Search Engine Strategies Chicago runs December 13-16 at McCormick Place. We were forced to run this event later in December than usual. However the later week is not hampering growth as the show has nearly twice the exhibit space of last year and registration could well double. Starting in 2005 we will have SES Chicago at the Hilton Chicago during the first week of December. Having it downtown should ensure even greater attendence.

I have written about Search and our SES shows quite a bit in this space. One cannot write enough about the powerful "Search-Tiger." Yesterday's New York Times (22 November) had an article about the number of pages indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. Our own Danny Sullivan commented about this metric by stating that size alone may be meaningless at a certain level in that quality starts to suffer as indexed pages reach a certain level.

The bullish thing about Danny's comments is that vertical Search is the next trend --- this is specialized search engines devoted to vertical topics.

This theory means that Search is only going to be a bigger industry in the Internet space as new companies are created to go after the vertical Search opportunities. This bodes well for our SES shows. As I have mentioned frequently, trade shows can die quickly if the topic covered by them is not changing rapidly. A case in point would be Linux. While Linux is important, I doubt there will be a Linux trade show of size within two years. Why? Because Linux is no longer dynamic which translates into few paid attendees and very few exhibitors.