SXSW Day 3: Social Media Breakfast and Search!
Today I hit Social Media Breakfast SXSW. If you’re unfamiliar with Social Media Breakfast(SMB), you should Google to see if your city has one.
Founded by my friend Bryan Person back in 2007, the concept has now grown to more than 40 cities. I was one of the original 12 folks who got together in Minneapolis a couple years ago to eat breakfast and talk about social trends. SMBMSP has now grown to nearly 1,900 members and tends to sell out in (literally) seconds.
You can stream today’s event here.
Then I hit the Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web panel featuring Nova Spivack from Lucid Ventures, Carla Thompson from Guidewire Group, Gil Elbaz from Factual Inc, Dag Kittlaus from Siri Inc, Barak Berkowitz from Wolfram/Alpha plus three other last-minute adds.
Overall, search gives you links to where an answer may be. But what the folks on the panel are trying to strive for is for you to get one link — one answer for your question.
I hear about the concept of “semantic web,” but I’m no search guru. Wikipedia defines it as:
The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to “understand” and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.
One panelist summed it up: if you’re able to ask a question and get an answer, that’s just mathematical. But if the machine is inferring what you’re asking behind the language — to user intent and knowledge available — and truely answer what you’re searching for, that’s semantic.
Semantics may help the Web be even more accessible, crawlable, to help better the user experience. Essentially, there’s more information out there than you get access through a search engine. There are different approaches to understanding meaning, mining data that has different formats, etc.
At another level, if all of that knowledge is available, all of the data should be available, and it’s up to developers to make search ubiquitous.
Nova says the next phase of semantic search is about presentation of data. Google works well, but the results list is clunky. A good example of presentation done well is Siri.
Wolfram/Alpha strives to aggregate all search results intelligently, although it may not quite be semantic. I’ll note they themselves define it as Development of this topic is under investigation….
Danny Sullivan says perhaps a list of links as a search result isn’t a bad idea.
Future opportunties for search optimization and innovation include real-time search, mobile, maps, personalization, locality and social. One panelist asked if these are just future/existing Google features, and I’m not sure anyone gave a solid reason for creating a brand new search engine from scratch.
Guess the long list of blue links is here to stay – for now.
Tags: sxsw, sxsw interactive
