This session will not be live blogged because it’s about images! 

PowerPoints of these presentations will be available shortly and might be published later.

-Ed

Dave Davies, CEO Beanstalk “A Look at Google’s Patents”

User behavior -If someone goes to Google, clicks your result, sees your site and then goes right back to Google, “you’re screwed,” it’s a vote of ‘no confidence’ for that keyword(s).

“Personal PageRanlk” Not valuing PageRank for your site, but assessing YOU.

Group data – If Charles likes X and has the same characteristics as Nitin, Nitin will probably like X, too.

Jonathan Mendez, CSO (Chief Strategy Officer), OTTO Digital

(He is parsing a really long URL, each little section can be “deciphered” if you know the code!)

[Note to self: He apologizes for going way too fast (I've stopped taking notes - and offers to talk to people afterwards.  Hmmm, wouldn't it be better to cover less and talk slower now?]

Richard Zwicky, CEO Enquisite

With Universal Search, the results page is getting so crowded that there are fewer organic search results “above the fold,” so it is “damned hard to rank above the fold anymore.”  So how do you do it?  Hire a very, very good SEO!

85% of traffic comes from the organic (left side) free results, and 90% are from page 1, so it’s proably worth the effort (read: co$t)

Keyword selection is getting harder with different cities, different regional “slang” or words for the same thing, different engines (GYM), and so on – and that’s just in the U.S.

Aaron D’Souza, Google

(This room is packed!)

Yes, Google knows where you are, but if two people sitting next to each other search for ‘cricket’ and one like sports and one likes bugs…[I would imagine their click-streams would solve that issue.]

“It’s not How Many people you get your link in front of!  It’s Who you get your link in front of.”  25 good users are better than 1,000 irrelevant ones.

And remember, you can turn Personalization off, or (if not now, soon) Edit It!

Bill Barnes EVP Enquiro Search Solutions

Used volunteers, “focus groups,” eye tracking / heat map studies, click behavior, etc.  Excellent!

Bonus fun fact:  Don’t kill yourself to rank your site #1 or #2 in Google, #3 – #5 are more profitable (pr-Universal?) So let Wikipedia be first…to get such precision, I would think that you would certainly need a very, very good SEO.

With personalized searches, there is more scanning of the results – on both the free and paid ad sides.

James Colburn, Microsoft

If you buy ads (PPC), you should be thinking about a) Geography b) Day of the Week, and c) Time of Day.  If you’re a barber in Chicago open only M-R 10 -6, then maybe you would only want your ad to show up to match those parameters.

But now……don’t just match the Business information, search the Person’s (User’s) information!  E.g. I want my ad to only show when a male aged 35 – 55 with moderate income is searching.

I would stop and think about that.

Q: What if I search for ‘Diabetes’ because Richard has it, not me?

A: Doesn’t matter. “I” am still interested in those results, even though I don’t have diabetes.

Bottom line:  The major search engines know an amazing amount of cross-referenced information about every personalized search.  In other words, they are smart and getting smarter; they are “learning” more about individual people every day – maybe you!.

End of session.

SES Chicgo  Day Three  Keynote address

David Isenberg and Kevin Ryan

Five reasons why SEM (Search Engine Marketers) need a Neutral Net:

5. Extra charges

4. Reduced reach

3. Degraded knowledge of customer behavior

2. Reduced marketing and application discovery

1. Reduced trust

“The Phone Company is the Enemy of the Neutral (free) Internet (’net).

Ed Whitabek, CEO AT&T said “No one will use our pipes for free!  If Google and Yahoo! do, they’re nuts.”

The Internet is planned for reliability, it does not have just a single purpose, and it continues to grow.

The phone companies say “the sky is falling,” the Net is degrading.  Actually, it’s getting better all the time!

Net Neutrality means the same treatment of every “packet” of data regardless of who is sending it, why, or to whom.

Because of Net Neutrality we have: email, blogging, video and audio streaming, Web 2.0 applications, and on and on.

Actually, the Net is not free, because most of us pay an ISP $ for our Internet connection, it’s just that it’s worth far more than what we are being charged, so the phone companies really just want to charge us more – much more.

[There's that profit motive again!]

What if you had NO Internet access tomorrow?  How much would you be willing to pay to get it back – how soon would you need it to do your work?  (If I don’t have 24/7 connectivity, obviously this blog would look strangely familiar every time that you visited and your email/RSS feeds would stop.  I also would stop returning your emails – I wouldn’t be able to, I mean.

“Public Calling” – 800 years ago it was mandated: competent services (e.g. shoe maker), available to all, for a fair price – NOT “whatever the market will pay.”  Hmmmm

So whether you are a Free Marketer or not, the “free” Internet is threatened.  (Mobile is a different animal.)

Let me try to sum up this Keynote address:  “If Network Neutrality dies, you’re screwed!”