Visit to Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc.

Spent a day at Enquiro, which is a search engine marketing and optimization firm based in the lovely town of Kelowna, British Colombia. ... Being serious, the place was beautiful. ... Gord Hotchkiss is the president and CEO, Enquiro.

Enquiro is an interesting company, in that not only do they do SEM and SEO stuff, but they also have a research division, and have produced many Enquiro research papers in the search engine marking area, including the classic, Inside the Mind of the Searcher, which is still a standard in the area. Lately, Enquiro has been focusing on the B2B area, with Gord’s upcoming book, The BuyerShere Project, which is an outgrowth of The BuyerShere Project series.

Although long day (I left the hotel in Vancouver at 6 am and got back at 10 pm), but it was a lot of fun with interesting exchanges and conversations. I gave a talk on Profiling the Web Searcher Using Log Data, along with brief introductions to a *couple* of other research projects that I am invovled with.

Always interesting for academics to present to practitioners, because (in Web search at least), many times the practitioners are ahead of those in academia. (Note: I am talking real practitioners, not the researchers from industry who typically come to academic conferences. In my experience, these industry researchers are just academics, even though academia treats them like practitioners.) The Enquiro folks are engaged in this SEM/SEO/B2B space! Therefore, the exchanges and discussions were educational for me. I picked up three insights that will really help me focus some of my research projects.

I also participated in the Enquiro foosball tournament. Although not as polished as I once was, I held my own.

A big thanks to the entire Enquiro team!