Today clearly showed the domination of Google and Yahoo in this marketplace, not only in the sessions, but also in the exhibition hall. Yahoo and Google had the largest booths at the front, with ASK and MSN in subordinate positions, as well as Verizon Yellow Pages and Quigo, an network linking advertisers and publishers, the other large booth vendors. Interestingly, Google Analytics had its own booth among the smaller search marketing vendors.

Each search engine had its own emphasis for the conference. Today's featured lunchtime discussion was Yahoo's new Ad Platform, compared to yesterday's lunchtime time discussion with Google with their newly released Webmaster Tools, replacing SiteMaps, released Friday, just in time for SES opening day. And then the big event for the day was the infamous Google Dance party at the Googleplex, and the opportunity to meet with Google product managers.

A key session today was entitled "Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues ", a major concern of publishers. Shari Thurow, of GrantasticDesigns, presented an outstanding outline of potential sources of duplicated content which go beyond the obvious. Mikkel deMib Svendsen emphasized the importance of controlling the search engine crawling using 301 redirects, rather than defaulting to their individual algorithms. A major culprit is creating multiple URL's for the same content, often unintentionally. Then the session opened up to the search engine companies and audience questions. Tim Converse of Yahoo, Matt Cutts of Google, and Rhaul Lahari of ASK all did an excellent job of explaining their viewpoint with regard to duplicate content, then fielded specific questions about situations such as translated content and repurposing American content to British content. My insight is that premium publishers need to learn more about this area to avoid being caught in the spam filter screening from the search results pages. It is only too easy to inadvertantly create spam!

The session entitled "Meet the Blog and Feed Search Engines" highlighted changes in the news area, in addition to the introduction of new functionality. Toni Schneider, co-founder, Sphere discussed their focus on retrieving posts based on relevance and relatedness, rather than time. ASK.com has added video searching according to Robyn DuPree.
Adam Hertz, Technorati, gave figures indicating that while the majority of blogs are still English (39%), the number of Asian blogs is growing rapidly, with 31% Japanese and 12% Chinese. Chris Tolles, Topix, discussed the results of their push into local news to the zipcode level, providing localization to the original source. Local forums are generating very high growth. So of course, I had to check out my hometown local forum to see what the neighbors were talking about!