Search Engine Show to Highlight Industry Changes

With Web searches dominating the majority of Internet traffic, if you want to know how to float to the top of a directory, you gotta listen to SearchEngine Watch founder Danny Sullivan.

Sullivan and company are in San Jose, Calif. starting Monday for the Search Engine Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo. The four-day event (August 18-21) produced by Jupitermedia , parent company of this Web site, brings together some of the best cutting edge strategies in the search engine sector.

The show is taking on a larger significance this time around considering the wildly changing world of search engines. In the last six months alone Google scooped up the assets of Applied Semantics, Overture said it would buy the Web search unit of FAST Search, Yahoo then turned right around and announced plans to acquire Overture.

Joining Sullivan on the keynote stage next week will be Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Wednesday and Yahoo Senior Vice President of Search and Marketplace Jeff Weiner on Thursday.

The breakout sessions are also reflecting the changing face of search engines. New topics and tracks include Organic Listings Forum; Search Engines & Trademarks; Cleaning Up the Mess; Search Engine Ratings; Balancing Organic & Paid Listings; Dayparts & Other Paid Listings Evolutions; Up Close With the Google API; Contextual Ads; Blogs, News Search & RSS Feeds; Search Engines & Web Server Issues; Meet The Meta Search Engines; Advanced Link Building Forum; and PPC Management Tool Vendors along with updated and improved sessions previously held.

Recent reports by Jupiter Research show search marketing will continue to be the hottest segment of online marketing into 2004.

“Seventy six percent of marketing executives that used search engine marketing rate it as more successful than banner-style advertising and 64 percent plan on increasing their spending,” said Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein.

“For consumers, Web-wide search is more accurate than local site search a full 52 percent of the time,” added Jupiter Research senior analyst Matthew Berk. “Search is the single greatest opportunity to learn from – and influence – customer behavior.”

Show organizers also note that attendance is way up this year prompting the addition of a pre-conference just for tutorials.

Representatives from About.com, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, America Online (AOL), Ask Jeeves/Teoma, Carat Interactive, comScore Networks, Consumer WebWatch, EFF/ChillingEffects.com, FindWhat.com, Google, Inktomi, Jupiter Research, LookSmart, Microsoft, MSN, Nielsen/NetRatings, Overture, Primedia, Sprinks, Terra Lycos, U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, Yahoo and more are expected to be in attendance.