AndyHickl.com

The Evolution of Semantic SearchThe potential for semantic search to take on the role of an all-purpose engine is dead. Building a search engine is just too expensive: a massive capital expenditure, a huge team, and a marketing campaign to hook users are beyond the reach for most companies, let alone a startup. And, the big players are already integrating more and more semantic technology, such as Microsoft’s acquisition of Bing and Yahoo’s SearchMonkey initiative. That being said, there are still many ways for semantic technology to provide value to smaller domains in search. It’s time we refined our notion of semantic search and discuss what’s next for semantic search startups.

ANDY HICKL CEO Swingly	WILL HUNSINGER CEO Evri	Moderator MARK JOHNSON Senior Program Manager Bing at Microsoft	CONNIE KENNEALLY CEO Textwise

I’m part of an excellent panel (organized by Mark Johnson of Powerset/Bing fame) this morning at the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara.

We’re slated to tackle the question of “what’s next” for semantic search — a worth topic, indeed!

But, I have the feeling that we’ll all be circling back to the more vexing problem of exactly how companies who have invested in semantic technologies can create real (sustainable, sexy, growing) markets for their products.

There’s no live feed, but I’ll get shakycam video up later this afternoon.