Marissa Mayar, VP of Google on The Future of Search and Announcing Google Gadget Ventures “We pay you $100,000″

Marrissa Mayar was the closing Keynote at Searchonomics today in Santa Clara, she gave an overview of all the Search tools as well as an announcement of a new program, read on to find out.

The Google Search Inventory:

Language Translator “Clear”
Google is investing heavily in automated translation, why? This technology can break down languages barriers. They’ve launched “Clear”, the slides showed Arabic translated to English. This tool will provide powerful results in multiple languages

Google Book Search
Google is working on crawling high quality content, such as their library program of 16 libraries and over a dozen publishers. For books that are not scanned, extensive metadata is being crawled and organized. A location based tool will help identify which libraries have the book you need available. For scanned books, Google will allow viewing of books of “limited preview” or “view all”. Additional metadata “About this book” will be improved. Lastly, a really interesting feature is a Google Mashup, “Places mentioned in this book”

Images and Video
Many improvements made over summer, including YouTube integration.

Speech Recognition empowers Video Search
Have you heard of “1800-GOOG-411” Users can call this phone number and do voice search. Voice to text can even empower for speech recognition over video for transcripts. Facial search is not far along.

Universal Search
Local books, news, and media appear more like an encyclopedia, it’s a content aggregator. Blogs maybe included by the end of year, Podcasts may take more time as less metadata available.

Mobile Search
Usually during summer google.com has a dip in usage, however this year, the analytics for mobile access has increased. Universal search will be present here.

Maps and Local
Google maps currently has traffic maps, data is from third parties to measure congestion, and also available on mobile devices. Streetview, although somewhat controversial, can save users time to navigation a local search experience.

Google APIs, Gears, Gadgets
These tools provide hooks into multiple applications. Users and developers can run their applications on a faster user experience. Google reader is now supported by Google Gears. Google Gadgets spans the desktop to the web experiences

iGoogle
Will provide a customized and personalized homepage for users, it also has skins. Some of the skins track the time zone and match sunrise and sunset and movement of celestial bodies. This will tie with Gadgets, the web becomes modular. The Gadget Wizard will allow develoepers to create new applications and gadgets. One of the most successful developers was 17 year old Caleb, who developed for his community, high school users, he’s received 6.5 Million views a week. What did they access? A periodic table, and other school-centric tools. Developing these tools is free.

“Gadgets are a new form of advertising, and that’s the type of interaction we want to foster”

Announcement: Google Gadget Ventures

Google sees an interesting trend in the Gadget network. There’s an industry showing early growth trends such as SEO and Ad Sense. This will encourage business ventures that rely on the Gadget platform.

Grants to develop Gadgets will be provided in two phases:

Tier 1) 250,000 page views will be tier 1, $5,000

Tier 2) Seed investment of $100,000, must have received tier 1 grant and must present a business plan

Google is going to fund the small developer to build on their platform, this is one of the first of it’s kind in an open network. The details about Google Gadget Ventures are here. Are you qualified? Read the FAQ. Or check the official Google Blog.

Related Sessions I covered at Searchnomics:

Searchnomics Conference: Social Networking User Generated Content and Search

Searchnomics Conference: Video Search Optimization and Marketing

Search meets Web Analytics at Searchnomics Conference

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Conference, Search Strategy, Widget Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.