Q&A: The New Search Insurgent

Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.

Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.

Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.

Danny currently heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief, which covers all aspects of search marketing and search engine news. Danny also serves as Third Door Media’s chief content officer, which owns Search Engine Land and the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. Danny also maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter: @dannysullivan.

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As President, Ask.com-U.S., Leeds oversees strategy, product development, and technology for Ask.com in the U.S. Previously, Leeds was Chief Operating Officer, Ask Network.

Before becoming COO, Leeds was President, Dictionary.com. In that role, he was responsible for overseeing all strategy and operations for Dictionary.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ask.com (acquired July 2008). Prior to his role at Dictionary.com, Leeds served as the Chief Strategy officer for Ask.com. Before joining Ask.com, Leeds spent almost five years at Yahoo! (including Overture Services), most recently as vice president, Global Product Justice, where he led the development of reputational products and services as well as oversaw product policy and legal compliance for all of Yahoo!’s products and services worldwide. Earlier in his career, Leeds held senior positions at mobile ISP OmniSky and mobile carrier Vodafone, and founded BootSpace, an advertising software start-up. Leeds received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.

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Bob Rosenschein is CEO of Answers.com (NASDAQ:ANSW), a U.S. top 20 website [comScore 9/30/10], which he founded in 1999.

Previously, he founded and ran Accent Software, a producer of multilingual software tools, which produced the first multilingual word processor for Windows and also consulted to Microsoft to develop right-to-left Hebrew and Arabic versions of Windows.

Previously, he worked for Data General, American Management Systems and the World Bank.

Mr. Rosenschein graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, received the Prime Minister of Israel’s Award for Software Achievement in 1997, and was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2009 Award Finalist in the Metropolitan New York region.

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Charlie Cheever is one of the founders of Quora. Previously, he worked at Facebook where he led Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform and also worked at Amazon.com. He graduated from Harvard University with an A. B. in Computer Science.

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Dr. Damon Horowitz is a leading thinker at the intersection of technology and the humanities.

Horowitz recently joined Google as a Director of Engineering, leading several initiatives at the intersection of social and search. He came to Google from Aardvark, the popular social search engine, where he was co-founder and CTO, overseeing product development and research strategy. Prior to Aardvark, Horowitz built several companies around applications of intelligent language processing. He co-founded Perspecta (acquired by Excite), was lead architect for Novation Biosciences (acquired by Agilent), and co-founded NewsDB (now Daylife).

Horowitz teaches courses in philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science at many institutions, including Stanford, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and San Quentin. He has spoken at conferences ranging from TED to AAAI to Web2.0, and his work has been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to Discovery Channel to TechCrunch. Horowitz was recently named one of the AdAge “Creativity 50” most inspiring thinkers and innovators of 2010.

Horowitz earned his B.A. from Columbia, M.S. from the MIT Media Lab, and Ph.D. from Stanford.