Monday afternoon at BSeC, we held a series of “Knowledge Cafes”. This session was a new format, based upon a discussion format by David Gurteen.
The format of a Knowledge Café is to have a facilitator provide a brief (5-10 minute) introduction to a topic, then split the participants into small groups of 4-5 people each, to have their own discussion around it. After 30-40 minutes, you then bring together the members of the individual discussion groups into a larger group to continue the discussion.
I had the pleasure of leading a Knowledge Café on Vertical Search, with about 15-18 participants.
We talked about how the quality of GYM search was diminishing, with shopping and spam sites dominating results. While no one will likely displace Google for consumer search, there are many opportunities for vertical search, particularly topical search.
It was also discussed how publishers were well-suited to vertical search, as they can leverage their understanding of niche markets and their editorial expertise in site selection and tagging.
The group agreed that the biggest challenge to building an effective vertical search engine was in the tagging and development of taxonomies and ontologies. It was suggested that those interested in vertical search should invest an hour or so building one using the free Google Co-op Custom Search Engines. This will let them learn about the process, while also seeing some of the challenges.
The new Knowledge Café format seemed to be much more effective than the larger discussion groups of the past. Thanks to Dick Kaser and David Gurteen for introducing the new format.
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