Google's vice-president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said in an Interview to the UK Telegraph about a whole new bunch of search innovations currently being worked upon. What are these? Translated search, social/personalized search and intuitive search. Here's what Mayer has to say about these three projects.
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Translated Search
"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 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." Mayer told to Telegraph.
What it does is that helps break language barriers. It helps move beyond Web dominated entirely by English and makes regional reach possible.Conversely, It allows non-english content to have a more global reach.
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Social Search and Personalization
"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."
But getting access to Facebook's social graph is another matter. Google doesn't leverage Facebook Connect anywhere in any of its products. So far, company's experiments with Social Search have been small in scope, but impressive.
But If it was all that easy, it probably would already have happened. Microsoft, meanwhile, may seek to do similar with Bing.
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Intuitive Search
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 says:"Mayer 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".
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. So all this about Intutive Search seems cool, but not surprising.
Search Engines are often limited by inability of Humans to explain what they want. Search queries are expected to be short and precise. Search Enginges leave behind many of the signals we emit implicitly - like location, click-stream history, time we spend on a web page (signals our interest in it) and more.
The future of search may very well be based largely on our implicit behavioral data. This is the direction the Search Engines are moving in.
What are your views on Google's Search Innovations? Let's discuss it here.
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