It has taken me a great deal of time to think about what I should post as my first entry to this blog, not because I do not have anything interesting to say (hopefully!), but more because there is so much that we could cover. This is one of the most significant challenges with working in Search, and even more so when you include semantics in search, there is so much to talk about and so much to do.

For a relatively small team like RB Search, the opportunities are almost endless, so prioritisation, as with deciding what to write about in this initial blog becomes increasingly difficult.

At the recent Google Zeitgeist event, I was fascinated to hear when asked what was his biggest concern, Sergey Brin respond that it was Opportunity Cost. I doubt very much if that would be the main concern of the leaders of many of the global top 5000 companies, maybe it should, as then companies may be a little more innovative.

Obviously in a much smaller way, this does reflect the core challenges for RB Search, in that there is so much that you can do, it is the things that you don’t get to do that worry you most….what opportunity have we missed?

It is an old metaphor, but it is very much like being in the sweet shop, although in this case the sweet shop is the size of a supermarket and you are being challenged to do the supermarket sweep, but to do it strategically, picking the most valuable items as fast you can and getting to the registers before the business model evolves again…sometimes even evolving the business model yourselves, just to disrupt the other shoppers.

All of this makes search great fun, as well as extraordinarily challenging. You need a team that is entirely focused, but exceptionally adaptable as you quickly migrate models, content types, semantics and products.

The Opportunity Costs of search are massive, even if you are Google, as there is so much you cannot do even when you are delivering a huge array of new products. Just some of the things that you need to think about and that I intend to cover in greater detail in later posts are:

· Zibb On Demand – syndicating search services across a global enterprise
· Pushing Search – using search to push content
· Industries – which should you cover and what makes them special to the users
· Semantics – taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies and how these can help users get to an answer
· Content Types – thinking about search in a different way
· UI – evolving away from simple results
· Tools – which tools and why
· Crawlers & Data – variants for different purposes
· Relevance model – making them relevant
· Coupling – or not….ensuring you loosely couple systems
· Widgets – the next revolution, driven by search
· Team – brilliant people driving innovation and some very strange conversations
· And more as it occurs to me!

Now that I have got off to a start and got through my Opportunity challenge around this blog, I can hopefully start to talk more about the different elements of search and B2B mentioned above that make the difference.