2002 Search Engine Meeting

The Agony & The Ecstasy?

San Francisco, April 15-16, 2002

Call for Offers of Presentations

Offers of presentations should include an informative title, plus a short, descriptive abstract as to what will be covered. Please note that this meeting is not an appropriate occasion for product pitches or descriptions. Presentations accepted will be expected to make real contributions to the field of information searching and indexing, or in furthering the understanding of the meeting participants in the general search area.

Those presenting will be given free registration to the entire two-day conference. Speaker expense reimbursement will not normally be offered. Please send offers, in the first instance, to Harry Collier at Infonortics (hcollier@infonortics.com). Offers will then be forwarded to the program chairman and to the program advisors. Since the program is normally finalised early in November and attracts many offers to speak, it is advisable to send offers of presentations in as soon as possible.

Some principal themes

"Hence the recurrent ecstasy over what we hope to do with new IT, and the recurrent agony of re-discovering not only that IT can't hack it without people, but that people aren't the answer, either". (Anthony Oettinger, Chairman of the Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, in an address at the 2000 ASIST Meeting).

"The Search Engine as Cyborg: As the Web sprawls out of control, search engines are overheating and programmers are trying something new: human beings". (New York Times, June 29, 20000. p.E1).

Four themes of particular interest for the 2002 Meeting are:

• How are we progressing in by-passing expensive humans, while still doing a good job?
• Choosing a search engine for corporate use (advice, analysis or results of experience)
• Indexing internal data, or building taxonomies, to enhance information retrieval via intranets.
• Tools and strategies for improving intranet search engine performance.

The conference normally attracts 200-300 attendees from a broad mixture of government, academic and industry participants. Attendee lists (names and organizations) from previous years are available to those wishing to better define the probable audience.

Pre-conference workshops

The organizers are also interested in receiving proposals from those interested in offering half-day workshops on the afternoon of Sunday April 14. Please contact Harry Collier of Infonortics (hcollier@infonortics.com). There will be no more than three workshops held, and they will be held in parallel from approximately 1 pm until 5 pm on the Sunday afternoon.