We’ve been so busy getting ready for next week’s conference in San Francisco that it was a bit of a surprise to be deluged with submissions for our Boston conference yesterday. Of course that is because the deadline for submitting proposals for the Gilbane Boston conference, December 2 – 4, 2008 was June 15. It’s great to see the interest!
Anyway, since we will all be very busy next week, we realized we might as well extend the deadline, so the new deadline in June 24.
See: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html for instructions.
Questions can be sent to speaking@gilbane.com.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 53 of 74)
Relevance has always been the main goal of search for most of us searchers, although sometimes completeness can be even more important, e.g., when we want to determine relevance ourselves and volume is not an issue. Relevance is relative, and there is no way to write code that can anticipate relevance in a general way. (Of course quality is relative too!) Fortunately, search can be extremely useful even without the mind reading option – in fact, mind-reading wouldn’t be enough to anticipate relevance enough anyway.
Much of the discussion about search quality these days revolves around the front-end of relevance, i.e., determining, as much as possible, searchers’ intent. And we do have increasing amounts of information (such as surfing behavior) that allows us to make better guesses about intentions.
We can also make information richer so that search engines can make more accurate determinations about relevance. For example XML site maps provide context in the form of structural information; providing additional metadata to search engines provides even more context.
Despite the imprecise, and constantly changing meaning and use of language, we have been able to asymptotically improve our ability to determine both intent and relevance, and incrementally improve search quality.
I say “we”, but I am neither a developer nor an expert on search technology. We are fortunate to have someone who is arguably the most influential expert and developer today speaking about search quality in two weeks at our San Francisco conference. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, Google is going to open the conference with a presentation on Search Quality and Continuous Innovation. While Udi won’t be giving away any secrets, his presentation will provide valuable and fascinating insight into the way Google thinks about improving search quality. For a taste of Udi’s clear and straightforward style, and what he’ll be talking about read his recent blog post: Introduction to Google Search Quality
We have a lot of search coverage at our San Francisco conference in a couple of weeks, including a conference keynote, a track keynote, multiple panel sessions, and an in-depth workshop. To complement all of this we are offering a 20% discount to registered attendees who order Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen Arnold.
Steve is being interviewed by Lynda Moulton in the Enterprise Search track keynote, so you can pepper him with questions after you read the report. All registered attendees will automatically get an email with the coupon code to use for the discount. If you can’t make it to San Francisco you can still get the report at .
Find out more about what we’ll be covering in our search track on Lynda’s search blog. Though there is some overlap, also see the Search and Semantic Technology category.
This year we have 5 half-day workshops following our conference with 5 excellent expert instructors. These are a great complement to the conference for those of you really need to dig-in to a topic.
A: Web Content Management Systems: Architectures & Products
Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch, Publisher, The CMS Report
B: Enterprise Search: How to Successfully Adopt and Deploy Search
Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst for Enterprise Search, the Gilbane Group
C: The Hive: A New Model for Extracting the Best from ECM Initiatives
Cairo Walker, Consultant, Enterprise Content Management Graduate Program, University of Technology, Sydney
D: Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems
Andrew Draheim, Globalization Consultant, Dig-IT!
E: Social Media 101: Building a Social Media Roadmap
Rachel Happe, Research Manager, Digital Business Economy, IDC
Registration information
This is the last week for the “early-bird” discounts for Gilbane San Francisco.
For more details about the keynotes and conference sessions visit http://gilbanesf.com
Main Conference Schedule
Post-conference Workshops
Technology Showcase
Conference Speakers
The 2008 CM Pros US Spring summit will take place on June 17, the day before the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.
Our Publishing Practice released a new report this week: Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions – Growth, Trends, and Best Practices. This is an interesting study especially because it is not an area covered much, if at all, by other firms. Bill Rosenblatt, who co-authored the report with Steve Paxhia, blogged about the report yesterday. You can download the report at no charge from our new “Research Reports” page.
The new page will be the place to find a listing of our most current reports and studies. You can also find information there about Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen Arnold, which we released in April (and which is not free – but a great deal!).
We have 5 more reports in the works to be published in the next couple of months, and realized we needed a home for this new series of publications. While you can find most anything on our site with our Google custom search, we have reports going back to 1993, as well as many other types of publications, and thought a new home for current reports would make for a friendlier site.
The deadline for submitting proposals for the Gilbane Boston conference, December 2 – 4, 2008 is June 15. See: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html
In case you missed it, we published our latest report, Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen Arnold, early last week, and it is available at a special introductory price through April 25. More details are at: , or you can go right to the store at: .
