Luminaries To Discuss The Future Of Search At Bing Event

Tomorrow in San Francisco Bing and Big Think are hosting a gathering of high profile industry leaders, thinkers, academics, investors and executives to talk about the future of search. Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box seeks to answer the question of whether the search industry locked in a race to the bottom or whether conditions ripe for a breakthrough. The event will stream live tomorrow from Big Think.

It’s an impressive lineup, with opening remarks from Harvard professor and Business week columnist Vivek Wadhwa, who will also emcee the rest of the day’s events. The keynote speaker is PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel on “The Future of Search.”

The first panel is a “Search-Tech Showcase”—How do you create a niche user experience? Entrepreneurs will present a challenge they identified in search, their solution, and how it works. Presenters include:

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas, architect of BING maps
• Esther Dyson, Director of 23andMe
• Aditi Muralidharan, third year PhD student, University of California-Berkeley
• Di-Ann Eisnor, neogeography pioneer, Waze

This will be followed by a roundtable discussion on trends in search with Microsoft’s lead of core search development Harry Shum, Google web spam chief Matt Cutts and Blekko co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta.

Next: “Breaking Out of the Text Box: The New Search Experience.” How will new user interfaces, new mobile paradigms, and the expansion of the web into all aspects of daily life act as catalysts for change in the search industry? Presenters include:

• Kevin Kelly, Author, What Technology Wants (Moderator)
• Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist
• Professor Marti Hearst, professor, UC Berkeley
• Sam Altman, CEO, Loopt
• Ty Ahmad-Taylor, founder and CEO, FanFeedr

This session is followed by “Web 4.0: When The Machines Take Over,” addressing the question of when will A.I.and machine learning reach social utility? Participants include Mark Drummond, CEO, Wowd, Inc., Luc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram|Alpha and two others TBD.

Lunch features taped interviews with well known authors and futurists Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Rushkoff, Nicholas Carr, Malcolm Gladwell and Susan Bookheimer.

The final session features Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Center on Aging on “Is Search the End of Memory or the Opportunity of Collective Wisdom?” and Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Russia’s Yandex.ru on “Why Russians prefer Yandex over Google/Bing/Yahoo.”

Tune in live for the event tomorrow between 10:00am to 2:00pm PST via Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and you can submit questions on Twitter using hashtag #FutureSearch.

About The Author

Chris Sherman

Chris Sherman (@CJSherman) is a Founding editor of Search Engine Land. He also programs and chairs the Marketing Land Search Marketing Expo - SMX conferences.