(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Steven Marder,
Eurekster

In a session titled "The Personalized Search Revolution," representatives from several different companies got together to discuss the subject.  Phil McDonnell, a software engineer at Google, laid the groundwork by giving a sort of overview.

According to McDonnell, personalized search is based primarily on web history data.  It finds the most relevant results for each user, and provides subtle ranking changes.

Steven Marder, the CEO and cofounder of Eurekster, later stepped in to talk about where search is heading.  "Social search has reached a turning point with search giants tapping into new methods of user engagement," he said.  "We continue to see value in explicit and implicit contributions and believe it’s instrumental to overall search experience that users are able to browse and discover, as well as more deeply engage with content and drive the conversation among their community."

Phil McDonnell,
Google Inc.

Marder also added, "Content discovery is the next step in social search, especially leveraging more distributed vertical communities.  Adding a layer of community-contributed content to enhance the user experience creates more opportunity for the monetization and verticalization of search, as well as driving highly targeted advertising inventory for advertisers."

So if they’re not already, it seems that marketers (and search engines’ accountants), along with average users, should be cheering personalized search right along.

Moderator: Bill Flitter, VP, Marketing, Founder, Pheedo

• Steven Marder, CEO, Eurekster
• Ben Pashman, VP Business Development, Gigya

Bill Flitter

RSS, new media, blogging, social media. That’s what Pheedo does. We help publishers analyze and use dist content. Thinking re: results

round and round widgets—’widgets’ used to be a generic term, but now it has a meaning

Brainstorming what we, the audience, want to know—we design the session.

• What makes a great widget? What makes people want it?
• What are popular widgets today?
• Is the microsite dead?
• Why do I need widgets?
• Is it worth creating these? Can we monetize widgets (specifically Facebook)?
• Examples of bad widgets—best practices
• How can widgets impact search?
• Can you measure conversions on widgets?
• Challenges in production?
• Legal concerns of widgets

Ben Pashman

Simple to complex widgets

Why is there so much attention focused on widgets? Social network advertising will grow a lot. Doesn’t interrupt user experience, not forcefeeding a branded message while they’re trying to talk to their friends. It’s the answer to how to get social media advertising

“If social network marketing delivers on its promise of peer recommendations the flow of ad dollars will turn into a flood”—eMarketer

The definition of widgets: widgets are miniapps that can be deployed on top of existing communities like Facebook. His simpler definition: any little piece of content that can be grabbed and shared, goes from one place to another—the atomized web. Even YouTube, embedding video. Shared, grabbed, personalized, utilized.

3 types of widgets

• desktop
• start page
• social media (the narrower definition)—big opportunity here. Dave Berkowitz broke down differences between these types of widgets in his blog. Goals: entertain friends, identify themselves, engage people, have fun, enable communications. Sets it apart from other categories.

It’s all just starting—we’re in the ca. 1995 era here. We’re seeing a lot of viral players, repackaging of content, and that works to some extent, but it doesn’t leverage the full potential.

Nike—what could they do?

Personal: Johnny, 16 y/o, likes movies and bball. Nike offers widget customizable to fave athlete/team. Highlight footage in widgets, send customized messages, live chats

Widget analytics:

• installs by location
• impressions
• interactions
• lifecycle (how long is it living on the page/pageviews over time)
• viral distribution patters

You can think of a widget as a mini browser. It’s a 24 hour TV channel that you can put anything in any time.

It’s primarily branding tool. Can drive some traffic to site, but primarily provides exposure for your site away from you site. Provides user-endorsed exposure. Can be viral. If your brand can be part of an individual’s self-expression, that’s a lofty goal.

Steven Marder

What’s great about widgets is the distribution opportunity. We’re about branded, distributed, social search. It’s about brands, distribution, engaging consumers with widgets. Leveraging search as a behavior, users’ desire/comfort with search while they’re on your page. We’ve been around 3+ years. But we’re not about building a destination or attract consumers—working with publishers.

Search + wiki = swickis

Trends in social media/social search

Then: media 1.0 centralized creation, traditional distribution, one-to-many. Search 1.0 algorithmic organization & creation (increasing dissatisfaction of generic search) one-to-many.

Now: media 2.0: navigation and discovery through connection and engagement. Discovery is just a huge element here, huge value prop for widgets and social media in general. Many-to-many

It’s about understanding your consumer, reinforcing brand, driving action. Leveraging social media tools, being part of the conversation, being authentic, being transparent. How do you engage in a conversation? Being fun, useful, authoritative, providing links to other people, providing value.

What do you have that you can leverage?

The power of your brand, the power of community, user participation and engagement, social media tools. Provide useful tools, apps, etc. to let them interact with your brand (content, products, genre). Leveraging social search is one such tactic.

We think social search is the next phase, and Google gets that—personalization to influence SERPs. It’s all about search behavior off general destinations.

Ex: search box with tag cloud widget. It’s a search tool for the site, but also a discovery tool.

Demo of building widget with Eurekster. Now you can build a site-specific search, brand it, skin it, and let people put it on their sites.

Steven: Fantastic opportunity to get in with kids early.

Q&A

Are there affiliate type widgets?

Ben: There are some available—Amazon, eBay, Widget Bucks. Natural extension for sure.

Steven: Be authentic. Build your brand.

Comment: Dell just did a campaign where people could contribute to a campaign to let people contribute to help their friends buy new computers—via widget and Paypal.

Biggest take home tip?

Ben: Keep it simple. Don’t try to cram your whole website on there.

Steven: Get compelling, engaging content on that widget.

Ben: Think about how can you add to the experience of the target display website. Fun, simple, silly are doing great volume.

Ben: Clearly the microsite is dead. Why would someone want to go to the BourneIdentity.com when they could take it with them? Don’t work so hard on creating a site to then create a community—leverage an existing community.

I built a Google Gadget. It got clicks but no sales. Can I reuse it? What do I do?

Ben: That’s a very common experience. You can’t just “build it and they will come.” Distribute it, promote it, but it’s not an easy thing. You can’t just build it and drop it in a widget gallery. (Though that can happen.)

[Note from my discussion with Tameka Kee of MediaPost: Think about why your target audience would want that widget on their site, not what you want to push out onto them.]

Steven: It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s softer. It’s branding.

Ben: It’s not just repurposing an ad.

Comments

If you have a blog that focuses on particular subject matter, inclusion of useful links and other features like these custom search engines can help to build loyalty and return visits. But, for webmasters who build local guides for small communities, Swickis are also an ideal way to rapidly provide robust, location-specific search functionality.

Over time, I’ve looked at a lot of small community guides, and many of the people who create them are masters of finding free widgets to provide functionality for things like weather forecasts, news headlines, and local events. But, many of these sites are missing even simple search functionality to help users find the local info on their site as well as elsewhere on the internet.

For instance, check out these small town websites for: Milan, Tennessee; Monterey, California; and Fredericksburg, Texas. Each one of these sites seem to be something less than comprehensive guides for their areas, and each could benefit from having a search engine to provide a route into more info about their areas.

Eurekster is perfect for this sort of thing — check out the search engine portal I whipped-up there for Milan, Tennessee in just about five minutes:

The rectangular widget that the service provides includes a search form box along with a “buzzcloud” of keyword links to top items you select to hot-link right into the search results. The interfaces are easily customizable in look and feel, and you can set up a few different search ads to run in the results pages, if you’ve signed up with those services to do so.

Here’s another cool example local swicki that someone created as a Seattle search engine.

So, if you need a quick, local search engine, Eurekster is definitely the way to go.

Comments

 There were several announcements by search engines this week and I think one that was particularly interesting was Yahoo’s updates to Site Explorer with “Dynamic URL rewriting” and also the new Executive Editor assignment over at Search Engine Watch.

Here are the posts from the TopRank Blogging team on day three of SES San Jose:

• Search Bash 2007
• Yahoo Book Party – Mona Elesseily
• Search Engine QA On Links
• The SEO Reputation Problem
• In House Big SEO
• Link Baiting – Viral Search Marketing
• SEO QA on Links
• SES Video: Steven Marder Eurekster Swicki
• Mobile Search Optimization
• So You Want To Be A Search Marketer?
• SES Keynote: Marissa Mayer of Google

Be sure to watch the TopRank YouTube channel for new videos (not all are posted on the blog) as well as the steady stream of new SES San Jose photos on the TopRank Flickr site.

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In the “Business” section, a site called Squidoo took top honors.  If you’ve never heard of Squidoo – and, to be honest, more than a few of the winners had gone unnoticed by me – it will allow you to make a “‘lens’ to market yourself, your products or just something that you’re passionate about.  View and rate other people’s lenses and hope your content is rated well by others!”

As for the “Search” categories, Rollyo came in first, Eurekster Swicki placed second, and Pipl got third, so the omnipresent Google was, surprisingly, not visible among the top three.  Simply Google did receive an honorable mention, however.

In my relatively random recap of the Web 2.0 Awards, the section on social networking comes up next.  Here we see at least one name that should be familiar to most: Facebook.  I know Facebook has claimed more than a few minutes of my life, and it managed to claim first place in these rankings, as well.  Mingle2 followed behind, with Imbee (a site aimed solely at kids) bringing up the rear.

And I believe that’ll just about do it for this summary of the SEOmoz monster list.  Here, however, are a few more sites that caught my eye:

Biblio (number two in “Books”)
Pandora (number one in “Music”)
LinkedIn (number one in “Professional Networking”)
Zillow (number one in “Real Estate”)
FeedBurner (number one in “Feed Management”)

Credit for assembling the original beast goes to Jane Copland, and my hat is also off to a number of judges and contributors who also played important roles.

The new "Community Features" allow swicki users to vote in favor of or against results that appear on the page. Or, if something’s missing that should be there, users can write their own search result and add it to the index.

Swicki also keeps a list of unanswered questions: terms people have searched for but said they didn’t find the answer they needed. Users can answer those questions or pose their own to their community.

“As strong and successful as general search has been over the last years, there has been increasing momentum in enabling publishers and users to collaborate to provide more relevant and targeted search—somewhat known as social search. The challenge for most has been how to provide an easy and scaleable way for users to contribute their expertise and passion for a certain area of interest,” said Eurekster co-founder and CEO Steven Marder.

“Our Swicki (search plus wiki) platform has always allowed users to contribute and collaborate just through their implicit activity; today, with the launch of these new features that allow for Q&A, voting and posting comments, we now make it really easy for users to contribute their vertical, social or local oriented expertise and really emphasize the wiki in Swicki.”

But the main goal is conquering that information gap that occurs when searchers don’t find what they’re looking for.

“The idea of using existing search technologies to build bigger, faster, fresher indexes has not lead to greatly improved search results, because people only find what they want 60-80 percent of the time,” said Grant Ryan, co-founder and Chief Scientist for Eurekster. “We want to fill the 20-40 percent void by automatically highlighting gaps in the search results and making it easy for communities that care about a topic to fill in the answers."

The company says that since the Swicki’s inception, over 16,000 Web publishers have built over 46,000 Swickis worldwide. As the user-created index grows, Eurekster is building an ad network. Because these swickis are so niche in topics, they can, potentially, offer advertisers some pretty well-targeted crowds. As of now, advertisers can purchase space on individual swickis, and soon, reports Greg Sterling, categories of Swickis.

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Eurekster technology will enable Forbes to build vertical search engines out of their content.

A statement from Eurekster noted its service powers a tab called “Web” on the Forbes.com home page and on the search results page that offers Web search results influenced by, and specialized for, Forbes users using Eurekster’s Swicki technology.

Eventually, Forbes could use the Swicki technology to build more focused vertical search options from its content. Forbes already offers several content categories, each with several sub-categories. We anticipate Forbes using Eurekster and the activity of its visitors to improve the visibility of their content.

In a recent conversation with Eurekster CEO Steven Marder, he discussed some of the points of difference between Eurekster and companies like Yahoo. Eurekster is not a destination play; the company focuses on providing tools for sites to better serve their users.

With Eurekster’s Swicki technology, a webmaster can tailor the sources of content. That includes paid products as well as information sources. Tailoring the available content can help a publisher reinforce its brand by making searches through that content more relevant.

This permits the webmaster to select content that makes sense for the community. Eurekster also plans to move toward facilitating monetization as well as bringing advertising and publishing together with its future products.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Eurekster’s Swickis can be found on sites like Popular Science and Hollywood.com, where they create ‘buzz clouds’ of search terms based on what users search for the most on a website.

As more users submit queries through the Swicki search, the cloud grows and terms become bolder as their number of searches increases. Eurekster calls it community powered search, and it has been recognized by Red Herring as one of its 100 favorites in North America for 2006.

“We are honored to have been selected by Red Herring for this prestigious award that serves as a testament to Eurekster’s vision, technology and business model,” said Steven Marder, CEO & co-founder of Eurekster.

Marder will also take part in the Red Herring Spring 2006 CEO summit, taking place in Monterey, CA. Previous early movers spotted by Red Herring’s editorial staff include Google and eBay among many others.

Eurekster and the other companies recognized by Red Herring will participate in “The Pursuit of Disruption,” this year’s conference theme. Various speakers will cover topics in roundtable sessions, with award presentations taking place on May 25th.

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Could Captain Steve Ballmer and his little buddy, Bill Gates, really have Eurekster in their acquisition sights? That certainly seems to make more financial sense than the Facebook buy that a certain hack suggested in late March.

Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan picked up the Eurekster-Microsoft vibe from BusinessWeek, which itself picked up the rumor from the noteworthy “people familiar with the matter” sources.

Following these stories from link to link, and month to month, offers only slightly less difficulty than reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion in one sitting, but without the elves or Middle-Earth.

Essentially, they (Sullivan and BW, that is) indicate that Microsoft will do exactly what its reorganization aimed to accomplish: emphasize Windows Live and do for web services what Internet Explorer did for the browser market. IE holds about an 85 percent share, and Microsoft would not mind relegating online darlings like Yahoo and Google to the dot-com graveyard.

Ambitious, sure, but this is Microsoft, remember?

Eurekster isn’t giving anything away at this point, its CEO Steven Marder quite content to speak of ” negotiating potential partnerships with a number of portals and media companies.” Prudent words, probably 100 percent accurate and equally lacking in any real details.

BusinessWeek likes Microsoft’s potential to data-mine the information it possesses on its 230 million Hotmail users, and nearly as many MSN Messenger devotees, and bring that into the social networking mix as a ready-made userbase for a purchased or partnered Eurekster. That leaves us one question: isn’t anyone thinking about Friendster these days?

Anyone?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.