Sorry it’s been so long since my last real post. I’ve been really busy working on a million different things. I’ve heard many people asking to hear more both directly from them and from third parties so I am promising to try to increase my posts again. As always, I read emails constantly in case you want to hear from me in the meantime.

So Search Engine Strategies (SES) had their first SES Local. An indication that mainstream webmasters and search engines are paying closer attention to local search (which had shed its “niche search” quite a long time ago)? I wasn’t able to attend but I’m interested in hearing from anyone who attended about what they thought…especially anybody who may have familiarity with other local search conferences (i.e. DDL.

Anyone see the Searchmash search engine by Google. It takes Google’s simplistic design and adds some nice do-hickeys such as an AJAX-based scrolling mechanism similar to Microsoft’s Live Image Search. Obviously, Google’s search will probably stay simplistic for a long time and they may be doing what Microsoft did with Start.com…a testing ground for various concepts.

Did you hear about A9 dropping many features which include not only personalization but also the blockview stuff they had? They were the first to add this but it is fairly expensive to keep up. They want to focus more on core features and capturing users, currently ranked as number 83 last week in the US. A9 has always been about building a UI on top of an existng search engine, originally using Google but now using MSN’s new search engine (they recently relaunched a new improved search engine). Now, with a stripped down interface, no ability to bookmark, add diary entries, view street-level pictures (etc), I don’t see how they expect to draw users in unless they are willing to concede the search engine wars and be satisfied with their position (for which they can expect a big drop).

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