The Yahoo! Search BOSS team attended the AltSearchEngines conference in San Francisco, and we came away from the conference even more convinced that there’s still a lot of room for innovation in search.
We saw dozens of demos of search engines in various stages of development, many of which use BOSS technologies as part of their approach.
We saw four major opportunities that search entrepreneurs are pursuing:
1) Vertical Search – Whether it be image, video, health, or even green search, dozens of entrepreneurs are working on building highly focused vertical search engines.
2) Semantic Search – A group of promising start-ups are focused on using natural language processing or other approaches to build search engines that can understand and respond to the actual meaning of a query.
3) Discovery Engines – A handful of search engines, such as Kosmix and Worio, are working on building engines that integrate structured data from high quality sources to present users with a starting point to discover the best content on a given topic.
4) New Presentation Models – Many search entrepreneurs are working on new ways to present search results, by changing the visual presentation or by clustering by topic or data source.
Bill Michels, GM of BOSS, gave a quick overview of BOSS and where we see opportunities to provide technology to the growing search ecosystem.
Big thanks to AltSearchEngines for providing a venue for collaboration and learning.
Keep up the great work, search entrepreneurs!
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