Conferences and workshops on Web searching and search engines

Pandia looks at conferences and workshops for people interested in Internet searching, including webmasters, , internet professionals, librarians and researchers.

Are you looking for the latest on the search engine scene, itching to meet colleagues and competition or do you simply need some inspiration?

One of the best way to get up to date is to participate in search engine conferences and workshop.

See also our page on search engine marketing conferences and workshops.

Websearch University

The Websearch University provides a venue for improving web searching skills. You can learn about new search tools, new resources, new techniques, and new approaches to research on the Web.

The Websearch University faculty consists of well known search experts like Mary Ellen Bates, Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz, Greg Notess, the editor of Online Marydee Ojala, Gary Price of ResourceShelf and Ask.com, Chris Sherman and more. These names are definitely signs of quality.

Among the topics covered are:

• Teaching web search skills
• Search engine industry trends
• Advanced search techniques
• Differences among engines
• Evaluating web search results
• Multimedia searching
• Finding books and searching inside them
• searching and information delivery via handheld devices
• RSS
• and much more.

Internet Librarian

Information Today arranges a series of conferences for librarians and researchers, which are according to them the

"only conference for information professionals who are using, developing, and embracing Internet, Intranet, and Web-based strategies in their roles as information architects and navigators,Webmasters and Web managers, content evaluators and developers, taxonomists, searchers, community builders, information providers, trainers, guides, and more."

Hence the Internet Librarian conferences go far beyond the world of search engines, but web research skills are included and the other topics are of relevance to people using the Internet for professional information gathering.

There is also an international version of the Internet Librarian Conference which has its own web site.

Search Engine Meeting

Search Engine Meeting takes a more academic approach to search engine conferences, with calls for papers and so on.

The goal is to "bring together commercial search engine developers, academics and corporate professionals to learn from each other."

The events are arranged by a British company called infonortics.

Papers and presentations from previous conferences are available at the web site.

European Conference on Information Retrieval

The European Conference on Information Retrieval or ECIR for short is also an academically oriented conference. The conference encourages the submission of high quality research papers reporting original, previously unpublished results.

Among the topics covered are searching, browsing, meta-searching, data fusion, filtering and indexing, text and content classification, categorization, clustering, topic detection and tracking, novelty detection and much more.

Enterprise Search Summit

If you are looking for information on enterprise search, i.e. on internal search capabilities (intranets, web site search engines etc.), you may visit the Enterprise Search Summit.

Expert speakers cover topics such as standardizing interfaces to integrate search functions, tuning search to deliver optimum results, making the most of search logs and analytics, applying Web services solutions to metadata challenges, developing topic maps, and so on.