Google's Mayer Says Personalization is Key To Future Search 93
rsmiller510 writes "In a wide-ranging interview with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington on Wednesday at Le Web in Paris, Google's Marissa Mayer talked about all things Google, but what I found most interesting was when the conversation turned toward the future of search. Mayer said the key to the future of search lies in personalization. ... Mayer said in the future, Google (and presumably other search tools) will understand more about the user and be able to deliver more relevant information based on that knowledge. 'We think that when you look at the winning search engine in 2020 and what traits it's likely to have, we think the one thing that will be true is that it will understand more about you the user.'"
Video of the interview with Mayer is available at Tech Crunch. The personalization of search content focuses mainly on SearchWiki, which we discussed when it went live last month. The Register has a more cynical take on the discussion, seizing on comments by Mayer which indicated Google employees may evaluate SearchWiki's user ratings and use them to make "obvious changes" to search results for everyone.
My website does this (Score:3, Informative)
I've been working on a personalized news site, if anyone wants to see what the future looks like :) The site learns what you like (based on up/downvoting, like Reddit) and gives you only the news you want to see.
It would probably interest some Slashdot readers (it filters Slashdot, among other things, so you only see the good stuff) and it works like an RSS reader even if you don't trust the recommendations. It's at http://newsbrane.com/ [newsbrane.com]
Editor's Added Comments Are Not Quite Correct (Score:3, Informative)
Semantic Search != Personalisation (Score:4, Informative)
The author of the Daniweb article fundamentally misunderstands semantic search, stating that "Search certainly has a key role in helping us sift through the mountains of information and semantic search, where the search engine has a sense of the meaning and context of our search, which is essentially what Mayer refers to when she cites personalization, could be the key to helping us access the data that's most relevant to us."
Actually semantic search is not really about personalisation at all. Personalisation could enhance semantic search, but they are two separate disciplines. I posted on what semantic search really means a while back [slashdot.org], but I'll re-iterate here.
say a guitarist wants to search for a guitar amp speaker cabinet that would handle the 100w (that's RMS watts) output of his Marshall amp, and fit in the boot/trunk of his car - let's say it's a Ford whatever... anyhow, the point is that the semantic search app would need to discover the dimensions of the car's boot/trunk from Ford, then it could search for speaker cabs that would fit in the boot/trunk that could handle 100w (that's RMS remember) so, if the dimensions of the boot/trunk are expressed in inches by Ford and the dimensions of the cab are expressed in cm by Marshall/Mesa Boogie/Fender et al, then of course there needs to be a standard scheme to express units of size, and then the conversions are easy. Don't forget, that's 100w RMS...
Today you would need to run multiple searches, holding information (the size of the cabinet v.s. size of the boot/trunk) in your head to complete the task. With semantic search, the computer would do it all for you.
Re:Echo Chamber (Score:5, Informative)
It reminds me of a conversation that I had with an old family friend, involving research and the Internet:
Myself: (continuing)"...so my research is greatly aided by the massive amounts of indexed information on Internet. I can access the specific data I need without having to wade through large amounts of information."
Friend: "That's great, but often times I worry that the nature of research is changing because of things like the Internet, Google, Questia, etc. When I was in college, writing research papers, I would have to go to the library, find the relevant books in a card catalog, and then rent out all of those books and pour through them. Now I'm not saying that I didn't skip chapters or pages, but I found that the process of looking through the card catalog, finding all books related to the subject, and reading information that was irrelevant or detrimental to my thesis was more informative than finally arriving at the information that merely supported my thesis. Often times this process of discovery would force me to re-analyze my position resulting in a more robust conclusion. I fear that if people are brought too quickly to what they are looking for, that they will ignore everything else, and that could lead to many problems."
I was young (teenager) when we had this conversation, and at first I disagreed with him. Now, however, I completely agree with him. I think that "compartmentalized" search information could inevitably do more harm than good as it could result in many more 'localized theories' and far fewer rigorously tested truths.
Re:Googling through TOR = nearly impossible (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who is really being "searched" here? (Score:4, Informative)
Google is ridiculously more profitable than NBC Universal or CBS:
Google: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=GOOG&annual [yahoo.com]
NBC: http://www.ge.com/ar2007/mda_segop_summary.jsp [ge.com]
CBS: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=CBS&annual [yahoo.com]
NBC and CBS are far more than TV networks, so it doesn't directly address your point, but presumably, those companies integrated other aspects of the broadcasting business into their operations to save money, not to spend it.
That they provide more eyeballs at a lower price point is a huge aspect of the success that Google has had; I don't know, but I expect that being cheaper is part of those lower prices.
Re:Googling through TOR = nearly impossible (Score:1, Informative)
The Google apologists will be queing up no doubt to tell me that I am getting this page because I am using TOR and all the searches appear to Google to come from a few IPs, so I should use Google directly
Google usually blocks IP addresses from where large number of queries come quickly, regardless whether it is a tor node or else. We also ran into this issue while trying to use their apis for retrieving large amount of search results from the same ip address, and there was no workaround besides waiting enough time so new searches would be allowed. You shouldn't be so paranoid about the tor non-issue, I don't think it's because you use tor, but because lots of people are on the same node and sometimes a large number of queries can seem to come from that node.