Keynote: John Battelle

February 18, 2009 – 3:02 pm

Information about the keynote:

John Battelle is author of the outstanding book on how search engines developed, The Search, in which he also coined oft-repeated description of search engines as a “database of intentions.” A veteran journalist and entrepreneur, this keynote conversation will cover how John sees search developing, the challenges ahead and searches greater impact on the internet and society.

John Battelle has his finger on the pulse of the search industry.

Cited an example of a recent dinner conversation where people around the table use mobile devices to add value to conversation. If somebody brings up an question or topic that nobody has an immediate answer for, everyone scrambles to use their phones to add value. This is the epitome of social search. A great example of a search application that is blazing a train: Shazaam for the iPhone. Who, if anyone will take Google’s place as the king of search? It very well might be a social search model similar to Shazaam. In any case, we will certainly be measuring the value and success of search different than we do now.
When do we get to the Windows vs. Mac version of search? The problem persists: When you have digitzied all of the wold’s knowledge and made it searchable, the “hunt and poke” (similar to what we see in a Windows or Mac interface) just won’t work anymore. However, right now, search is still in its infancy. We are still in the blinking cursor at a command line phase. We are going to soon shift to a new interface. It will be driven by similar parameters that drive language in our brains.
Let’s think about the other places search is headed. The Goog 411 service certainly wasn’t invented as a nice public service. It was created to build a database of human speech phonemes.
Will Twitter change search? Check out John’s From Static to Realtime Search post. For many people, the process of figuring out twitter is hard, but once you get it it, Twitter becomes extremely useful. When you have a database of real time conversation (”what’s happeneing right now”), and you can query that database, you have absolute gold. There is a massive commercial opportunity with Twitter that has yet to be exploited, and it’s all based on the same basic principles as traditional search.
Conversational marketing: Create media/content that adds value to online conversations. John used an example of a dinner party where a random dude runs in and yells “IBM servers are the best!” This would be totally out of place and make no sense. This is how a lot of online advertising happens. On the other hand, if you come to the dinner party with a bottle of wine and work into the conversation why yyou think IBM servers are good, assuming that the conversation is already about IBM or servers, then the endorsement becomes fully relevant.
Battelle’s next book: The Conversation Economy. The premise is to look forward 10-15 years at the future of search and trace it back to now in order to write a presciption for success.

-Drew