The Wild West
posted by philip in Snooth
I was in San Jose all of last week - ostensibly for the Search Engine Strategies conference at which I spoke on Vertical Search, however, I used the fact that I was down there as an excuse to schedule a lot of meetings.
Specifically, and scarily, the panel I spoke on was called “Getting it right in Vertical Search” - clearly, as I joked to the audience then, this is a panel I should be listening to, rather than speaking at. For those that are interested, I’ve uploaded the presentation here: Vertical Search presentation by Snooth. Its basically an introduction to the kinds of things one would need to think of when building their own vertical search site. Hint - you need a big market to support the kind of affiliate or ad dollars a VC would like to see.
This doesn’t have much to do with wine, but I wanted to tell you about one of the highlights of the week: the Google Dance!
Until recently, I thought the Google Dance was what happened to your search rankings when Google decided to update their algorithm, however, its also the name of one of their annual parties.
Geeks paradise really is the only description I can use to describe it. The boys at Google really know how to appeal to everyone’s inner nerd. With popsicle stands, caricaturists, a dance floor, pool tables, beach volleyball, and of course free food, drink and dispensing candy machines it was quite the event. Everyone was given glow in the dark tshirts, wrist bands, glow sticks and other paraphernalia, and there were even Google engineers on hand to demo the various Google applications. If none of this appealed, you could hang out with the Google pets: I only saw some dogs, but they were very cute and seemed at ease with the throngs.
Best of all though, was that they’d set up a giant stage for us to go up and play the game: Rock Band. Complete with laser show, smoke and wind machines, when I first walked past I thought it was a Kiss cover band. It was only on second glance that I realized it was a bunch of search geeks like myself rocking out!
I didn’t go up, as the wait was so long, but it really looked like the highlight of the night. To the “bands” that really cut loose, you guys were amazing. I was one of your thousand strong fan base that night.
PS. The #1 highlight of the whole week was actually the Snooth Meetup in San Francisco, but HondaJohn beat me to the report on that, so I’m going with my number 2 story.