Update: There are a couple of fairly significant announcements in the notes section below. I’m starting to turn these into posts. Lots coming.
At least half of silicon valley’s tech writers and major bloggers are at Google HQ today at the invite-only Searchology, where we are watching a series of presentations by Google executives.
There may or may not be announcements of note – Google is only promising to “highlight the latest news on search innovations.” Speakers will include Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience; Udi Manber, VP of Engineering; and Craig Silverstein, Technology Director.
The Agenda:
- Welcome
- Search of Days Past (Craig Silverstein)
- Search as We Know it Today (Kerry Rodden and Ben Gomes)
- Next Step in Evolution of Search (Udi Manber, Marissa Mayer)
- Q&A (Udi Manber, Marissa Mayer, Alan Eustace)
What I didn’t know is that I could be attending this from the comfort of my bed – the whole thing is being streamed and is available here.
I’ll update this post with any interesting announcements, until it’s over or my battery runs out.
Notes (chronological order):
Elliot Schrage, VP Global Communications & Public Affairs, welcomes us and asks us to turn off our cell phones. There are three seriously large lava lamps at stage left.
Craig Silverstein, Technology Director and Google’s third employee after Larry and Sergey, is currently on stage talking about the history of Google.
Silverstein has a great slide up right now showing the Google home pages over time:
Ben Gomes (Software Engeineer) and Kerry Rodden (Senior User Experience Researcher) are talking about the current state of search. Overview and definition of page rank.
- very cool slide showing results of usability study and where people look on search results page.
Preparing for next session (had to take a minute to write about Club Penguin and may have missed a few things).
Udi Manber (former CEO of Amazon’s A9) coming on stage. Definitely something being announced.
Udi – “search is very very hard”. 20-25% of the queries we will see today we have never seen before.
Good slide on easy v. hard queries (from google’s perspective) and their never ending quest for context.
Udi – we will launch very soon a way to search in different languages and get results in different languages. Google will auto-translate your query and the results to return more results. Screen shot (sorry about the quality):
Marissa Mayer is now on stage. Says they have a couple of announcements to make search more intuitive.
First announcment: UNIVERSAL SEARCH. integration of search. Books, local, images, news and video will be integrated into main google search.
examples: steve jobs. integration of images, news, related, etc.
restuarants mounting view california – integration of local into main search. Called Universal.
Nasferatu – see google video link as no. 2 link. can watch the actual movie.
second announcemnt – google video search is now integrating beyond youtube and google videos, integrating other properties like metacafe. includes metacafe plus others. 5 or 6 total.
I have a dream - integration of video directly into search results (embedding)
Marissa – some people will still want to search in verticals like video or news. Google is adding links directly above results to vertical engines that have relevant results (blogs, books, groups, code, etc.)
Next announcement: Google Universal Navigation bar: nav bar that goes across all google properties. get to gmail, etc. with one click at any time.
next: Google Experimental. google.com/experimental. can see all the latest experiments on google. sign up to any and it adds to your default google search experience.
timeline view. Map view. Integrates directly into search. more – see experimental site.
going to QA. Sergey Brin joined as well
Can’t seem to get the audio for it!
Cool! Live Search ] ology.
Whatever that is.
Interesting!
Would be really interesting if they would have done a real search which showed AdSense ads as the top results like a normal page
Wonder where all the clicks would have gone.
Mike can I type the notes I see there, before you, in the comments
See you in 10 mins
The two conceptual slides showing the World Wide Web as a dot-graph were very interesting. Would you please repost them if you can?
Thanks.
Nice concept. But I want to see Google work more on improving the search result, getting rid all the MFA and crappy sites.
Very good stuff I must say
Once again Google proves to be the most innovative and efficient Web-based company. Yay!
Google owns search; Yahoo and AOL MSN / better get into something else ..
If they want to be #1
hint (Dont try Video either) .. -RB
I would like to hear someone from Google answer this question: are they concerned about false clicks on ads from people using that “more” drop-down menu? Since, you know, that sort of thing is currently looked down upon for AdSense.
Amazing.. that usability study and where people look on search results page!! I had no idea they do such complex studies… Way too cool !!
“The ultimate goal of universal search is to break down the silos of information that exist on the web and provide the very best answer every time a user enters a query. While we still have a long way to go, today’s announcements are a big step in that direction.”
http://news.tau...age-Design-1276
It was an amazing set of announcements, the full impact of which won’t be felt for some time.
Still, we’re now dealing with the Web through Google 3.0 (not 2.0, as Danny Sullivan mis-labelled it — this is the 2nd major redesign of Google in less than 2 years).