There were five distinguished panelists at this session: Jonathan Leblang from A9, Jim Rainey from Ask Jeeves, Grant Ryan from Eurekster (with a great New Zealand accent!), Tim Mayer from Yahoo, and Marissa Mayar from Google. Each panelist had a chance to give a short rundown of what their company was doing in the field of personalized search, and then the session was opened up to questions. Here's a quick rundown of what each panelist had to say.
A9 and Personalized Search
A9 enables the user to turn personal search history off, but history helps personalize search, so it's a bit of a trade-off. There are a few features that A9 has been working on: Discover (based on your history), OpenSearch (personlize your sources), and more. The A9 toolbar allows you to personalize your search even further with a right click functionality. You can search your data with A9's diary tool (I thought that this was especially cool!) which enables you to make comments, notes (think of this like Post It's) - "it's free form tagging with your own notes."Yahoo Personalized Search
Yahoo's search vision: "Enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge." The Web could be thought of as having three distinct parts; the public (Web search), personal (desktop search), and shared Web (search communities, My Web 2.0). My Web 2.0 incorporates all three of these elements. You can share tags, bookmarks, etc. In regards to Search History, you have to actively go in in order to save it (it's not activated by default), and you can also clear your history entirely. You can save any Web page using the My Web toolbar or bookmarklet. Yahoo Mindset (this is the one with the cool slider) allows you extreme personalization.Ask Jeeves Personalized Search
Personal search has some challenges to it; namely, why would people want to go through the trouble of inputting a whole bunch of information just to search for something? Most people just want to search and go. However, personalized search can be very powerful if you take the time. Ask Jeeves has released a few good search tools lately; there's desktop search, My Jeeves, and they recently acquired Bloglines, one of my favorite aggregators that I use every day.Eurekster Personalized Search
Eurekster is big on community-driven search; a good example of this is Game Revolution, which is an example of a specialized search community. Personalized search is unique in that it's decentralized; anyone can publish a search engine.It's more democratic, distributed; there's no one correct view, and it's organic (it evolves faster). SearchPublisher is a recently rolled out product; the economics for personalized search are staggering because the scale is huge, it can break the search engine monopoly, and there's the opportunity to add a search engine to your own website in order to add revenue.Google Personalized Search
Google's personalized search is actually on by default, which differentiates it from the rest of the search engine properties. Users have complete control over it, and it's integrated with the main web search listings. You can do a full text search over your documents, cluster searches based on topics, and the new Calendar feature allows you to see activity on a certain day. Google gives you a high amount of control over your search history. My Google gives you a personalized home page, and functions within Google properties (all you have to do to access of of Google's various services is sign in with your free account). Google properties, such as Google News, can be personalized as well.Go on to the next page for audience Q and A.
