Best Kept Secrets Dept.: Search Insider's Conference Attracts Industry
Luminaries, Major Users; Focuses on Trends in Advanced Search,
Enhanced Search, Search Impacts

April 24-25 Program Includes Leaders of Autonomy, Endeca, Convera,
Blossom, FAST, TEMIS


BOSTON, MA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/23/06 -- A little-known
international search-engine conference, dubbed "the search insider's
conference," will once again be attracting leading search industry
researchers, designers and developers as well as academics, investors,
and major corporate users to Boston this spring.


Now in its 11th year, the conference, Search Engine Meeting (SEM),
organized by British technical publisher Infonortics Ltd. is expected
to draw over 150 to the city's Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel on April
24-25.


"The Search Engine Meeting is a unique conference where the leading
edges of search engine research and development, categorization,
indexing, natural language, and computer science converge," according
to Nancy Garman, writing in Information Today magazine about the
conference's ninth annual gathering. "At this event, academics and
researchers talk the same language, and the theoretical foreshadows
the operational."


The two-day annual event has been dubbed "the search insiders'
conference" in an article in CMOmagazine.com by search industry CEO
Fredrick Marckini of iProspect.


"Above all, this is a trends meeting," says Harry Collier, Infonortics
founding and managing director who has been following electronic
search since its inception. "SEM is a major annual forum for studying
the trends in the world of search." Among trends on which Collier
expects speakers to focus are developments in advanced search,
enhanced search, and the growing impact of electronic search on almost
every aspect of modern life.


Among the 25 individual speakers and panelists on the 2006 SEM program are



-- Michael Lynch, founder & Group CEO of U.K.-based Autonomy Corporation,

plc;

-- Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca Technologies Inc.;

-- Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer & Manager of ibm.com Site

Architecture at IBM;

-- Alan Feuer, founder and Chief Technologist, Blossom Software, Inc.;

-- Claude Vogel, Chief Technical Officer, Convera Corporation;

-- Charles Huot is co-founder and chief operating officer of TEMIS;

-- Stephen Arnold, president, Arnold Information Technology (AIT);

-- Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder and president of Vivisimo, Inc.



This year's talks fall into five categories: Searchers & Search
Behavior; Faceted & Federated Search; Mining; the World of the Web;
and Web Tools & Intelligent Tools.


Besides the two-day program, a half-day pre-conference tutorial by
Arnold on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! will be given at the conference
site Sunday afternoon, April 23.


A complete list of speakers and topics is attached. Further
information about the conference, including speaker bios, is available
at http://www.infonortics.com/searchengines.


Some typical developer organizations from past meetings include: Ask
Jeeves, Basis, DocSoft, Entopia, FindWhat, Inxight, iProspect,
Microsoft, MondoSoft, ProQuest, Speed of Mind, Verity, Yahoo!, Zoom,
and ZyLAB.


Some typical user organizations from previous gatherings include: Akzo
Nobel Chemicals, ASRC Aerospace Corp, Daum Communications (Korea),
European Patent Office, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Fidelity
Investments, France Telecom, Hewlett Packard, Mitre Corporation,
National Cancer Institute, Nokia, R.W. Johnson Pharmaceutical,
Reuters, Schering AG, Thomson Scientific, U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, and Verizon.


Infonortics founder and managing director, Harry Collier
(http://www.infonortics.com/infonortics/hrcbio.html), has spent over
30 years in the electronic information industry. The founding editor
for the industry monthly newsletter Monitor from 1981-1993,. Collier
is author of two information-industry books -- "Strategies in the
Electronic Information Industry" (1991) and "The Electronic Publishing
Maze: Strategies in the Electronic Publishing Industry" (1998). He was
chairman of the European Association of Information Services (EUSIDIC)
during 1983-84 and 1985-86. During 1988-1991, he was executive
director of EUSIDIC.


Infonortics Ltd. (http://www.infonortics.com), founded in 1987 and
based in offices in Tetbury, England, some 90 miles west of London, is
both an organizer of meetings, conferences and workshops and a
publisher of business and technology books, reports and custom
studies. Besides SEM, its annual conferences include the International
Chemical Information Conference and Exhibition, the International
Virtual Communities Conference, and the Intelligence Tools, Data
Mining, Visualization Conference (IDV).



Search Engine Meeting 2006

Boston, April 25-26

Speakers and Their Topics


Monday, April 24

9:00 a.m. CONFERENCE OPENING Topic

Session One: Searchers and Search



Behavior

Steve Papa Searching The Long Tail

CEO

Endeca Technologies Inc.



Mike Moran Don't Just Change the Search Engine!

Distinguished Engineer & Manager

of ibm.com Site Architecture IBM



Igor Perisic Search: New Technologies to Make It

Chief Technology Officer Good for Your Health

Healthline Networks, Inc.



Max Copperman WYSIWYG Search Crafting

Sr. Director, Advanced Technology

Knova Software, Inc.



Joseph Tragert Concept Searching Across RSS Feeds

Director, Market Development and Structured Content

EBSCO Publishing Repositories: A Business Use Case



Alan Feuer Towards Restoring Conversation to

Founder and Chief Technologist Search

Blossom Software Inc.



Session Two: Faceted and Federated Search



Claude Vogel Speeding Search - Faceting for

Chief Technical Officer Faster, Relevant Drill-down

Convera Corporation



Abe Lederman Challenges in Scaling Federated

Founder, President & Chief Search

Technology Officer

Deep Web Technologies



Tom Reamy Faceted Navigation: An Alternative

Founder & Chief Knowledge Architect to Search and Browse

KAPS Group



Peter Noerr The Hidden Side of the Metasearch

Co-Founder & Chief Technologist (Federated Search)World (or

MuseGlobal Inc. Metasearch in the Big Bad World)



Session Three: Mining



Pete Cipollone Visualizing Emerging Intelligence

Director, Strategic Development, Through Text Mining

Text Mining & Visualization

Factiva



Charles Huot Searching & Mining

Co-Founder & COO

TEMIS



Laurent Proulx Enterprise Search As a

Sr. Vice President & Chief Productivity Tool -

Technology Officer Or the Power to Search in Context

Nstein Technologies



Tuesday, April 25

Session Four: The World of the Web



Stephen Arnold Google: The Erosion of Relevance

President

AIT



John Lervik The Challenge of Mobile Searching

Co-Founder & CEO

Fast Search & Transfer™;



Boerge Svingen

Co-Founder

Fast Search & Transfer™



Raul Valdes-Perez Web Vortals are Back, and Why

Co-Founder & President

Vivisimo, Inc.



Multi-speaker session: The Emerging Digital Marketplace



Susan Feldman

Director, Content and Retrieval

Technologies Program

IDC



Michael Lynch

Founder & Group CEO

Autonomy Corporation, plc



Josh Jacobs

President

X1 Technologies, Inc.



Andrew McKay

Sr. Vice President, Product

Marketing

Fast Search & Transfer™



Session Five: Web Tools and Intelligent Tools



Paul Thompson Search and Misinformation in

Research Associate Professor, Intelligence and Security

Computer Science Department Informatics

Dartmouth College



Bob Wyman Searching the Future

Co-Founder and Chief Technology

Officer

PubSub Concepts, Inc.



Elizabeth (Liz) Liddy Leveraging the Unrealized Value in

Trustee Professor, School of Trouble Tickets

Information Studies, and Director,

Center for Natural Language

Processing

Syracuse University



Stavros Macrakis Automatically Generated Summaries

of Web Content



Note: Order of speakers on each day may change.