When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”


Skipping ahead a few years, Gord Hotchkiss wrote this past Thursday,
“Yesterday, I had the tremendous privilege of moderating a Webinar with our Search 2010 Panel: Marissa Mayer from Google, Larry Cornett from Yahoo, Justin Osmer from Microsoft, Daniel Read from Ask, Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group, Chris Sherman from Search Engine Land and Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence.  It was a great conversation, and the full one hour Webinar is now available.  I won’t steal the panelists thunder, but the first question I posed to them was what they see as the biggest change to search in the coming year.”

“Most pointed to the continued emergence of blended search results on the page, as well as more advances in disambiguating intent. A few panelists looked at the promise of mobile, driven by advances in mobile technology such as multi touch displays, embodied in the iPhone. After listening again to the various comments, I’ve put them together into 4 major driving forces for Search in 2008 and beyond.”

Did you catch those names?  Instead of forty-nine Nobel prize winners, in that one room were the top brains from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask, plus others such as SEL and Jakob Nielsen!  Wow!  That’s the A-team, right?  Right.

So what did they see as the biggest change coming to Search in 2008?
“…the continued emergence of blended search results on the page, as well as more advances in disambiguating intent. A few panelists looked at the promise of mobile, driven by advances in mobile technology such as multi touch displays, embodied in the iPhone.”

Let’s break it down: 1) the continued emergence of blended search results 2) more advances in disambiguating intent, and 3) the promise of mobile…such as…the iPhone.

That’s it?  That’s what the key major search engine insiders and industry analysts predict for the roller coaster year ahead?  More of the same - and the iPhone?  Sorry, “been there, done that.”  And did you catch any mention of the Alternative Search Engines?  I wonder how they see them impacting Search in 2008?

How ironic that I am writing to you from Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, the birthplace of Mr. Jefferson, his home Monticello, and the University of Virginia – my Alma mater.  At AltSearchEngines, that is not what we see for the year ahead.  We see the triumphal emergence of next-gen search, although it appears that the Titans of Search, for all of their conferences in 2007, somehow failed to pick up on the clues.

I guess they really don’t read this blog – or don’t admit that they read it.  Who knows?  All we have to go on is their webinar.  Well, let’s leave it alone.  It’s mid-December 2007.  You have their predictions, and you have mine / AltSearchEngines’.  Put your chips down, we can hardly both be right, and we’ll check back in 1st Quarter 2008 to see how things are progressing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to stop and go have dinner – alone.