Tuesday, April 12: A capacity crowd filled the hilltop auditorium up at PARC on Coyote Hill Road, overlooking the verdant sprawl of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley. The spring evening was a clear and brilliant blue, and the BayCHI event was free and open to the public. People packed the rows, spilling into the aisles. Latecomers watched the presentation from TV sets quickly deployed in the lobby.

We were there to hear from a handful of industry thought leaders about Recent Innovations in Search and Other Ways of Finding Information. In speaking order, the panel consisted of: Peter Norvig (Google), Ken Norton (Yahoo!) , Mark Fletcher (Bloglines/Ask Jeeves), Udi Manber (A9), and Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen Norman Group), the "guru of usability." Rashmi Sinha (Uzanto Consulting) moderated.

Bay CHI is the local branch of a professional organization for computer-human interaction professionals. Not surprisingly, the crowd was weighted with designers, developers, information architects, students, consultants, and entrepreneurs. Like me, many were employees of the companies represented. Were we expecting a sermonette? A shouting match? New insights tactical or strategic?

What we got was the articulate and intelligent conversation of peers, some anecdotes that resonated and rippled outward. Each panel member had five minutes for show and tell. These presentations have been summarized and posted by better note-takers than I. Jonathan Boutelle's piece hones in on the exuberance and recaps some common themes.

Boutelle's first two points about search tugged at my sleeve: An undocumented command line interface. Mediating between human beings and the desired information objects created by other human beings.

Search is still difficult, but it's getting better in interesting ways. Because the search experience connects two humans, it's as much about facilitating trustworthy communication and clarifying intent as it is about information retrieval between machines. There's a renewed focus on the user experience and social media -- where software meets wetware.

As search escapes the box, and flows into powerful new interfaces for different types of interactions, we should anticipate a flourishing of creativity like that which occurred when personal computing moved from the blinking cursor to the metaphorical desktop.

Will we finally be released from a cramped 18-character-wide rectangle to search like there's nobody looking? Do our camera phones hold more than the promise of an "image mess"?

Ken Norton's walkthrough was a whirlwind tour of year one in the life of Yahoo! Search Technology--the stream of releases and innovations Search Blog readers have come to expect. Ken covered Desktop Search, MyYahooSearch, Creative Commons search, Mobile Search, Local initiatives, RSS integration in Search, Y!Q (search at the point of inspiration), Flickr and the potential of social media.

What's next? Yahoo! Search is committed to creating the tools to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. Join us in facilitating a bold remix of content, community, information, commerce, and culture, to build a viable metaverse for citizens of the 21st century.

Note: You'll find more excellent notes and detailed summaries of this BayCHI event from Barney Pell , Mike Rowehl, and David Lyons .

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial