Source: AIMIA, www.aimia.com.au | Sydney

Online-Retailer.com.au - the official event website for Online Retailer Exhibition & Conference was launched today. The website features a detailed overview of the event for both visitors and exhibitors, and will shortly provide online registration for attendees. In addition, the site will deliver on going news, insights and business intelligence for the online and multichannel retailing community in Australia.

The aim with Online Retailer Exhibition & Conference is to provide a live forum that brings the together the e-commerce and e-retailing community to share knowledge, experience and expertise, and to create business opportunities between buyers and sellers. Over time, the Online-Retailer.com.au website will be further developed to extend this opportunity year round and create an online community for exhibitors and sponsors to connect with e-retailing professionals.

Overstock.com and Zappos.com Confirmed as Keynotes

The first two international keynote speakers for Online Retailer Exhibition & Conference have been confirmed. Jake Bailey from Overstock.com and Aaron Magness from Zappos.com are the first keynotes to join what will be an-star faculty of speakers from Australia, New Zealand, Asia, UK and USA.

Jake Bailey, Director of International Business at Overstock.com has worked in numerous positions at Overstock.com including Director of Marketing, Affiliate Program Manager, Strategy, Business Development, Lead Generation, and the Gift-Card program. In his current role he heads up international business. Overstock, ranked the second fastest growing retailer in the U.S. by STORES Magazine (published by the National Retail Federation) and the only pure-play Internet retailer to make the top 10, is an online retailer that sells discounted inventory of name brands direct to consumers. The company was started in 1999 with first year sales of $1.8 million. In 2007, online sales exceeded $760 million.

Aaron Magness, VP Business Development at Zappos.com is responsible for Brand Marketing, PR and Social Media as well as Business Development. Starting out in 2000 as an online retailer of shoes, Zappos.com exceeded $1 Billion in sales in 2008. The company has built an international reputation for delivering the most incredible customer service, and in 2009 was named by FORTUNE MAGAZINE as one of the "100 BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR". Today, Zappos.com employs over 1300 people and stocks more than 3 million shoes, handbags, clothing items and accessories from over 1,136 brands. More information about this online retailing phenomenon can be found at about.zappos.com.

Take a Stand for Success at Online Retailer yet?

If you promote, market or sell e-Commerce technology or e-Retailing solutions, consider the business building and lead generation opportunities available at Online Retailer. Imagine what your best salespeople could do if they met a new prospect every few minutes? Imagine trying to get hundreds of buyers to invest a day to visit you so you could sell to them?

When you exhibit at Online Retailer, that's exactly what you can expect. Two big days of face-to-face interaction with the largest concentration of active buyers in the online retailing market. To learn more about Exhibiting and Sponsorship opportunities, contact Scott O'Brien on 0429-661-813 or email sales@online-retailer.com.au

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

Google on Tuesday announced it has broadly released changes that it expects will produce better results for complicated searches.

The technology works by analysing the content of web pages that appear related to the query and determining from those pages the "entities" such as people, places, or concepts that are related to the query. Sometimes it would then offer suggested new searches in a "search refinements" section that appears at the bottom or top of the list of results, said Ori Allon, technical lead for the company's search quality team, in an interview. The processing occurs during the fraction of a second Google takes to return search results.

"We try to understand what's the meaning of the query, the context of the query," Allon said. "We can do a better job of generating refinements that let users hopefully get to results they want."

Google offered search refinements in the past, but mostly only in English. Now they'll show with "most searches," and in all 37 languages Google supports, Allon said. The technology helps more with long, complicated queries, but it works on simple ones, too, he added.

One example: a search for "revolutionary technological developments in history" shows a variety of other searches at the bottom of the page. Among them are searches relating to the American Revolution and the agricultural revolution, neither of which appear in the top 10 results.

A search for 'revolutionary technological developments in history' shows these other searches at the bottom of the search results.

In addition, for longer queries, Google is showing more information in the "snippets" of text included with each search result so people can better judge each site.

"We feel that with longer snippets, you get a better understanding of what the site is about and whether you should click through," Allon said. "We noticed with longer snippets, people (less often) click and come back because they didn't find what they want."

Allon and Ken Wilder, an engineer with Google's snippets team, described the changes in a blog post Tuesday.

The changes show the difficulties that contenders in the search arena face in trying to get an edge over Google. Wolfram Research, for example, plans to reveal a search technology called Wolfram Alpha in May that's specifically designed to handle longer questions people might ask a search engine, and some of Google's new changes appear to help the company with that sort of query.

Google has found in its testing that the search refinements help in the real world.

"We noticed that people who don't find what they want in top 10 results tend to use refinements," Allon said, scrolling up and down and looking beyond the first page of results. With the better search refinements, "We witnessed a significant increase of people who find what they want."

Though Google's search refinements appear in a separate section today, Allon didn't rule out blending the information directly into the search results themselves. "We are working on future development of this, but there's nothing we can announce today," he said. "This is not the only improvement we have."