Photo Credit to Jeremiah Owyang

This will be the 5th conference I’ve been invited to in the past week and a half… Pretty exhausting! Like I mentioned in my last post, it’s impractical to come to these conferences without a laptop that you can work on.

In a nutshell, here are my ratings for the conference:

1) Quality of Sessions: 8/10 – Among the best of the conferences I’ve been to

2) Venue: 9/10 – Practical, but not spectacular (Santa Clara Convention Center)

3) Food: 9/10 – Best Conference Food I’ve had! Amazing lunch, pretty good reception appetizers

4) Quality of Attendees: 6.5/10 – Not so hot… older, not as cool crowd.

The Searchnomics crowd seemed to be a bit older and a bit less web 2.0 savvy, but the quality of the sessions was pretty high. At any given time, there was a selection of 5 to go to, and I’d say 3/5 of them were really good. Like all conferences are, some sessions are good, some are bad, and that’s usually dependent on the speaker more so than on the topic. It’s especially annoying when speakers come to pitch their product/service and give no educational value whatsoever. At Searchomics, there was none of this, and the moderators took the effort to make sure of it. Kudos to them!

I feel as if most entrepreneurs there viewed Google with a love/hate relationship. Take the product comparison engines, for example: They get most of their traffic from google, (mainly from paid search) yet they’re constantly competing with everybody else on Google (as well as google) when it comes to everything they do. What I mean by this is, when you search for “ipod nano” these product comparison engines want it such that customers go directly to them, but most people continue to go back to Google.

Vertical search engines need a way of getting direct traffic rather than relying directly on google in order to get catch and keep traffic. Shopzilla says that 5-6% of their traffic comes from integrating its technologies with existing content websites that have heavy traffic. By combining a website with content and community with relevant products/services that people may buy suddenly provides both sides a new way to monetize. These types of agreements usually mean splitting the profits 50/50. Become.com, another product comparison website claims that this type of marketing brings in 10% of their traffic. Both companies agreed that this marketing method is INCREDIBLY effective, but the problem with this is that it takes much longer to make these types of partnerships.



Photo Credit to Jeremiah Owyang

Local search is huge, but there’s still this huge gap between online and offline. When it comes to tangible goods, it’s easy to finish the entire transaction online. But when it comes to local services, it becomes slightly more difficult. International services are a bit difficult as well, but odesk.com seems to have the best model for web development outsourcing. My friends at uship.com seem to have a pretty decent profit model when it comes to services that addresses this huge issue that was brought up at the conference. The day a company perfects this model is the day that we’ll see the next eBay.

Now for the award ceremony… there were several of awards, such as best social engine and most popular engine. Best social engine went to Linkedin.com, and most popular engine obviously went to Google. My friends at Ask.com were pretty pissed off – I mean, what a stupid, incredibly biased award. It’s obvious that Google would win this without any debate or discussion. I guess it also helps that Google is Searchnomics’ Platinum Sponsor :)

More to come!

  • No Related Post