The Future of Search: Google's Perspective |Dean Whitney Interactive

The Future of Search: Google’s Perspective

Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Dean Whitney in Advertising, Search, Social Media and has 0 Comments

Attended a SEMPO Boston event at Google. Lisa Green, a Senior Agency Relations Manager at Google talked about the future of search touching on key data/insights, social, and mobile search. We learned a bit about a few of the hundreds of new features and enhancements Google has been working on to improve their search and universal access to information.

There was a special focus on images – with 100 Billion images added to the internet each day Google sees this as a major area for development. Some nifty things include;

Google Social Search (YouTube demo) shows search results from your social networks when you have a Google Profile.
Google Image Swirl lets you search images and displays a faceted map so you can find images grouped by image attributes. Check out this search for the Eiffel Tower.
Google Googles which lets you take a photo of a landmark or store and it provides search results on your Android phone.
Google Language Tools and Translate are focusing on improving search so that it can search other language using native language queries and return search results in the native language; so if you search Wine Tasting in Paris; it can return return results in English from French language web pages; allowing those pages to come up first given they are more relevant than say a wine tasting in New Jersey.
Google is partnering with iLike and Lala to provide greater music depth in search; so you can listen to music, see ratings and richer information from music searches.
Google Voice Search sounds promising; this is simply the ability to search from you phone by speaking. Allowing users to search by key words, locations, movies, restaurants and showing the correct results. The big challenge here is machine automation with the variety of accents, dialects and languages.
Google’s Agency Relations focuses on helping agencies and brands better utilize search engine marketing (SEM) including paid search, display, video, featured YouTube content etc., and still doesn’t help support search engine optimization; although the SEM tools are very useful for SEO analytics.

All in all it was a great presentation; Lisa Green was very engaging and knowledgeable. Be sure to check the Google Blog every Friday for “This Week in Search.”

SEMPO is the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization; a global non-profit focused on providing education, promoting the industry, generating research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.