SEL: Key Takeaways from Battelle's Interview with MSN Search's Gary Flake

check out the Digging into Search swicki at eurekster.com

Search marketing in the new media era.

April 07, 2006

Key Takeaways from Battelle's Interview with MSN Search's Gary Flake

Battelle's interview with Gary Flake gave me the following take aways:

• Keep an eye on Microsoft Research
• Read more Greg Linden (who asked my favorite questions in the thread following the post)
• When engineers lead a project they may get distracted by "core issues" and ignore stuff like usability (even at MSN ;)
• User Interface at MSN search is now under strong investigation and experimentation: live.com
• 32 bit architecture to 64 bit architecture translates into increasingly sophisticated measurements of relevance at MSN
• This advance is not a sustainable tech advantage (Greg points out in comments)
• MSN Haterade still guzzled freely (via comments) - this is an observation, not a value statement on my part
• Gary driving a sense of MSN innovation, [what's important is that] "we have a platform, framework, and philosophy that are all in support of trying new things so that we can progressively improve and learn."
• Gary driving a sense of MSN passion: "the idea of being able to fully leverage [Microsoft Research] towards web search gave me goose bumps."

One thing's for sure: Gary Flake is a PR badass. Why? I'm interested again in what's happening at MSN. He's got passion for what he does and communicates that plainly. Get him blogging, MSN.

Here's some Greg Linden reading for you for the weekend:
MyLifeBits, Memex, and Google Desktop Search

Why read him? He's asking great questions about the core of search, and balances out my ecstatic power of social media/social search rants about Yahoo MyWeb :)

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

...the search industry queries new media