I just got back from the WebSearch University conference in Washington D.C.; delivering a talk on all the resources available in Yahoo! Search for the advanced researcher. It was great to see this conference going strong and to have a chance to interact with the 300+ librarians, researchers, and information retrieval professionals attending -- everyone from management consultants to researchers for the Supreme Court. This conference is always an interesting change from the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference that I also speak at. The attendees here have a laser focus on finding the best, most complete sources of information; and virtually no interest in web marketing, the dominant theme at SES. Two completely different groups, and the contrasts are always interesting. Many thanks to Marydee Ojala and co. for putting on such a great conference.

Here are some of my takeaways:

-Web search has now become the de-facto starting point for most researchers, and premium databases and verticals are increasingly used as fall-through.

-There was a lot of focus on data available on the "invisible web," and a lot of interest in what steps we are taking to make this data searchable. To this end, I was able to demo the new partnership Yahoo! has with Worldcat.org that allows Yahoo! searchers to find out if books are available at their local library (part of our Public Site Match Program where Yahoo! partners with numerous not-for-profits).

-With information increasingly available, lots of people were looking for new solutions to better track, store and categorize the information that they have found; traditional IE bookmarks and folders aren't sufficient for many advanced searches.

-News Alerts and RSS feeds are becoming increasingly important for staying on top of areas of interest. You couldn't go 15 minutes without someone bringing up RSS. It was also great to hear Ran mention in his talk that he doesn't use an RSS reader, since he can get the RSS feeds in his My Yahoo!.

One final note: Lots of folks requested a soft-copy of the PowerPoint from my talk, so here it is along with a "bonus" slide at the end that I didn't have a chance to get to. It shows some D.C. relevant examples of how Yahoo!'s improved contextual descriptions for search results are often useful for users looking for answers to natural language questions.

Cheers,

Jon Glick
Sr. Manager
Yahoo! Search

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