The first session interval I attended at the SES Chicago Expo was entitled: Search, A Real-Time Paradigm?

Search engines strive to have the most up-to-date content on the web, indexed and ready for display to searchers. They are moving towards that goal quickly, showing fresh, instant content higher in the blended search results. Google has created ’show options’ which includes pages crawled in the last 24 hours and forum/review results. Others like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are indexing instant submissions and making them highly visible in search results. Fresh content is a high priority for search marketers and advertisers to create and optimize.

First up to speak was Bill Fischer of TwitterJobSearch.com  Bill runs a job search site through real time semantic algorithms based on social media sites like Facbook, Twitter and Linkedin that brings job seekers and employers together through social media.  Bill’s presentation apparently never got sent to SES so he had to use another presentation with European stats, which being an American and all was kind of odd for me but understandable under the circumstances.As briefly as possible, Bills organization feels that classified advertising is moving in the direction of social media which is why they jumped on the idea.  Imagine a job opening that you are aware of even before the hiring companies HR department has even publically made the job available on their local domain or Career Builder or Monster.  Imagine a way to find qualified people and land a job faster, pretty cool huh?

Overall, Bills presentation was little short and lacked information.  Slightly understandable as his true presentation was lost, which may have been more enlightening; but we will never know.  What I look for in these sessions, presentations and panels is ‘actionable’ items that we as an audience can take away and apply ourselves.  I did not get any action items from Bill, only what his company does; however his site is pretty cool.

Next up was Nathan Stroll, co-founder of Aardvark.  Aardvark allows a user to ask a question, and the system finds the person who can answer it through social networking.  The system gathers knowledge from those in your network and finds those in your network and well as friends of friends of friends within the networks who can possibly answer your question.  A real interesting social platform if you ask me because it has nothing to do with Google.

Nathan did give one good piece of advice for social networking:
-    You need a reason why someone should follow you online on facebook or twitter, what’s the incentive for this other person?

Overall, I felt relatively left in the dark as with Bills presentation in that the focus was about them and what they are doing.  Nathan did mention ‘who knows what the future holds?’… No real actionable items to take away for the average online marketer.

Third on the panel was Rob Walk of NovaRising.  Novarising.com is a music indexing and search site for the BBC.  It uses semantic search and indexing to find top songs and artists worldwide through comments, posts, plays and views from Bebo, Google, iTunes, Last.fm, MySpace and YouTube.  Basically a music popularity contest across multiple platforms.  Users can narrow down search and enhance searches by genre, age, sex, etc..  Rob mainly talked about the nova project, some features, and some challenges.  Same as before, no real actionable items to take away for the average online marketer during this presentation.

Last up was Ho John Lee, Principal Program Manger of Bing Social Search.  Ho John was the best speaker in this interval in my mind as I had the most notes and ‘take-away’ from him.  Ho John spoke of real time social media in relation to Bing network and how Bing is adapting with the trends.

Why real time through social in relation to search engines?  Mainly because it’s fresh and ‘now’.  Ho John did reveal some information and tips to get placement of your social media efforts on the Bing network.
-    Remember that content determines meaning and relevancy
-    Low relevance ‘noise’ (chatter) can become ‘signal’ in aggregate
-    Information may not be accurate, but its fresh
-    Real time search is frequently and about ‘discovery’ not search, what are people talking about, who are people following?
-    Real time social search results differ from traditional web search results (he didn’t say exactly how)
-    Spam communities are highly visible to the search engines, don’t be part of a large social community.
-    Share good links
-    Attract real people

How does Bing use and score social in its search engine:
-    Top tweets
-    Shared links
-    Re-Tweets in last minute, hour and day
-    Your physical location

Although I did not expect a representative of Bing to spill the beans, these tips do help in general because prior to knowing this it was all guess work, assumptions and testing.  Sadly, it still comes down to more guess work, more assumptions and more testing to get higher placement on the search engines with or without social; at least now we have a little more direction from Bing at least.

In general this interval was about fresh real time search; it delivered what it promised.  I personally was not impressed basically because I want to learn how to be better at what I do for a living through these panels at this expo (that’s why we pay money to attend).  Ho John from Bing did provide the most informative and actionable presentation from the group.  When all is said and done, real-time fresh content is still an infant and has a long way to go.  If you can grab hold of it now, you will be far ahead of your competition.