IAMAI-Pinstorm Search Marketing Seminar: The Future Of Search

The next session at the IAMAI-Pinstorm Search Marketing Seminar featured representatives from the search engine industry who spoke about the future of search, among other things:

The Sellers
Rishi Behal, Director of Search at Yahoo! India spoke briefly about their plans for search marketing. They have around 50 advertisers signed up, and will go live in the next couple of weeks. According to their studies, people have no brand loyalty while searching. They may search for an Air Deccan ticket via TravelGuru, but could end up buying a SpiceJet ticket at Cleartrip. The top ranked results, however, give a perception of leadership. He mentioned that the current system at Yahoo!, with the ranking based on bids, needs to be improved. Yahoo! is planning a new release in the next few months, which will take into account the relevance of the ad. Behal also spoke briefly about Web 2.0, and “introduced” us to Flickr.
Peeyush Bajpai, co-founder Raftaar.com spoke about compatibility issues they faced while developing the Hindustani (informal Hindi) search engine. The future of search on the Internet according to him is across various digital devices, and non English based- maybe even bilingual. The long tail of search will get longer; it is this long tail that Raftaar plans to cater to: as the reach of the Internet increases, down to rural kiosks in India where most searchers are primary school dropouts- issues of language, demographic and technological differences will need to be addressed. He demonstrated how Raftaar has handled some of these; they’ve had over 2mn searches in Hindi since launch on Jan 26th, and are looking to leverage the first mover advantage.
Jinesh Sonawala, Sr. Director, OEM Sales and Business Development, Webaroo, spoke about taking search offline. Cached pages allowed him to search and browse content on the flight over to Delhi – while others -

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