Retail-ization of Google Search Results
What’s the fuss about? Well before the recent change if you performed a Google search for a term like “dentist”, “florist” or “lawyer” you would normally get links to other WEBPAGES with content about “dentists”, “florists” and “lawyers’. So for example a search for the term lawyers would have links to the Wikipedia entry on lawyers and lawyers.com, and about 100 million other pages like it… in other words connecting the Google searcher to more and more INFORMATION about the subject of “lawyers”. But now with the change that seems to have been put in place, Google is trying to infer the intent of the searcher in some instance… assuming that maybe the user doesn’t want to find more INFORMATION about lawyers in the general sense, but instead wants to be able to locate a real nearby lawyer.
In case you’re wondering, Google evidently uses standard IP lookup to determine the location of the searchers computer in order to give the appropriate geographically relevant results… see above an example of the SERP from a search for the term ‘coffee’ from a PC in midtown Manhattan.
Enormous leap toward Google embracing location awareness as a core element of search? Or simply Google trying to further improve the search experience and giving people the results that they most often want?
Our job is to help acquire all the world’s content
I had seen this a couple of years ago, but noticed it again the other day while having a discussion about Google Latitude and its noteworthiness or lack thereof. I have obviously sided with the noteworthy crowd, not because Latitude represented particularly novel technology from Google, but rather because Google is the 800lb gorilla, and when they adopt and even promote something, it’s noteworthy because of the sheer volume of people they reach. That and information is like oxygen to the company so they need to continue to promote the creation of digital information.
From a Google Job Description in their Geo/Core Content Group.. I thought that the inclusion of “retail product inventories” was particularly interesting, particularly as it relates to where Google may be going with Latitude… bye bye searching for bits, hello searching for atoms? The relevant part:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information – our team’s job is to help acquire all the world’s content… The full breadth of content acquired by the team almost defies description; scope includes multiple forms of media in categories as diverse as: business addresses, event descriptions, restaurant reviews, retail product inventories, real estate listings, government data, and travel-related information.”
More On Google Latitude and Lack of Google Social Networking
Ok in the past 24hrs I’ve become a bit obsessed with thinking about Google Latitude, Orkut and the way that Google is positioning its locaton aware friend finding service. To be fair, I know next to nothing about Orkut, except that it’s Google’s foray into social networking and mostly used by Brazilians… I do the whole social networking thing, but just on Facebook and LinkedIn and I don’t live in Brazil, so there ya go.
So the way I see it Google is not rolling out Latitude on Orkut, but instead via Maps and Gmail/Gtalk which on one hand makes perfect sense given the number and geography of users, but on the other hand makes no sense because this product is so VERY PERFECTLY suited for social networking. So if Google is rolling out what essentially is in its essence a social networking capability, but not plugging it into its existing social networking application… what is up?
Hmm…
- Latitude, lets you know the whereabouts of people and share your whereabouts with them.
- Orkut, Google social networking application, suprisingly not seeing much uptake outside of Brazil and seemingly not being pushed or invested in by Google despite massive popularity of social networks such as Facebook.
- Google CEO Schmidt says “The arrival of a truly mobile Web, offering a new generation of location-based advertising, is set to unleash a huge revolution… the recreation of the Internet.”
Everyone in LBS always has the debate on whether location is just a feature of something else or its own thing in its own right? I am wondering if maybe Google sees social networking in the same light, simply as a feature to something larger. Latitude is without a doubt a social networking feature and Google is baking it into its core product capabilities… makes you wonder if we’ll have a separate social networking site we visit in a few years from now or if it will be just become an extension of every day communication tools we use. Look up Bobs phone number and email and while you’re at it read the top 25 things I never knew about Bob as well as who he is friends with, where he is right now and what he is blogging about, etc.
Maybe Latitude is one the first anchors in this development?
Google Latitude
Seems that Google is throwing its hat into the ring with its own location aware social networking app and mobile friend finder called Latitude. The news is being well covered today including a great summary on O’Reilly Radar as well as one right there on the front page of AllthingsD.com today, Silicon Alley Insider and some particularly intersesting insidery point of view from the ex Googler and Dodgeball founder. All of those give some nice details about how it works, so I won’t bother going into much detail here, except to say that Latitude seems to work like other similar services including Loopt, Buddy Beacon, Brightkite, Limbo, etc. Where the application determines your location through one of a variety of ways and then lets you share it with friends, with a number of different controls to monitor with whom and to what detail (if at all) you share your location data.
One reason that it is noteworthy is of course because it’s Google doing it… and while literally dozens of small start ups have tried to build something similar and attract users from scratch with location awarness as a core benefit, Google seems to view location sharing/friend finder as another added feature to go along with Google Maps as sort of an extension to finding things on a map (hey why not find people too?) and GMail/GTalk, as an extended way to communicate with someone you know (hey, why not see them in person as well as emailing them?). I am still trying to wrap my head around that one a bit… should current location be as universally available and shared as ones phone number or street address (ie integration into an Outlook contact field) or is it better suited at this point as another facet of your life to be shared only with a more tight and existing social network?
It does seem odd that there wasn’t a specific tie into the social networking side of Google in Orkut, where Latitude would presumably be most right at home, although news on that may still be around the corner. I am sure we’ll see something before too long from folks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace as well.
I’ve see a couple of articles that seem to think that this announcement will mean the death of folks like Loopt and Limbo. I think this may be premature, heck in the short term they may even see a nice boost as overall consumer awareness is lifted and potentially attitudes are changed… hey Google’s mantra is ‘do no evil’, so if they’re letting people track each other, maybe that’s not so bad afterall?
Once LinkedIn or Facebook comes out with something similar, then, I think we’re getting closer to that come to Jesus moment for folks like Loopt, Limbo and Buddy Beacon, who may then be relegated to being a white label solution to power the location element of other existing communities/networks.
If Google is doing it in a big and mass way, and Mossberg’s squad over at the Wall Street Journal are reviewing it and putting it on the front page of allthingsD then I think it must be pretty close to going mainstream. I for one can’t wait to see a higher level of consumer consciousness and adoption, so we can begin to move along with all the other cool stuff that first requires getting this basic concept acceptance under our belts.
Dodgeball Can’t Dodge the Google Axe
Google announced yesterday that it was laying off a number of under performing application, including the mobile social networking application Dodgeball that they acquired in 2005. If you’re not familiar with Dodgeball it was one of the first mobile friend finder type application that allows mobile users to be able to notify others in their network where they are and when they’re nearby. With Google’s senior management openly talking about how they expect mobile and LBS to be a huge driver of growth, and this early investment in Dodgeball nearly four years ago, at first is seemed a bit surprising to hear that they had not invested any money to grow and build on Dodgeball since the acquisition and are now closing it down. Although the acquisition itself seemed like a bit of a stretch for someone who’s goal is simply to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful.
In the long run, Google certainly wants to see the market for mobile ‘finding’ and location awareness to move right along, but I suspect that they never really wanted to directly be in the business of running this application. In 2005 I suspect they instead wanted to motivate other market participants to develop more on this front, and keep Dodgeball as a hedge in case the market didn’t act accordingly… and if this was the case, they were certainly successful as this long list of mobile social networking applications will attest to. Google can now sit back and hope that they all adopt Google Maps as the underlying platform, and all will be fine.
What Google should do now is sell back everything that was formerly Dodgeball back to its founders for some small sum, still take the tax benefits on the “loss”, and let the original founders try to take the service to the next level on their own dime… it sure beats shutting it down and will ultimately benefit Google to have the original innovators working hard to continue to develop the service, and letting them pick up where they left off will move things in the space along quicker than making them start from scratch.
Highly doubtful this will happen, because it will look like a “failure” to the rest of the world, but it makes sense to me.
The Mobile Search Opportunity, Turning PageRank into PlaceRank
So I see that Google search market share is up to nearly 2/3 of all searches according to the latest stats, and has been trending in that upward slope for quite a while now. So you may be wondering, what happens when they start to run out of room at say 70, 80, 90 or 100% of search share… how do they keep it going?
Well, one solution is to grow the whole pie by growing the gross number of searches conducted. So how do you do that? For starters you make it super easy and convenient to run a search query, like search on a mobile phone (Google Mobile) while you’re out and about and while at your desk through a browser toolbars that is always there, ready and waiting (Google Toolbar). Second you try to get more and more of the world’s information into the index to make it findable, for example by scanning book or making it easy for any Joe Schmo to create new information say like in a blog on Blogger (acquired 2003).
In fact, the worldwide web has grown like wildfire over the past decade with the Google index growing from 26 million pages in 1998 to 1 billion pages in 2000 and an estimated 1 trillion today. So needless to say there is a lot of information out there to be found, and Google’s success has been built on developing the best mousetrap to help folks sift through those 1 trillion pages and find the information they’re looking for, largely relying on that popularity contest dressed up as a math equation called PageRank to help us uncover the needles among those 1 trillion straws of hay.
If there is any commonality between those 1 trillion pages of information that Google currently helps us navigate through it’s that they all 1. sit on a publicly available webserver usually on a server farm somewhere 2. are not time or place dependent and 3. the popularity rank or pagerank is determined in large part through votes (links) placed by a global democracy of users.
Where I am, and information on the places, items and people around me. Take for example these things that we don’t even consider doing a Google search for
Search is 90% solved! Woo hoo, now we can go out and play!
I am sure it was just one of those goofy comments that she made, that she now wishes she hadn’t made that she is now trying to clarify, which she does a respectable job of via the Official Google Blog. I am equally as sure that back in the 1876 Melvil Dewey said something equally as silly when he came up with the Dewey Decimal System… I am sure it went something like this: “ all knowledge can be categorized into ten core classes and I have devised a perfect hierarchical classification system that can handle an infinite number of new elements. The problem of searching for and finding information is practically solved.” Followed by the off the record comment “woo hoo yeah baby! Now we can go paaaaart-ay!
What Melvil didn’t acknowledge is that not all the worlds’ information would be written into books and stored in large libraries.
What Google is not acknowledging is that not all the worlds’ information is written out and coded and available to be stored in large server farms.
The Google clarification goes on to recognize some key gaps including cross language information sharing, modes of search (like by voice) and personalization… all things that focus on the different methods of getting at and sorting through stuff currently available on web servers. The clarification does not address the problem that the worlds’ information is no more confined to the world of indexable web servers than it was confined to books back in 1876.
Ok getting back to location stuff as an example, a couple of simple things I might like to know in the next few hours are: Where is my bus? Or where is my friend? Or where can I find a great Cuban sandwich within a five minute walk for under $8. Or are there any guys playing basketball at the gym right now? Google search can’t answer any of these questions. Sure, it may be able to get me to a bus schedule of where a bus SHOULD be, or that a Cuban restaurant or a gym exists nearby. But that is quite different than information on the actual location of the bus, or that a deli nearby does great Cuban sandwich, or that the gym even has a basketball court, let alone whether there are people there playing at that moment.
The Google’s of the world still have a lot of work to do to first figure out how to handle all the knowable yet transient (there one moment, but then gone the next) information that exists out there already… and then they can move on to the bigger problem of helping to get information materialized in a way to make it more accessible… scanning books was a start, but I certainly hope it wasn’t then end.
