Google's Next Big Thing: Search Without Search

Today at LeWeb ’10 in Paris, France, our own Michael Arrington took the stage to talk with Google’s Marissa Mayer. Mayer recently took a new job within Google. Technically, she’s now the head of consumer products for the company. So what’s she working on?

Well, as we’ve all heard, location is a big part of it. But she’s also thinking about a bigger picture item that Google is still working on. This is what Google is calling “contextual discovery”. This means being able to look at either a person’s browsing profile or their location profile and serving up interesting data to them without them searching for anything. Yes, it’s Google results without the search.

“The idea is to push information to people,” Mayer said. She noted that on mobile devices this is particularly interesting because location can provide context. One example she gave was a menu when you’re in a particular restaurant. It would be great to show up and see that on your device — maybe with a bit of social flavor based on what your friends like, she added.

Mayer said they’re still thinking about how the UI for all of this should look, but they have some ideas. It may be a panel in the browser. But on mobile devices it would be different. She said they they have a couple of things they’re currently experimenting with and that we should expect something to come from them in the next year or so.

“We’re trying to build a virtual mirror of the world at all times,” Mayer said.
Article by : MG Siegler

Google working on search before you search

Google's Mayer says company is working on giving search results before question asked

Google this week reiterated its interest in being able to give users search results before they even know they want them.

At the LeWeb '10 conference in Paris on Wednesday, Marissa Mayer, vice president of location services at Google, said the company is working on giving users results without the search.

"The idea is to push information to people," said Mayer, during an on-stage interview. "It's location in context. Inside the browser and a toolbar, we can look at where people have been going on the Web -- then we deliver it. But it's a big UI challenge."

"On a PC, the search results might pop up in a panel on the browser, complementing the user's own Web browsing. On a mobile phone, Google would provide information based on a user's location."

"We can figure out where the next most useful information is," she said. "In a restaurant, maybe it's a menu. Or maybe it's a social menu. It's about explicit and implicit location."

"While it sounds like science fiction to suggest that technology can help search for things you don't even yet know you need, the opportunities to improve human discovery are very real in the future," Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray said in a previous interview. "Combining a person's context -- where they are, who they're with -- with their past opinions and actions, and the opinions and actions of others, can create tremendous value for people."