The search engine market is a tough one.

Ask.com, the search engine from the American group IAC/InteractiveCorp, is abandoning its general Web search engine strategy in favor of vertical search focused on specific demographic groups (such as the Rushmore Drive engine that seeks to prioritize content for an African-American audience).

This reorientation is accompanied by a restructuring plan encompassing the layoff of 8% of the Ask.com workforce and the departure of Gary Price, a search guru who joined ask in order to bring innovation to the heart of the Ask engine.

We can’t let this event pass without pausing to salute the creativity of the Ask team, as evidenced by products such as Ask3D, which offered some interesting new functionalities for users. Our best wishes for the future for all the Ask crew…

It’s also a moment for us here at Exalead to reflect on the disquieting reduction in the number of general Web search engines over the past few years, particularly as the stakes for free, open and universal access to information continue to escalate.

The role of challenger in this domain is important. It is to continue to innovate, to continue to seek of new ways of solving old problems, to continue to imagine novel ways of accessing and navigating the world’s burgeoning information stores, and it is the duty of the challenger to keep pressure on market leaders without ceasing to interrogate its own vision. For, in a world where diversity is fading, innovation left in the hands of a sole actor will cease to exist.

At Exalead, we are committed to doing our part by keeping up a flow of innovations for the public, like searching by associated terms (at www.exalead.com since 2001), thumbnail previews for results, face filtering for image searches (a market first released a month ahead of Google), and many others to come…

So a little message to those who support us: we’re committed long-term to challenging the status quo within the search engine world. Spread the word.

On February 28, Exalead, in partnership with KMWorld and The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), hosted a webinar in which Exalead’s co-founder François Bourdoncle and Steve Rappaport, ARF’s Director of Knowledge Solutions, discussed ARF’s experience in implementing an online knowledge-base. They also discussed hot trends in information access, including the growing use of hybrid vertical search applications by businesses. If you missed the discussion, you can access it now on KMWorld’s webinar archive.

As part of his series “Search Wizards Speak,” search guru Stephen Arnold recently interviewed Exalead founder François Bourdoncle. Though the series focuses mainly on enterprise search technologies, you’ll find much of interest with regard to Bourdoncle’s Alta Vista roots and the company’s guiding “search by serendipity” philosophy, as well as its dedication to unified search across all platforms (desktop, enterprise, mobile, Web…).

Read the interview.

Almost every late-generation website has embraced the same recent interface (UI) trends, sporting slick AJAX- and DHTML-generated interfaces, and most offer their users community-driven features like user ratings and content-creation tools. Some, like Prosper, Youtube, Facebook, eBay and Wikipedia, have or will become bellwether sites as they discover novel ways to empower consumers.

Some may even participate in taking the web to the next plateau by breaking through the walls separating one site from another. For, as amazing as the web has been at linking people together to accomplish great (or at least impressive) things, it has mostly failed at creating communication links between websites, leaving the web ocean filled with myriad islands.

It is a logical progression. First portals and search engines revolutionized the web by their grand success in linking documents; then social networks altered the face of the Net by linking people. Now, new technologies promise a third revolution by forging new links between websites.

These technologies, as represented by projects like OpenId, the Data Portability Project, and Microformats, are devoted to standardizing and facilitating information exchange so data can be easily ported from site to site. Think, for example, at the personal level, of the convenience of creating or updating your profile across all your personal networking sites using a single form. This kind of data portability, plus a new, shared philosophy of openness among web players, is beginning to create these website linkages, leading to an almost perfect fluidity of data on the web.

Mashups are of course one of the first manifestations of this fluidity. Using the web as a platform, mashups leverage available APIs (application programming interfaces) to combine data from multiple sources to create new services on existing websites. Consider, for example, a site that combines mapping data from one site with yellow pages information from another to create a rich directory not available on either source site.

This trend toward open exchange will only accelerate. As a first consequence, computers will become true “digital assistants,” providing a web experience that will become more and more personalized for everyone (with everyone simultaneously becoming more and more tuned in to privacy concerns).

Following this line of thought, we can seek the next evolution in the next kind of link being built. It is in fact already being built around us. It is an even deeper link between people arising from the convergence of personal communication and Internet access devices. The mobile phone will soon serve as the primary way to be online, with any time/anywhere connectivity thanks to the persistence of wifi/wimax connections, allowing for a ubiquitous yet even more personalized and more useful experience.

The next step will be the link between web applications and real life objects, with more and more objects being connected to the Internet (think of cars with GPS systems and “smart” household appliances connected to the Internet for remote management). Simultaneously, connected devices will play an increasingly active role in data exchanges. Think, for example, of your mobile phone not just providing GPS data to a web application in order to direct you to a local restaurant, but also (knowing your music download history and the community forums to which you subscribe) communicating your love of music as part of your profile, with the result being you are automatically steered to a restaurant with a live pianist at lunch.

And following on the heels of links between web applications and real life objects will be links between the objects themselves. What happens when your mobile phone, your TV and your smart car get together (with each other and their peers) to talk about you? Who said scary?

Join us Thursday, February 28, 2007, 12:00-1:00 p.m. Eastern Time for the KMWorld Webinar: “Leveraging the Power of Unified Information Access for Effective Knowledge Management” (aka, “Shortcut to a Five-Star Knowledge Base: Lessons from The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)”).

Exalead co-founder François Bourdoncle and Steve Rappaport, Director of Knowledge Solutions for The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), will discuss ARF’s experience in implementing an online knowledge-base. Also on the agenda, hot trends in information access, including the growth of hybrid vertical search applications in business.

Register now for this FREE webinar:
http://www.kmworld.com/webinars/register.aspx?eventid=279&src=kmb

AltSearchEngines, Charles Knight’s famous website on alternative search engines we already talked about published on last Friday an interview of François Bourdoncle, Exalead’s President.

This interview redraws François’ career and Exalead creation, introduces new-born BAAGZ and goes back over Exalead’s ambitions beyond French borders.

You can read this interview here.

Are you on Facebook? Do you compulsively
log on every day? At all hours? Is the site always open in your browser? Set as
your home page??

How can one explain the remarkable success
of this umpteenth social network? Is it timing? A masterful technical
deployment? Ease of use? The non-stop, abundant flow of info on even the
slightest movements among one’s entourage? Or simply luck? Could it have as
easily been any other of the hundreds (no, thousands) of sites vying for your
attention and that of your friends? Who knows? In any case, it’s a runaway success.

I’m only connected to a dozen or so
friends, but already on my home page I can follow a continual stream of newly
posted photos and images, track relationships in the making (or unmaking), view
profile updates, follow fluff messages or plug into useful exchanges, or join
improbable groups, like the “I flip my pillow over so I can feel the cold
side when I’m sleeping” group, or the ever-popular and grammatically
challenged “If the End of the World was announced by Melissa Theuriau, I’ll
die happy” group.

You can easily connect every half hour and
find new updates. With more friends, make that
every few minutes. It’s a little like gazing out a window and following the
action on a street where only your friends pass, an insider’s view into what
your friends think and feel, and what they want.

What’s more, there is a whole host of
plug-n-play applications you can add to your Facebook home page to move from
gazer to player (some developed by Facebook and other by partners). Say you
belong to the group “Brits in New York.” You could already exchange messages with
members of this group, but now you can plug in the Calendar app and organize a
meet-up with Newcastle fans at Nevada Smiths. Plug in the Slideshows app, and you can share videos of
your Newcastletonians Night Out. And not happy with your latest Profile pic?
Touch it up with the app Picnik. The possibilities are endless. Are you still
going to need your buggy old OS? You, yes. But your kids?

Now some of my professional contacts have
started to send me Facebook connection requests. All’s fine and well when the
network is confined to your web geek friends, but imagine what dilemmas await
as the networks spread. Do you really want to leave up that photo of you
rollerblading in the leopard thong?

With that cautionary anecdote noted, the
consent-based social networks of Facebook are considerable and seem useful for
all sorts of purposes:

• Small Ads: I could privilege ads coming from my close contacts, those whom I trust most, followed by those from members of my groups, etc. (This is also the approach used by Microsoft’s “Live Expo” in leveraging your MSN contacts.)
• Professional networking: I could explore jobs and partnerships and maintain client contacts. All that you can do on LinkedIn or Viadeo.
• Travel: I could better choose destinations, hotels, windsurfing
  spots, tour operators and airlines.
• News: I could more easily sift through the endless news stories available on the Net by filtering them for those read or recommended by my contacts, or maybe even just those contacts with whom I share particular interests.
• Dating: This is already in place and well-used, judging from the categories available for one’s Profile: “Single”, “In a Relationship”, “In an Open Relationship” (?!), “Engaged”, “Married”, or “It’s Complicated”; and those that describe what you’re looking for: “Friendship”, “A Relationship”, “Dating”, “Random Play”, or “Whatever I can get”.
• Net Searching: Will Google be rendered obsolete one day by a yet-to-be-invented “social search” application? An application that responds better to exploratory requests like “What are the best vegan restaurants in Queens?” or “What’s the best way to break up with my girlfriend?” Yahoo Answers and the now defunct Google Answers have tried to address this challenge, but a real community aspect is needed for this to truly work, and Facebook has the most well connected communities on the Net…

Certain oracles even see Facebook
dethroning Yahoo and Google altogether one day …And you? What’s your Facebook
prediction? A soft fading into the sunset as with Friendster? Why? Perhaps you
find terrifying the phenomenal quantity of information and photos available to
Facebook and all the partner applications for whatever purposes are deemed
useful…