Jeff Cutler of Answers.com kicked off by mentioning an analyst firm that claimed that search engines were going to put aggregators out of business. My thought: it's not the point. Web search engines are becoming more like aggregators themselves by the day. Jim Gerber of Google illustrated this nicely with his presentation, in which he demonstrated how subscription content is integrated in via Google News, which provides access to premium news content, Google Scholar, which enables premium content available in a local library-managed collection to get access to premium research content, and Google Books, which is able to support content sourced from partners and libraries to expose copyrighted and non-copyrighted content easily. The main difference between Google and traditional aggregators from this perspective is licensing: Google can provide access to premium book content in a view-only form online, but there is no license management function beyond this effort - yet. Jim highlighted some of the controversy surrounding Google Scholar, pointing out the excerpt management, links to purchasing points and library access points, underscoring from their point of view their position of supporting content monetizers instead of competing with them. It's careful navigation in a rapidly evolving field of services through content aggregation.

From an MSN perspective, Cliff Hawk of Microsoft highlighted the cross-linking and gradual merging of MSN and their Windows Live office automation online suite. The MSN side will become the pure media content, whereas Windows live is becoming utilities for personal publishing such as RSS feeds, email, messenger services, search, gadgets and other infrastructure to support users as content publishers and content consumers. Windows Live search will support ads but will also support specific instant answers services and services for publishers in books and other verticals that parallel roughly what Google is targeting. Cliff had an interesting part of his diagram labeled "April 12 = Mystery Vertical?" Cliff leaked that it will be academic journals, again paralleling Google's efforts. It's an interesting strategy, essentially stripping away all of the "old media" properties and trying to align Microsoft assets more perfectly for a world in which owning media properties becomes not as important as being able to extract value from media's contextualization in personal publishing and personal search environments.

Ryan Massie of Ask.com highlighted some of the changes in their approach highlighted earlier in our weblog. They decided also to be a company more aligned with Google, but with a twist. Instead of trying to make search something that it wasn't they provided search tools on the home page that would transform the home search page automatically into specialized searches by clicking on icons for people looking for images, weather and other specialized needs. The search results are positively Google-like, as shown in Ryan's slides, but it's interesting that 35 percent of people are clicking on images on the top of the page, whereas 45 percent click on the text links to pages and 15 percent clicking on ads. People can extract Ask content into RSS feeds that can be fed into a user's Bloglines page. At the same time the single box search line does still process natural language questions such as "Is it raining in Kentucky," but most people are used to formatting search queries. They also partner to provide content such as dictionary definitions from several sources, providing a fairly complete consumer reference strategy.

Question from Jeff Cutler: Do you prefer to license content? Jim mentioned that Google does license some content, though it prefers to drive traffic to existing sites. Ask.com will get key content such as stock quotes and then do their own aggregation around that source, whereas in news they tend to be more agnostic for users looking for multiple sources. Ask.com licenses where content can answer specific questions. MSN prefers working with many primary publishers where possible to maximize the value-add that they provide in their portals and MSN will work with aggregators to simplify relationships with small publishers.

Question from Jeff: Is there a "Chinese wall" for treating all content objectively in search results? The panel as a whole claims a high level of objectivity. Question from Jeff: is it premium if it's free for me, as in a controlled circulation model? How do publishers feel about search portals such as these making ad dollars around their content? Google asserts that they're ad supported and book partners are apparently accepting that sharing in ad revenues on their site is okay (N.B. - for not many yet). Microsoft will work with publishers to give them what they want and not to force them into any specific model. Didn't catch Ask.com's answer on this.

My question: how are you going to approach enterprise licensing beyond books? Ask.com and Microsoft didn't get the question, Google didn't answer it at all. I think that this is indicative of where we are today: in their own way Google gets the issues on a much more deep level than the other players, having skirted the old media relationships early on and getting more focused on servicing enterprises on many levels in an agnostic way. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Perhaps we will see some day a Google Enterprise portal, which will combine the most enterprise-ready content from the open Web with content from licenses sources. In the meantime enterprise content licensors are trying to move rapidly to define very focused relationships with their audiences to provide greater value-add into solutions that combine licensed and unlicensed external content with content internal to an enterprise.

At some point the war for aggregation supremacy will come down to two things: available capital and the ability to manage licensing on a user-by-user basis to reflect increasingly complex rights to content. Focusing on sectors and user roles can help overcome these two fundamental issues, and time for the moment is on the side of traditional aggregators. But as more content purchasing shifts to less centralized areas of enterprises and to small and medium businesses trying to compete with larger and more inflexible organizations the trepidation publishers have today about working with open Web search aggregators is likely to wane. It will be interesting to watch how these three players can run gingerly to the tough issues on licensing that can drive their full strategies forward.