cobrands,a nd provide rss on top products. you can see most popular, updates 6x a day. allows partners to keep fresh.
Michael: we plan to support rss feed. we plan to become a shopping news engine so you can get recall notices, or see a new product coming out.

what is your vision for local search

Paul Levin yahoo-- yahoo's vision is FUSE: find, use, share, expand all knowledge (go john, Michelle and Nate!)
find is basic
use, share, expand is more... we're in the business of serving users. adding reviews, integrating with mobile, concentrate on use. 360 is the share component... you want to know someone when you are getting a recommendation on a dentist. and expanding the amount of content. users are users but also participants.

shallesh roa, Google
creating delight, surprise. experiences that do both. no documented vision beyond Google's... local as an extension of that mission. stay connected to users, don't stay with a static model, stay nimble, maps, local, Google earth is part of that.

Daniel read-- ask jeeves
looking beyond one set of data. local search is more than business listings. local weather, community listings, and more. how can you remix those types of data with an intuitive user interface. and monetization, but believe it will follow if you provide the best product you can.

brady forrest-- MSN
"i agree with him" . Working local, virtual earth, map-hybrid, user can create an interniery on a scratchpad, save listings, add data (sounds very yahoo) immersive environment.

Q: what's missing?

Paul: the human element-- so many constructs but it's the tip of the iceberg.t eh valuable piece is under the surface of the water, which is people's heads, what you use in their daily loves. User contributed content, and user personality.
shallesh-- vertical is a proxy for the word deep.. how do you get depth across a variety of domains. Engaging users is one tactic. Find a way to be a catalyst to index to connect uses with the content. be fully aware it's the early days, so be of a mind toward innovation, look for feedback, don't be comfortable, and ask how do you connect globally?

Q: how do you differentiate when everyone can index the same stuff?
shallesh-- blah blah. quickly innovate, laser focus, we dont' in advance look for a way to do something no one can, just try to lead.
Daniel-- data consistency across different data types is important. community is important-- Craig's list has broken new ground in community and in business model. use of local wikis, blog postings need to be knitted into the mix People still trust web search more than local, and that's crazy.
brady-- no one has mentioned mobile. we need to bring data to the user, when they are out there are need directions. avant go was a start, but phones are better, and there are areas that don't have database.. it has to change.

Q" what chance does a small company have in local, what are the sweet spots to go for a small player, something you might want to aquire?

shallesh-- depth. there is always room for people who have a different notion, know a different space, have a deep knowledge. local is about getting it right. the bar is higher.there is always someone with a very deep knowledge of areas, comapnies,
...like yellow pages...
yes, and also functional expertise.
Brady: also international, there is lots of room for other players. MSN will go international, but not right away
Paul: Lots of room, if only innovation comes fromthis table, I'll be upset.
two areas 1. depth. you can think of local as a vertical, but also as a horizonatal hat goes across subverticals such as restaurants, etc. we want to work with comapnies that have a head start there.
2. advertiser side. we're excited because of the huge amount of advertiser dollars in local... it's hard for local businesses to understand how to use local search, so advertiser tools and services is a great area.
Daniel: destinations and agregators. to fight the big guys, you have to have something unique, something the big guys don't have. on data aggregation side , it's easier, all search engines are looking for sources of data (navtac model, sort of?)

Q: dodgeball's relation?
shallesh-- interesting intersection. recent aquisition, not sure.

Q: What about events? and local journalism?
brady: yup, we missed that. I'm sure you'll see something. (what is this guy smoking?)
Daniel-- yes, lots of opportunity with things like evites.. another subvertical. local search is everything to some degree-- you always have a local modifier. on journalism, another set of emerging data to give users access to. micropubishing, it's our responsibility to bring it forward.
Paul: we consider this interesting and vital. from a yahoo perspective, there is so much to do here, but you will be seeing more of this sort of content (hmm, another opportunity?)
look at northwest something for citizen journalism they are building a group newspaper.

Q: with adsense/overturn anyone make money, how can you get good local content supported with ads, local commerce?
Shallesh: from a Google perspective, it's about delight that creates a virtuous cycle, you will figure out how to monetize. we think of it a couple ways, reaching out to local community as we do now or third party relationships. but also thinking of how do you think of an experience that allows folks to engage but not feel intimidated. if we can create a compelling experience to the end user money will appear. for smaller players, monetizing through adverting has proved to be viable.

Q: what are the ad models?
Paul: new model very much from an ad perspective. you have to build up over time, and one day the dry cleaner realizes 30%+ of his cusomters come form teh web, then it starts flowing, but that's not now. small biz is familar with yellow page listings, so it's comfortable to small biz. Pay per call is starting to emerge, but we are at the beginning of a long evolution. it will take a long time.

Q: d quality i.e. dead businesss, bad results..
Daniel-- data quality is critical. and data quality an monetization is related. highest quality and consistency makes a difference.
Brady-- as well as data traditional, blog and other user data will help improve things.

Q: user ratings? how do you get ppl involved?
Paul: critical and yahoo is an early leader. ratings are important but reviews are even more important. Knowing it's a date or a business restaurant is real value. concentrating on richness. it can't be just restaurants, has to be businesses, even landmarks. it's not as big a challenge as you think-- once they see it and it's easy and comfortable, they do it. the more visible it is the more they do it. we were integrated into an episode of apprentice, to raise visibility, once people see it and start thinking about it?
Q: incentives?
Paul: we dont' do that now. right now I'm pretty impressed with user's willingness to participate.
shallesh: our approach is to help them find the right answer, by offering the broadest access provided across all the reviews on the web.
this is really throwing into sharp relief the difference of the Y & G perspectives

Q: Who's truth? you are moving into the dangerous place that journalists fear to tread.
Shallesh: a great question. form Google perspective, we try not to be intrusive in the relationship of the user and the content they are accessing.
Q: how do you determine authority?
Paul: it's a great question. we want the sf chron reviews, we want authoritative reviews. but also part of it is scanning through as a user, and determining. One tings we want to do is track authority over time. in connection with 360 we are doing this, you can see all the reviews that people have done. sense of legitimacy. but it's still better to have 20 reviews mixed, than none.
Daniel: it's important to have those, and then you can judge yourself who is trustworthy.
Q: can you transfer authority from bloggers to reviews? how can reputation transfer?
Paul: yahoo is doing a bunch of this. You can see how you are connected to other people, if shallesh wrote a review, I can see we have a mutual friend and that transfers authority. is this useful bubbles to the top.
Shallesh-- as a point of difference, if you look for Indian restaurants, we'll show the full gammit, and we won't intervene across those review sets. helping users ascertain by giving them everything. good god

panelists
mark kvamme - sequoia
chris moore- redpoint
theresia ranzetta - accel
andrea stavropoulous - draper fisher

mark, whose group funded yahoo and google-- search has been good to us. plans to fund more search. david filo wasnt' wearing search when the visited-- there was broken glass in the street. Filo said he wanted someone on a 14.4 to find the website he wants in 2 seconds or less. it's the same now-- yahoo did a great ob of human based search, google came along as did great algo-- the future is int eh combination of the two. the experience has to get better, consumers vote with their mouses. it has to be significantly better, visibility better.

one investment.. kayak... travel search engine. travel is unique,a nd one things kayak has... had a deal with AOL for distribution. people forget that google got their lift from being yahoo's search engine. you need distribution. If you have distribution, you have clicks and the advertisers will find you.

Chris-- ask jeeves, mysimon
thoughts on Internet 2.o? fatlands, oddle?
some good wins, not as nice as sequoia (laughter). Google, yahoo, jeeves... good at a certain class of queries: navigational queries. you know what you are looking for and you go there. the next set of challenges is a class of queries that are more complex the the ones you think of today. lots of room for improvement in the search expereinces. All the big guys re tryign to fill in the user expereince, goobling up the niche engines. the question for us is how big can these oppurtunities be?
oodle aggregates classified listings newspapers, watch out! and fatlands is comparison search (another?!?!)

andreas suggets all successful Internet products understand/use/focus on search. I can't think of any business that doesn't center on the search concept that's successful. in terms of moving forward, we're looking for... business model. volume and how much you can charge/earn for each result each action. you don't need both. enterprise with small market but high value 20-50 cents a page, as opposed to a few cents on a page for commercial site. a couple area's I'm focused on, new devices-- mobile device search. become the eyeball bandit. looking at web 2.0 stuff. distributed real time information if you can't assume static web pages is the way of the future. rss, pings, podcasting, blogging, etc.

teresia social networking/search.
see vertical search in focused media. accel has always been focused on rich media. see vertical search as focused media property... mixing human with algo. use humans as filters. not only editors and staff, but end users. facebook, brightcove.
facebook is college students, but the real value is community which mirrors physical community with verification (via .edu) and the end users make their space. good demographic, college folks. with web 2.0 tools, the end users can be more involved.
if it's a niche technology, it can be a problem to scaling, but a niche audience can be value, lasting value. One thing you can't beat is a loyal audience.

Mark suggests get live fast, get as many users using it as soon as possible. It's hard to judge size of market, put it out there to start learning.
he's said he's seen a lot of verticals that should not be VC funded... too small for VC, but still profitable (hot or not)

Andreas reminds you to do the math, make some projections.

Chris.. if you can get 4-5 scary engineers together who will go with no salary, you can do fine. you can sell vertical search for 20 mil, with no VC. you can get these demonstrated on the cheap. adsense makes it easy to monetize.. demonstrate your idea. take the money when there is a good reason to take it, such as scale the engineering team to solve a complex problem, or marketing to blow out on the traffic side.. be selfish and things when and IF to talk to VC. good money in sole proprietorships.

Andreas will do sub-one million investments to get into certain companies, do the bridge... such as technorati.

chris says do the small deals.. they incubated oodles because it could be money. VC can't make money on 100000 investment, but you can. myspace-- we could never had predicted it. we couldn't predict that was the mix. so we invested late.. it depends.

Q: are ads the way to go, or are there other ways to go?
teresia-- what are the ways to make money: ads, transactions and to a lesser degree, subscriptions. greatest rev is when you have two. shopping.com is 50/50 ads transactions. Sometimes we can't see what it'll be in the beginning. we want to see an interesting user experiences and yet entraprenuers dont' hire designers.
andreas... take it a level up. why do people search? these actions-- find a site, a product, etc-- have a value. consider it as a auction model, let people bid them up to their market value. What is the value of the action once the result appears? H5 knows the value. Regarding expert advice, a big issue is that it's hard to prove the value of the result before I get it. How do you avoid taking a discount on the uncertainty of the answer?

Q: Stanford kids starting a search company ask how big investment do you want and how do you find angels who are savvy in search.
mark: We'll come find you (heh)
andreas: you only do the small investments if you believe it will be huge. but if you believe, you do the small investment even when it's not typical-- it's a cheap investmeent.
teres-- we dont' think of dollars in, we think of dollars potentiall out
mark: we never say, put money to work, we htink of ROT-- return on time. VC can only do one or two early stage, you do 15-18 in general. you have to choose. If i invest 100k, you are my investment for the year. I have to believe.

Q: barrier to entry?
Chris-- nontrivial. the big guys are watching. it's easy to get people to find you, but you need a order of magnitude better user experience and distribution.
Andreas-- they are not winning today because of quality of search results. there are problems in google's results. people can game it. google aims for microsoft.. it's hard to fight on different fronts. large companies are slower to react to new threats... by the time they figure you out, it's too late. the current darlings can be the next victims.

Q: duplication of efforts, do you seen any strategic technologies everyone needs a start up could provide?
mark-- advertising networks, and others.. plenty!
chris-- fishing frontier, drive traffic, montezation services.

I'm at Vertical Leap, a great idea... hopefully a great conference.

David Hills of LookSmart is speaking. I've got the ipod recorder going... maybe he'll let me post...

NOTES
his definition.. providing essential search content and tools for people who have a passion, need or repetitive task.

I'm not sure this really captures it's nature... Ill try to think on that further.

two types of search

Our (MIG's) new website sports a section for essays and presentations, Ideas. I'm extremely delighted by the intial offering, an essay by Scott on how some companies seem to be only able to innovate when the fat is in the fire, and John's presentation from IIT on what design can and cannot do for strategy. Do not miss these!

from New York Times review of Batman Begins.

Last night, I went to see John Markoff talk about his new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer.

It was an oddly rambling talk for a New York Times reporter, and he was a bit cowed by the audience, packed with the who's who of software and personal computing of whom he had written (as groucho marx quipped, "Is this an audience or a lynch mob?"). But he did have an interesting thesis, suggesting that the revolution of software was one of many great revolutions of the sixties, of equal importance and effect to the political upheaval and drug experimentation. The idea was nicely upheld by the following talk, a panel of luminaries discussing their memories of the changes that occurred before the two steves hunkered down in their famous garage.

It reminded me of something I had read by Kurt Vonnegut, I think it was in Cat's Cradle. He wrote that there were two revolutions in the sixties. The first one tried to change the world politically through demonstrations and activism. The second happened when the first one failed; people gave up on the external word and turned to drugs to change their internal word instead. This one, he reported, also failed.

I couldn't help thinking about this idea as I listened. These amazing young men in aging bodies talked about the fire, the excitement, the possibilities that were there as they built the first personal computers, networks, virtual societies the world had ever seen. They were all visionaries, working in a limited media but with their eyes firmly fixed twenty years in the future.

Which revolutionary philosophy were they part of, activism or escapism? Much of the computer work was looked to as a way to change the external world, to help support community activism. It was seen as a tool to replace 3x5 cards and pamphlets. But it becomes clear as you listen to them talk that the computers were also a second world, much like the second world that LSD opened doors to. The computers were bridges to a new country that the computers were building. And the men themselves (and they were and are apparently mostly men) straddle escapism with active involvement in the world of here and now.

One could argue that the computer revolution was both the only successful revolution of the sixties as well as the one that has changed world society the most. It's technology that reveals political agendas these days, with hackers and bloggers leaving nothing sacred, and supports activism through meetups and political commentary; but it is also technology that allows escapist "trips" via movie special effects and gameworlds like Second Life. These trips leave the body unraveged and the mind aching to create a new better world. Technology is only a tool, but it is a tool like LSD or birth control that is capable of changing who we are singularly and collectively.

Computer scientists of the sixties like Captain Crunch were as happy crunching code as they were riding elephants in India. They lived life and they created it. The myth of the pale programmer walled behind a stack of diet coke cans faded for me in the face of this history, and the potential of a human who both invents and changes the world was made clear. I woke this morning joyful to have one foot in cyperspace, and one foot firmly in the mud of earth, and knowing I needn't pick between them and, in fact, the world is better if none of us ever do.