The second day has less of the “big picture” and more of product announcements and more technical detail. Here are some notes as the day progresses:

Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft: Our enterprise search vision & roadmap

Kirk is responsible for the business side of FAST after the acquisition. He is speaking on Microsoft’s commitment to search, the roadmap and future business directions, including pricing.

About 15% of the research done in MS Research is search-oriented.  10 years support on current FAST products, even non-MS platform.

Search server express now has more than 100,000 downloads. 1/3 of MS enterprise customers have deployed a MS search solution. Partner #s have doubled.

MS vision: Create experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of Internet services across a world of devices. Search is integral to vision.

Demo: Use of search in a business setting, showing documents in a viewer format, extracting keywords and concepts.

Announcing two new products:

• FAST for Sharepoint, which is FAST ESP integrated into Sharepoint, available at a substantially lower price than FAST ESP, typically 50% lower price. Simpler pricing model: Per-user charge for FAST ESP standalone, included in Sharepoint. Still need to buy a server at 25K a pop, but this is substantially lower price. Will be available from next rollout of Office (wave 14). Will also provide a licensing bridge for those who purchase Sharepoint now.
• FAST Search for Internet business. New functionality for interaction management (promotions, campaigns etc.), Content Integration Studio (graphical interface for managing content restructuring and content integration), and simplified licensing: Language pack and connectors will be part of the standard package.

Valentin Richter, Raytion: User engagement

Low satisfaction with many search solutions, and 70% of search managers do not study search logs with an eye to improve the experience. Went through a list of common myths about search (such as “people know what they are looking for”.) People want simplicity – they cannot handle expressions and need more of a drill down approach navigating through related information. Installing search platforms immediately needs to a focus on information quality: You find duplicates, you find confidential documents everywhere, and so on – be ready for it both in a technical and organizational sense.

Walton Smith, Booz Allen Hamilton: Case study of use of FAST and Sharepoint

BAH based in Virginia, traditionally centralized, but expanding. 300 partners, all wanting to go in different directions. De facto collaboration tool was Outlook. Created a social computing platform called hello.bah.com. Among the results: Have given access to more esoteric material, which caused issues with indexing. Were able to pull new people from other parts of the organization on a project. Other application: staffing.bah.com, finding people with the right credentials and experience, pulling information from many sources. search.bah.com crawls hell and iShare. About 1/3 of the firm is now using the platform, lots of information on individuals.

Charlene Li: Transformation  based on social technologies

It is all about engaging users in dialogue: H&R Block has a page on Facebook where they discuss tax issues – not trying to pull people in, at least not explicitly. Comcast is on Twitter with their customer service people. Starbucks testing ideas, such as automated purchasing based on a customer card. Beth Israel’s CEO blogs about what it is like to run a hospital. Necessary to change search to include social software: Technorati searches blogs, del.icio.us allows social bookmarking. You can use Twitter mapping to see what people are discussing – showing that what is rated high somewhere may not be what is most discussed. Amazon now lets you filter reviews by friends.

Conclusion: Social networks will be like air, and will transform companies from the outside in. Social media is impacting search at multiple levels, refining results based on personalization details derived from their social circles.

Jørn Ellefsen, Comperio: In search of profits

Comperio has more than 100 customers and have created a front application, Comperio Front, that sits between the customer’s web pages and their search engine. Introduced Drew Brunell who works with SEO for, among others, News International. Paid search is the growing part of the advertising market, everything else is either flat (display ads) or sinking (traditional ads). Doing a lot of experimentation linking into customer behavior – for instance, matching content with areas that see a lot of conmments, “invisible newspapers”. Another notion is the “curated content model”, setting up pages with a blend of original content with stuff from the outside web. Topic pages based on “zero-term search”, offering editorial content put together automatically around. Stefan Sveen, CTO Comperio, demonstrated topic pages from Times Online: User and journalists can create their own topic pages, based on search results and mark entries coming in after the page is created.

Venkat Krishnamoorthy, Thomson Reuters: Delivering Contextual and Intelligent Information to Premium Customers

Reuters delivers context-sensitive information for pre-investment analysis to premiere customers. They have done this for a long time, but want to change from being a data-delivery company, but to integrate into  the user’s workflow. Challenges here included having too many applications the customers needed to stitch together, finding information was difficult, especially across different kinds of assets – more than 40 content databases.  Solution: Put in a search and navigation layer between their desktop products (they have two, a web-based one and a premium, client-based one).