One of the remarkable things about SES Chicago was the number of search
engine reps that lost their "conference virginity," as some of us were joking.
Several of the eight Googlers I mentioned in my
8 Googler Alternatives
To Superstar Matt Cutts post at Search Engine Land were brand new to
speaking at the show.
That got me thinking about Matt Cutts (never far from my thoughts, and
doesn’t he give us all
butterflies?) and his virginity. Now when exactly did Matt make his live
search conference debut?
After some hunting, I’m pretty sure it was March 20, 2001 — on the Meet The
Search Engines panel listed
here.
For some perspective on how experienced Matt now is, also on the panel with him
were AltaVista, FAST and Inktomi. None of those other companies still exist, all
having been absorbed into Yahoo.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I think you’re right. Craig Silverstein did SES London in Feb 2001, and then he passed the torch to me.
I found a few notes from that show, by the way. Back then, Bill Bliss (General Manager of MSN?) was trying to convince me to convert my laptop from Win98 to Win2000.
Also back then, all the exhibitors were convinced that natural language processing was just around the corner. I was skeptical about EasyAsk, LexiQuest, and LingoMotors and their natural language claims at that time. Luckily, this time around, natural language processing is totally for real.
Ah, memories.
Matt,
Beat you by a few hours.
Tim
Of course this is me just being picky but FAST is still around and operating in the commercial enterprise search market. Unless there was another fast besides “fast search & transfer”, whereby you’re right again. Any thoughts?