Search Marketing Blog
SMX Social Media Marketing - Social Search: The Human Challengers
Only 1 hour 20 minutes until the SMX Social Media in Long Beach cocktail reception! But first, we have the keynote titled “Social Search: The Human Challengers“. I was actually looking forward to presentations from Jason Calcanis (founder & CEO, Mahalo), Steven Marder (Co-Founder & CEO, Eurekster), and Jimmy Wales (Founder, Wikia Search and fellow Objectivist) on how social interaction can improve search.
Steven Marder kicked things off with a presentation on Eurekster. Steven basically went over a demonstration of their technology and the pros and cons of human vs. algorithm based search.
Next was Jimmy Wales on Wikia search 0.2 (not 2.0). Jimmy touched on the philosophy behind Wikia technology, then went on to discuss Wikia search. Jimmy noted that the results are not very good right now. He later went on to demo the editable search results, comments, spotlights, and related searches. I’m rooting for Wikia search because I think that it will have several niche-focused applications similar to wikis.
Next up was Jason Calcanis. Jason started off by asking how many SEO’s there were in the audience then went on to demonstrate why SEO’s can’t game Mahalo. For those of you who are not familiar with Jason he recently made some pretty negative comments about SEOs. I don’t think Jason quiet understands that most SEOs help improve the relevancy of their client’s sites, they don’t try to “game” the system. In my humble opinion, I think humans might be a little easier to influence then algorithms.
Ok, now it’s time for the cocktail reception!
