Search by Voice

Marissa Mayer did a brief intro, then brought up Vic Gundotra. Vic is going to show a series of mobile demos emphasizing that phones have senses (ears, voice, eyes) via their sensors. He showed the progress on Google’s mobile app by doing “pictures of barack obama at g8 summit” as a voice query and it nailed it. Then Vic did the query for [mcdonalds in beijing]–and it nailed it. Announcement: support for Google Voice in Japanese. In 2010, many more languages will be supported. Vic showed a demo of “talk in English, run voice recognition, translate into Spanish, then do voice synthesis in Spanish.” So basically a Babel fish.

Location

Vic showed customized suggest in Mobile. With a location of Boston, Massachusetts, [re] gives [red sox], [red sox schedule], and [restaurant week boston] as suggestions. In San Francisco, [re] suggests [rei] instead. Demos are coming fast and furious now. Vic just demoed “products in stock near me” on a mobile phone. Now Vic is demoing “Near me now” at search pagethat tells you interesting stuff. I know this neighborhood and it nailed the nearby businesses. A new version of Google Mobile Maps for Android is coming out today and if you long-press on a map, it will offer to show you stuff near you (businesses, the Computer History Museum, etc.).

Search by Sight

Vic is announcing Google Goggles. You can take pictures of physical landmarks, bottles of wine, CD covers, bar codes, a bunch of different things. It looks like it tries to recognize (do OCR) on text in images. Vic took a picture of a landmark from Japan and it told the name of the shrine.

Marissa is back up and introduces Amit Singhal.

Real-time search

Amit is talking about how information used to spread. In old days, people would ask their elders “Are these berries safe to eat?” The childen who listened to their elders would grow up to be grandparents themselves. The printing press changed the communication from one-to-one to one-to-many. The web brings it to many-to-many. Google is announcing real-time search today. Amit is emphasizing that relevance matters a bunch. He makes the strong point that Google has 11 years of experience with ranking based on relevance, not just based on sort-by-date.

Woohoo, my tweet about real-time search showed up in the results.

To get to real-time search, you’ll click the “Show options” link above the search results. Then you’ll see a “Latest” option. Looks like there’s also an “Updates” link to restrict it to updates from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Example of see that a vaccine was out from a tweet a few seconds ago.

Realt-time search works on mobile (iPhone, Android) too. Google will add really-hot topics to the Hot Trends page to see these real-time updates.

Amit is talking about the infrastructure–lots of stuff has to happen to index this stuff and rank it well. Amit says Google is processing “over a billion documents a day” from the real-time web.

Amit talks about the four pillars of search: comprehensiveness, relevance, user experience, and speed/freshness. Amit is re-emphasizing that relevance matters and that speed/freshness is really one of Google’s strengths. We’ve worked on increasing our freshness

Amit closed with: “Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we won’t rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you.”

Marissa: two new partner announcements. Facebook is providing some updates. MySpace is also providing updates.

Q: Face recognition in Google Goggles?
A: Not doing facial recognition

Q: Advertising opportunity in real-time search?
A: Amit is answering. Twitter and others have added tremendous value to the web (ski conditions in Truckee, traffic in Bangalore). He believes there will be opportunities there for everyone over time, but isn’t too concerned right now.

Q: Sources in real-time search?
A: Over 1B pages a day are being processed. Not just Twitter, but a fresh press release or a blog post. Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku, etc.–looking to add MySpace and Facebook

Q: Availability in non-English?
A: First launch in English (Canada, India, US, UK). In Q1 2010 the plan is to add many new languages.

Q: from Dave McClure: Can I prioritize based on my friends?
A: Amit: localization, personalization, and social search can absolutely improve search quality.

Q: Facebook vs. MySpace?
A: Marissa: MySpace sending all public updates. Facebook will start by sending updates from Facebook Pages.

Q: What if you didn’t have a partnership with someone?
A: Marissa: Our goal is always comprehensiveness. We’d always look

Q: Danny: Can you clarify any financial terms?
A: Marissa: We can’t disclose any financial terms.
Q: Danny follow-up: Murdoch seems to have strong opinions. Are you sure you can’t say anything about the terms?
A: We can’t confirm.

Q: Any sources not allowed?
A: We’re happy to get any source of real-time and let the algorithms decide which updates are relevant.
Q: Same relevancy algorithms applied, just faster, or are they different?
A: At least a dozen new technologies to make real-time search as well as it does. Not exactly the same algorithms, but many of the same insights apply. Experience helps.

Q: As Android takes off,
A: Our desire is to reach our customers on whatever platform they’re on.

Q: Will real-time search be the death of journalism? Does that make Google the most powerful company in the world?
A: Amit: Journalism has its role and it will always have that role. There will always be a need for insight and the value that is added by journalists. Regarding the second point, our goal has always been to bring timely, relevant, useful results to users. It’s about user empowerment.
A: Marissa: We want to get people off our site and to the native source of information on the web.
A: Gabriel Stricker: Yet another channel to drive traffic to news and web sites.

Q: Philosophy of universal search?
A: Users don’t want the mental overhead of remembering “Oh, I have a image-y query, I’ll go to images.google.com.” We want them to be able to type anything into the search box and Google will return relevant results.

Q: Ryan Singel: You mentioned getting people off of Google quickly. Other companies (Yahoo/MSFT) seem to want to create pages based on the information and keep people on-site.
A: Marissa: The web thrives on openness and we want to encourage that. The exception might be entities where you want to tell people about that entity. But we want the web to prosper.

Q: Stephen Shankland: Any way to put truth into the equation, not just relevancy?
A: Amit: This is a really tough problem. We emphasize quality and relevance, which often brings the truth out.

Q: We host real-time information on our site. How can we talk to you?
A: Catch the PM after the event, but the general answer might involve an API down the road. Seemed more like speculation by Marissa than a promise.

Q: How does PageRank factor in?
A: Amit: PageRank is one of over 200 signals that we use in ranking. Lots of new technologies (e.g. language modelling) also developed for real-time search. Marissa: PageRank is about authoritativeness. There are similar signals (retweets, replies) in the update space.

Q: Someone wants to turn off scrolling in real-time updates?
A: Amit: They added a pause button based on dogfooding feedback. They continue to experiment and could change the UI in the future. [Personal note: Real-time search won't trigger for a ton of queries, only when it's believe to be helpful. That was one of the technologies they had to invent (when does a search deserve the freshness of latest-search). So scrolling makes sense to me because it emphasizes the hotness of the search.] Marissa: they may tweak it over time.

Q: Niall Kennedy: Geo? Will Galileo change things?
A: Vic: Depends on the source of the data. Fallback from GPS can be cell tower or A-GPS.
Q: Niall: Good coverage internationally?
A: Vic: Coverage has increased by an order of magnitude over the last year.

Q: Support in Google APIs?
A: Too soon to say.

Q: When will this be live?
A: Vic: Japanese live today. Google Goggle already available now. Coming weeks: “Near me now” on mobile home page. Product search: a few weeks beyond that. Demo of real-time translation: more like Q1.
A: Amit: Real-time search begins roll-out today, finishes over the next few days. Go to google.com/trends and click on “Hot Topics” panel on the left.

Q: Technology behind Google Goggles? How do you decide when a picture really is the Empire State Building.
A: Hartmut: Uses unsupervised learning as a reflection of what’s on the web.

Q: Not just text and status updates?
A: Amit: Excited about expanding quickly beyond just status updates toward relevant real-time results.
A: Marissa: MySpace already looking at non-real

Q: Real-time product inventory? (questioner works on similar idea)
A: Sometime in Q1. Current partners are Best Buy and Sears?

Q: Ryan Singel: How different is web index from real-time index.
A: Amit: Our web index can be updated in minutes or seconds quite easily. New tech is update receiving and real-time merging into the index. Amit seems to be saying that the intent is for everything to be as unified as possible under the hood.

Google has posted a video about realtime search too:

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The suggestions for videos don’t have to be about search/SEO. I really enjoyed doing the barcode scanning video, for example. So I’d love to tackle a few more general questions like “Do you have power tips for crunching through email quickly?” or “What Chrome extension would you like to see?” I’m happy to tackle some broad questions like “Do you have any predictions for 2010?” Post some interesting topics and we’ll see which ones we can tackle. Thanks!

Please leave your question on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here.

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So why post if this will end in about 2 and a half week time? Because I will have this post as an entry? Why now? I was away and not been on seo world for about 6 to 8 months I believe due to projects outside seo world. And just having my time now to test again what is happening around search engine.

I have seen improvements on search engines, new search engine evolve and start ups like WolframAlpha that is cool. Anyway, let have a try on this one if I still remember my brain dead seo knowledge base. Wake up brain cells lets do the work for oes tsetnoc.

If on few more days say 7 days before the end of the contest, and we don’t see improvement and google visibility, same old scenario pass the juice to all my friends entry.

This entry must be valid with this organizer site located here Webmaster Forum.

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For starters, here’s what Google announced about Chrome OS back in July. At that time, Google called out “speed, simplicity and security” as the key ideas behind Chrome OS. Google released Chrome a little over a year ago with a novel idea–a comic book to describe the features and design decisions behind Chrome.

Looks like Danny Sullivan is live blogging too.

Google OS just noticed that the source code for Chrome OS is available. (Maybe they’ll call the open version “Chromium OS”?)

Sundar Pichai (a Vice President of Product Management at Google) is talking about the progress of Google Chrome over the last year, and the progress of HTML5 as well. Pichai notes some large-scale trends:
- Netbooks are becoming more popular.
- Hundreds of millions of users are living in the cloud. [Yup, I went Microsoft-free as a challenge and I haven't looked back. I do almost everything I need to do in a browser.]
- Innovation in computing devices. For example, phones are getting smarter and more capable–more like mini-computers.

MG Siegler is live-blogging over on TechCrunch.

Every application in Chrome OS is a web application. Sundar Pichai repeated this for emphasis. That means “don’t expect to be able to run .exe files.”

Pichai emphasizes that Speed, Simplicity, and Security are the pillars of Chrome OS:
- Speed: the goal is that boot and execution is blazingly fast. The OS currently boots in 7 seconds.
- Simplicity: the browser is the front-end. If you can run a browser, you should be able to use Chrome OS.
- Security: no code is installed on the system, so detecting malicious processes is easier.

Demo time! 7 seconds to boot. Ooh, they’ve been running the demo on a Chrome OS machine. The UI is still in flux (final machines might not appear for a year).

Chrome OS looks very much like Chrome. There’s an extra pinned tab on the left-hand side to open web applications. When you open up a web application, up pops a “mole” (because it comes from underground) that’s a persistent small window. These “moles” are expected to be called “panels” in the external release. The panels persist as you move between tabs and can be minimized down to the bottom right or they can be closed.

You can also have different windows or workspaces, so you could have a set of tabs for some work and a set of tabs for blog post and switch between them easily. You can drag and drop tabs just like with Chrome.

You can plug in a phone and browse pictures or video files. Then from there you could upload stuff to the web. They showed Flash working. Everything is web-based, e.g. they took a Excel file and loaded it into SkyDrive and viewed it using a Microsoft web app for viewing Excel files.

I want this OS, like now. Matt Papakipos, an engineering director at Google, just announced that they’re releasing the Chrome OS. They’re also releasing a bunch of design docs, not just code. Everything is flash-memory-based–no hard drive.

Matt Papakipos is talking about verified boot. It looks like the Chrome OS team is working hard to verify that code is secure via cryptographic signatures. If you get typical malware, you just reboot–seven seconds later, you’re clean again. Chrome OS does a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that from the firmware upwards, everything is secure and has the latest patches. The application security model changes in Chrome OS. Instead of running with the privileges of “you” (e.g. administrator capabilities). Under Chrome OS, web applications can’t change your underlying hardware settings, so things are safely sandboxed (chroot, namespaces, stack protection, toolchain). The root partitiion in file system is read-only, including the Chrome executable, which is unusual.

User data is encrypted on a Chrome OS machine. If you lose your laptop, the attacker gets nothing of value. Aside: what will people call these machines? Netbook? Chromebook? Webbook? Webtop? Chrometop? I don’t know what people will decide to call these machines. I like “chromebook.” User data and settings are synced to the cloud. So if you have a wifi network you’ve configured, that data is stored in the cloud. If you dunk your “Chromebook” in a pool or lose it, it sounds like you can pick a new one off the shelf, log in, and it will be as if you never lose your machine.

You can’t download Chrome OS and be guaranteed it will work on a random machine. Target time is end of next year. Google will work to ensure that these machines will be a good experience (good keyboard, resolution). They want compelling devices.

Google is going to be good open-source citizens and contribute code upstream (e.g. to Linux, Ubuntu, Moblin). [I've seen this with Chrome and it's worked well.]

We’re watching this video which is on the Google Chrome channel on YouTube:

Okay, it looks like Google has released a ton of Chromium OS videos on the Chrome channel on YouTube.

Question: How much will it cost?
Answer: You’ll hear that from our partners. Expect prices in the range of what people expect for computer products today.

Question: What are machine you running?
Answer: Sundar Pichai says that the demo was running on an off-the-shelf EEE PC.

Question: Standards?
Answer: MattP: Google is going to be a good citizen on pushing web standards forward, but standards take a while to be finalized. They want e.g. HTML5 to run in multiple browsers.

Questions: Drivers and hardware?
Answer: We’re looking for high-quality components with open-source drivers wherever possible.

Question: Applications?
Answer: Use case is web only. Again, don’t expect to run .exe files on a “Chromebook.” Web-based applications (e.g. photo-editing) can do most of what you want. If you’re a lawyer and editing Word files all day, this wouldn’t be your preferred machine. Sundar mentions that this might be your “backup” machine in that you might want a “primary” machine that can run Windows or Mac apps, but your Chrome machine might actually be your “primary” machine in terms of the time you spend.

Question: Compatibility between Chrome and Chrome OS?
Answer: Everything that works in Chrome works in Chrome OS. Things like Native Client are an important of this story.

Question: Will it run different browsers?
Answer: “Chrome is the OS.” End-to-end is/will be open-source. If someone wanted to make a similar OS with a different browser, they can. But don’t expect e.g. Opera to run under Chrome OS.

Questions: Is this netbook-only?
Answer: Initially focused on netbook-type form factors because they want a compelling experience. Can go bigger later, but for 2010 focusing on netbook.

Questions: Call out hardware partners?
Answer: Probably in the middle of next year?

Question: Size of the code base?
Answer: It’s open, so people can check it out themselves. They want to simplify things, so they don’t want a huge code base.

Question: Any offline access?
Answer: Primarily intended for wifi connectivity. If you use HTML5 you could in theory do offline. You could plug in media and run (say) a Flash game off of the media too. [For example, I played Machinarium, which is a Flash-based game, offline on a plane with my vanilla Ubuntu machine on a recent trip.]

Questions: Wide-band or other unusual networking?
Answer: Mainly focused on 802.11n.

Question: Can it be run in a virtual machine?
Answer: Yes.

Question: Can Android apps run?
Answer: No, only web apps.

Question (Mike Arrington): No plans for native executables?
Answer: Current plan is to only support web apps.
Arrington: That’s exactly what Steve Jobs said, and he changed his stance within a year.
Sundar Pichai: But even the

Question: Native Client implies an Intel processor. Do you plan to support ARM? < - [Smart question from InfoWorld.]
Answer: (Pichai) we want to work with a wide variety of possible partners. MattP seemed to indicate interest in ARM.

Question: timeframe for non-netbooks?
Answer: Focused on netbook for 2010.

Question: Business model?
Answer: Just people using the web more can be really good for Google. Every app is the same web app (seemed to imply no additional ads). The OS is free/open-source, so you could always strip out ads. But the demo didn’t show any ads. [This question reminded me of the people who claimed that Android would be a mobile phone OS that would show ads everywhere. That clearly didn't happen.]

Question: Reliability? e.g. Gmail down for two hours stalls me.
[My answer: Cloud-based services are still more reliable than client-based solutions ]