WWW05 panel

The AIRWEB ’05 panel mostly went well — three search engine guys (David Cohn from Google, Marc Najork from Microsoft, and me) and two academics (Andrei Broder, Soumen Chakrabarti), taking random questions about search engine spam.

The panelists were mostly very collegial and friendly, but unfortunately toward end the, um, industrial trashtalking spilled over into fighting words, and then into a real fight. Najork got me into a headlock, briefly. Cohn defended himself with a chair like the wimp he is. Anyway, it was broken up quickly, with no harm done, but I’m afraid some photos were snapped — I’m just hoping they don’t get out onto the web….

Update: my worst fears realized: photo1, photo2, photo3. (Thanks Sibel.)