Google

Analysis of Google and its search offerings, both on the Web and for enterprises. Related subjects include:

Search engines
Search engine optimization (SEO)
(in The Monash Report) Google Apps, and strategic issues for Google
(in DBMS2) Google as a user and creator of database and analytic technologies

November 25, 2012

The future of search

I believe there are two ways search will improve significantly in the future. First, since talking is easier than typing, speech recognition will allow longer and more accurate input strings. Second, search will be informed by much more persistent user information, with search companies having very detailed understanding of searchers. Based on that, I expect:

A small oligopoly dominating the conjoined businesses of mobile device software and search. The companies most obviously positioned for membership are Google and Apple.
The continued and growing combination of search, advertisement/recommendation, and alerting. The same user-specific data will be needed for all three.
A whole lot of privacy concerns.

My reasoning starts from several observations:

Enterprise search is greatly disappointing. My main reason for saying that is anecdotal evidence — I don’t notice users being much happier with search than they were 15 years ago. But business results are suggestive too:
- HP just disclosed serious problems with Autonomy.
- Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST was a similar debacle.
- Lesser enterprise search outfits never prospered much. (E.g., when’s the last time you heard mention of Coveo?)
- My favorable impressions of the e-commerce site search business turned out to be overdone. (E.g., Mercado’s assets were sold for a pittance soon after I wrote that, while Endeca and Inquira were absorbed into Oracle.)
- Lucene/Solr’s recent stirrings aren’t really in the area of search.
Web search, while superior to the enterprise kind, is disappointing people as well. Are Google’s results any better than they were 8 years ago? Google’s ongoing hard work notwithstanding, are they even as good?
Consumer computer usage is swinging toward mobile devices. I hope I don’t have to convince you about that one. 🙂

In principle, there are two main ways to make search better:

Understand more about the documents being searched over. But Google’s travails, combined with the rather dismal history of enterprise search, suggest we’re well into the diminishing-returns part of that project.
Understand more about what the searcher wants.

The latter, I think, is where significant future improvement will be found.

Categories: Autonomy, Coveo, Endeca, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Lucene, Mercado, Microsoft, Search engines, Speech recognition, Structured search

4 Comments

April 1, 2010

Google funniest joke of the year (that I’ve noticed so far)

I just noticed a subtle and really funny Google joke. Look at where on the search results page it tells you how long the search took. They’re screwing around with the units of time (and in some cases substituting actual measures of speed). So far I’ve noticed figures in units of:

Centibeats
Microfortnights
Microweeks
Nanocenturies
“The velocity of an unladen swallow”
Planck times
Shakes of a lamb’s tail
Warp (Star Trek, of course)
Centons (Battlestar Galactica)
Parsecs (a unit of time in Star Wars Episode IV 🙂 )
Jiffies
Skidoo (23.00 skidoo, to be precise)
Gigawatts (pretty hard to explain how that’s a unit of time or velocity)
Epochs (one precise figure was 1.25e-15 epochs)
Hertz
Femtogalactic years

I haven’t tried to check or estimate the conversion factors used.

Related links

2010 April Fool’s Day highlights
My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day
Google Operating System with more on Google’s 2010 April Fool’s jokes.

Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor

April Fool’s Day highlights

It’s April 1, and hence time for jests, online or otherwise. Highlights this year include:

In a charming blog post, Google annoucned the new Android Translate For Animals feature.
Reddit has apparently made every user an administrator, throwing the whole site –or at least the Reddit hot stories list — into chaos.
A video depicts icons falling off of an iPhone onto a table.
Firetoys, Ltd., whoever they are, are promoting a Back To The Future style hoverboard. I want one!

Edit: And more being added as I find them:

Supernatural Season 6
A crucial computer gaming accessory

Related links

My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day

Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Social software and online media

3 Comments

March 29, 2010

Google’s version of an old joke

Search Google for “recursion” and it helpfully offers a link to let you search on — you guessed it — “recursion.” The joke has been implemented in German as well.

This idea is not, to put it mildly, new. I first saw the definition

Recursion: See recursion

in the glossary to Intellicorp’s KEE documentation, in 1984 or so. And I’d guess the joke is actually a lot older than that.

For another variation of the same idea, see this link.

Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Search engines

Google declares total war on Microsoft

Google blogged Tuesday night about a new project, the Google Chrome Operating System. Highlights include:

Open source
Targeted to appear in netbooks in the second half of 2010
Google Chrome browser + new windowing system + Linux kernel
Minimal user interface
Data stored or at least backed up in the cloud, and hence available on any computer
Hardware compatibility hassles allegedly eliminated
Ditto for software update hassles
Ditto for security problems
Apps apparently assumed to run inside the browser. (Not clear if this is required or just recommended.)

Obviously, Google Chrome OS is a direct attack on Microsoft — even more so than Google Wave, which I’ve predicted will “play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more,” or for that matter than Google Mail and the rest of Google Apps. Taken together, Google’s initiatives suggest that an all-out Google-Microsoft war is coming, in a conflict that many people have been expecting — and analyzing — for years.

So how will this all shake out? Well, let’s start with some basic points:

Google Chrome OS Release 1 is expected over a year from now, and then only on a limited subset of PCs, namely netbooks.
Google Chrome OS Release 1 is supposed to have great performance and be bullet-proof. Hmm …
Google is evidently assuming that the apps people want to run will either be browser-based, or else be new ones written for Chrome OS. Hmm …
Google is signaling that Chrome OS will be very limited in features. That makes sense for Release 1 — but what will be missing?
Consumers have proven their willingness to buy non-Microsoft computers, especially Apple ones, specifically in the Mac and iPhone/iTouch product lines.
A lot of people would have compatibility issues replacing Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint with partially-compatible alternatives. I’m not so sure about Microsoft Word, however. Other than those three, Outlook, and the Windows family itself, I’m not aware of any Microsoft client products that have much lock-in. (Well, maybe Xbox, but that’s not in the main stack.)
Open source software often gets most of its community support in a couple of areas, namely compatibilities and language translation. Google probably doesn’t need the help in languages, but letting other people fix Chrome OS compatibility issues whose importance it didn’t recognize is potentially valuable.
Google probably won’t make any direct revenue from Chrome OS. So how much will it invest in the project?
Notwithstanding Danny Sullivan’s concern, there isn’t much of an antitrust issue here. Google’s search can’t easily be used to favor Chrome, Chrome OS, or Google Apps. And the other way around — e.g., using Chrome OS to favor search — Google clearly isn’t a monopolist.

Categories: Google, Microsoft, Software as a Service (SaaS)

10 Comments

May 29, 2009

Google Wave — finally a Microsoft killer?

Google held a superbly-received preview of a new technology called Google Wave, which promises to “reinvent communication.” In simplest terms, Google Wave is a software platform that:

Offers the possibility to improve upon a broad range of communication, collaboration, and/or text-based product categories, such as:
- Search
- Word processing
- E-mail
- Instant messaging
- Microblogging
- Blogging
- Mini-portals (Facebook-style)
- Mini-portals (Sharepoint-style)
In particular, allows these applications to be both much more integrated and interactive than they now are.
Will have open developer APIs.
WIll be open-sourced.

If this all works out, Google Wave could play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more.

I suspect it will.

And by the way, there’s a cool “natural language” angle as well. Read more

Categories: Google, Language recognition, Microblogging, Microsoft, Natural language processing (NLP), Search engines, Social software and online media, Software as a Service (SaaS)

3 Comments

April 3, 2009

Google has a lot more features than I realized

A features and syntax page reveals that the basic Google search box now gives you flight times, weather, stock quotes, sports scores, currency conversion, calculator results, and a lot more. Wow. I did not know.

Since the early 1980s, I’ve thought that natural language interfaces — spoken or otherwise — would someday win. While this versatility isn’t natural lanaguage per se, it still in my opinion is evidence in favor of that belief.

Categories: Google, Search engines

Thoughts on the rumored Google/Twitter deal

Michael Arrington reports that Google and Twitter are contemplating both:

A Google acquisition of Twitter
Some other kind of relationship built around real-time search

I have three initial thoughts on this:

1. Clearly, in Google’s mission to “organize all the world’s information,” there are several web areas it isn’t yet doing well in, and one of those is microblogs. What’s more, much as in the case of YouTube, it’s hard to see how Google would do that organizing any time soon unless it owned or otherwise was in bed with the leading platform for that kind of content — i.e., Twitter.

2. The YouTube example is apt in another way as well — it’s not clear where the monetization would come from. Google famously doesn’t make much advertising revenue from YouTube. And Twitter is even worse as an advertising platform; sticking ads into the tweetstream would quickly drive users elsewhere, and any other advertising scheme would likely fail because of the broad variety of interfaces — such as various mobile phones — Twitterers use to get at the service.

3. I’ve been suggesting all along that Twitter needs radical user experience enhancements. But when has Google ever made made user experience enhancements to a service? Its core search engine always looks pretty much the same. Ditto GMail. Ditto Blogger. Ditto YouTube.