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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I’m not the only one who thinks we are in definite need of Search 2.0. Just ask the founders of Wink, Delicious, Eurekster, or Rollyo. Or Google and Yahoo! for that matter.

There generally seems to be two different approaches to Search 2.0. The first is the approach of Wink / Delicious, which is largely community driven.

Wink is people powered search. Users rank and tag Google search results, thus using collective wisdom to improve the results for queries. Delicious does something different but with the same goal of better search results – a search query for a word like blogs returns results for the most tagged item by the community.

On the other hand, we have Rollyo a concept based on individuals creating their own search engines. With Rollyo, for example, you can create a vertical search engine on a niche subject or one consisting solely of the sites you visit on a regular basis.

Eurekster is somewhat of a mix of these two ideas. Like Rollyo, Eurekster lets you create your own search engine, calling your creation a “swicki”. In this approach though, you train the swicki to help point it to more relevant sites or search queries. It then uses that information to weight search results – results do not include solely hits from the specified sites. Eurekster also learns from users and has a buzz cloud below its search box, showing the most popular queries by users. You can check out my swicki or see it in action on the right sidebar of Jeff Clavier’s site.

Yahoo! and Google jumped in on Search 2.0 by doing things like social bookmarking and search history. They seem to be betting on personalization over the community approach.

A pure technology solution is not going to solve the search problem. As I wrote in the past, there is no perfect search algorithm. The analysis above proves that. Now, it’s a matter of seeing which type of human intervention – at the individual or community level – brings us closer to Search 2.0.

Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

The Times’ online version features two clouds, one for US President George W. Bush’s recent 2006 State of the Union address, the other for his 2002 speech.

A tag cloud generally refers to a visual weighted list of a website’s tags. According to the Wikipedia listing

Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible.

You see tag clouds in places like Flickr, highlighting the most clicked-on tags; even Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog features a tag cloud generated by Tagcloud.com based on Steve’s posts. This blog uses the tag cloud feature to highlight the searches conducted on the PR-focused Swicki search I set up at Eurekster.

But the Times concept sheds new light on what’s possible with tag clouds. By turning every word in both speeches into tags, it’s easy to see where the focus shifted from 2002-shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks-to 2006. “Security,” “terror,” and “weapons” were oft-repeated in the 3,875-word speech four years ago; the address earlier this week(which weiged in at 5,433 words) featured an emphasis on economy, a word the President uttered 16 times.

There’s huge potential for this approach to tag clouds; expect to see more of it.

Hat tip to Poynter Online’s E-media Tidbits.

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.