Google amazed us last week with 5 fantastic demos of innovations like Google Goggles and near instant speech-to-text mobile translation. That was before the company showed off its new real-time search, a key problem it solved with grace while its competitors floundered.
Now we’re told of a whole new batch of far-out search innovations that are in the works, in an interview with Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer in today’s UK Telegraph. What are they? Translated search, social/personalized search and intuitive search. Here’s what Mayer has to say about these three projects.
Translated Search
See also: Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years
“Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites,” Mayer told the Telegraph. “And then invoked the translation software a second and third time – to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through.”
That sounds like a great way to move beyond an internet dominated entirely by English, or to help English-only speakers cope with an internet dominated by content in other languages. It could help open up monetization to more content and it could greatly expand all our horizons. To think that a significant portion of the world’s information is inaccessible because of something as almost-solvable as language differences seems like a real shame.
Related: Google Announces New Translator Gadget for Website Owners
Social Search and Personalization
“Although we search the web right now, what we really want to do is search it as each individual user sees the web. We want Google to be the most accurate reference tool which allows people to search the web and each have an individual experience,” Mayer told the Telegraph.
The Telegraph’s Emma Barnett identifies social network friend connections as a key part of this. “Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users’ privacy settings are ‘public’,” the reporter writes. “According to Mayer – the ideal will be to get access to your friend’s updates in search.”
Mayer: “Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public – will really empower us in terms of search.”
Understanding the structure and permission is one thing but getting access to Facebook’s social graph would be another. Have you noticed that Google doesn’t leverage Facebook Connect anywhere in any of its products? So far the company’s experiments with social search have been impressive if small in scope. Now that Facebook is opening up, if Google can connect with it then hundreds of millions of people could have social search placed front and center in their search experience.
But if connecting Google and your Facebook social graph was a simple matter, it probably would have already happened. Microsoft, meanwhile, is a big investor in Facebook and may seek to do something similar with Bing.
See also: Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs
Intuitive Search
Recommendation technology is something we’ve written about extensively here and Mayer seems to be telling the Telegraph that recommendation is going to be a big part of Google’s future. Intuitive search sounds pretty far-out, but Barnett writes that it may be closer than we think.
Barnett: “The ultimate prize for Mayer is intuitive search. She wants Google to be capable of presenting information to users before they even know what they’re looking for. Amazingly she doesn’t think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the ‘omnivorous’ search engine -i.e. one which is able to take a user’s total context – where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on.”
Mayer: “You could have some information waiting for you when you turn on your computer or some relevant URLs forming part of your browser background (presumably if you use Chrome – Google’s browser) or on your side wiki”.
Our take: This sounds cool but shouldn’t be too surprising. Last week Google demoed a mobile search product that automatically recommends categories you might want to search for and gives you a way to find nearby restaurants, etc. with a single click.
Search engines have long struggled with the limitations of human users and their abilities to explain what they want. Search queries are maddeningly short and compared to many of the other signals we emit implicitly – like location, click-stream history and more – explicit search queries are relatively rare.
The future of search may very well be in semi or unprompted recommendations based largely on our implicit behavioral data. That sounds like the movie Minority Report, but it’s also the direction that search companies are moving in. You didn’t think Google was going to leave a Minority Report type future untouched, did you?
Check out Barnett’s full coverage in the Telegraph at ‘An omnivorous Google is coming’.
