Blogging the Google Search event, December 2009

I’m not going to do a full live-blog, because it’s going to be well-covered by:
Danny Sullivan
Jason Kinkaid
Kara Swisher
among others. You can also register and watch the event as a webcast.

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:

69 Responses to Blogging the Google Search event, December 2009 (Leave a comment)

  1. Is Windows Media the only way to view the Google Search conference @ investor.shareholder.com ?

  2. This is great. Google is merging its information empire across so many fronts. This kind of innovation is really exciting. It reminds me a bit of the Sixth Sense Technology.

  3. I love this. This is my internet I envisioned as a child coming to light.

    Just when some thought the internet has run its course, begins a new enlightened age.

    Wherever you can shine the light of truth, evil will disappear.

    Bring on the goggles!

    dk

    🙂

  4. dk (aka PurposeInc), are suggesting that you envisioned the Internet when you were a child? LOL! Okay, I’m excited about Goggles too. Bring it on.

  5. Thanks so much for this summary. Google is – again – delivering solutions where others are discussing and have “visions”. I am quite sure that the real time search results are a big chance for journalists and other content creators who really add value – now all publishers must see that they can’t compete with the power of the web when freshness matters. So they have to invest in adding value, insights, background informations – that’s good for quality driven journalists, analysts, creative people. A good day for the information age.

  6. Yeh Jon, LOL,

    According to my dad, back in 1963, he supervised (not designed) the construction of the first computer with 1 MB of Ram, working for Ampex under contract with IBM.

    I fully expected by now that the walls would all have screens, speak to us like HAL, and every device we owned would have a chip in it, and they all would be integrated. “Where are my keys again?”

    Watching technology unfold these days is absolutely thrilling.

    If we have seen this much change in the past 20 years, just imagine what is coming next!

    We can call these specialized goggles, GOOGLES! Oh wait..that name is allready taken.

    dk

  7. Excellent post about excellent features added in Google

    Thanks for this info Matt, 🙂

  8. This is very exciting but it’s also a bit scary to a small business owner that has so much into SEO.

  9. @ Bonnie….There is a huge market that is irrelevant to real time results, yeah ski results are great via twitter, but there is so much more to the potential for webmaster to focus on great quality and building a real sticky website than how quick you can upload your latest tweet, I think twitter is the most overated and hyped business model that has no value to certain businesses that are lost in the best buy tv commercial hype.

    So many business owners fail to grasp the idea of permission based marketing, there is a value, but buying cycles are so different amongst businesses and ones that need to continue to attract new customers, better not forget about adding real content and value to their brick and mortar site online.

  10. ghhh!
    Who is Amit or Amit Singhal! You have mentioned this name a lot.

  11. ‘Google Goggles’: very exciting! Innovation at it’s best. Unblievable sort of…

  12. It’s good to see Google is reacting quickly to calls for these sorts of new features, rather than allowing its search to become stale. I like the idea of Goggles, not something I’d use often but I’m sure very handy when I do!

  13. Hi,
    I have one question about Real-Time Search… I’m in show option in my search page in google.com and ‘m not able to active Real-Time-Search. Why???
    I’m a italian boy but I use google.com english ?

    Thanks for your help.

  14. I like the question about truth vs. relevancy! Since quality and relevance often, but not always, bring out the truth, it could really use some innovations to reach a delicate balance.

  15. Matt,

    In what has definately been an exciting time for Google in terms of announcements, don’t you worry that you guys are getting too caught up in features and not enough on fundamentals.

    Operation Papworth by the Metrapolitan Police in the UK seems to have thrown up evidence of a systematic failure of Google to avoid criminally-run websites from ranking highly for key ecommerce terms here in the UK.

    5 days on from the Police operation (which took down 1200 of these scam sites), many are still being returned on page 1 for very high value keywords (despite 404’ing) – in what is the biggest shopping week of the year online!

    In general, Google seems to have failed to take leadership of this issue, and indeed, almost seems (to me at least) to be ignoring it.

    This sort of thing makes it harder to get as excited about all the new stuff for me, when there is something so obviously wrong with the “old” stuff (that was what made Google what it is in the first place).

  16. why not places Realtime search onebox at left or right side,or make it float?

  17. With the Google Main SERPS becoming more and more cluttered with search results from different sources: news, images, videos, shopping, maps and now myspace, twitter (which personally I am not interested in – because in my eyes this is gossip search) I would really appreciate Google adding a tab “website search” at the top. I can choose to search only images, only maps, only for shopping results, videos but there is no way I can limit my search results to websites only.

    I do not like clutter, if I want a map, I click on maps, if I want images I click on images. If wanted websites I used to type in “google.com”. But there is no pure website search anymore. Only a big boiling pot of search stew. So please please, give me back pure uncluttered website search. (Personally I liked Google best how it was about three years ago.)

  18. The real-time seems useful, thanks for putting the video in.

  19. I like the sound of Google Goggles and i will be interesting to see how that and the other changes to search are implemented, and as an SEO i’m sure it will be a challenge!

  20. Is very exciting!!

  21. What a nightmare, this is going to be bad for twitter. Twitter is going to become a spam hub, the work has begun, people will be hiring people overseas to be twittering their heads off with keyword spam and various other topics just to get clicks within Google.

    I have a feeling the live twitter feed is going to removed within the next month.

    Open season for now, slam out those keyword rich twitter posts…..

  22. Hi Five for real time search, also don’t you think it might give google less time to actually know whether the search results are something genuine or just spam? .

  23. @don I agree strongly with your point about Twitter. The content box is a neat idea but I think John has a good point as well that it will just be encouraging spam and I hope there will be some serious filters incorporated with that.

  24. I think that the technology behind this is fantastic and the vision is even better, however I am skeptical about the spam capablities of real time….As of now, the index is filled with web 2.0 and review sites that use other products and product/service reviews to gain traffic. Some of the posts are not apropriate and may defame a company or person. Talk about bullies online in a school environment, the information will just be more front line. Is this a fair practice when Google deos not offer any polocies or action against these sites. Why not offer a webmaster/public submission that could get the offending site or page removed from the index? Where will Google stand on inapropriate practices of other webmasters that spam the index and other companies/competition/people.

  25. Hi Matt,

    Havent tried the live search yet but one of the guys in the office came across this article in regards of real time search, thought you would be interested in it.

    http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-real-time-spam/

  26. Its all about relevancy. If searchers find ‘real time search’ more helpful than normal listings then its an effort worth cheering for. Most it could be used by ‘seo intelligence officers’ or alert guys lurking for competitors etc. It can also help to check your effort regarding ‘reputation’ management.

  27. Hi Matt,

    I personally think twitter is already a “spam hub”, and this will make it a million times worse. I typed in “mps expenses” earlier and was just confused. I wanted to view the documents of the UK MPs tax expenses on the UK’s official parliament website.

    The official website with the documents was organic position 2, however it was below the fold after the news results AND twitter results, so really it was 10 clickable links from the first result.

    Why would I want to read about people moaning about it, i would rather see the facts, which is what I thought Google was all about?

    In my opinion….Don’t fix something that isn’t broke.

    Twitter is not good content, its simply 140 characters of people thoughts that do not mean anything, i want facts facts facts! I couldn’t care less what “Tom” in “Glasgow” whats to say!

    Sorry for the rant, but I think Google has made..(or making) a HUGE mistake with these twitter results! Get rid of them!….Or at least move them to the bottom of the search results!

    Cheers,

    Mike

  28. Amen to what Mike said. The last thing in the world I’d want to read is 140 characters of “google announces personalized search today n i don like it much” or “look at my mps expenses fact site at bit.ly/A934F03” or things to that effect. If I want to find something Twitter-related on Google, I can always add site:twitter.com to a search.

  29. QUOTE from Multi-Worded Adam:

    “If I want to find something Twitter-related on Google, I can always add site:twitter.com to a search.”

    The perfect solution! Or if Google REALLY wants to push Twitter results, then have a little check box next to the search button that says “Search Live Content?”

    Please please don’t do this, I don’t want to HAVE to use Yahoo or Bing!

    Over and out.

    Mike

  30. Why does it take 4 clicks to see obama’s Nobel speech, which does not load quickly on my crappy german university server, while 1-3 clicks takes me directly to opinion on the speech. I rely on the internet to hear the world, not an impression of the world. It pisses me off that the photos of Obama smiling with his awards makes me mad, but not the video of his speech or the commentary on his acceptance.

  31. I personaly use twitter to keep people within the events industry updated with news and info and if Google index’s that news and links for me its a good thing.

    Twittwer is a hub of info and social interaction with a wealth of knowledge behind it

    My opionion, its a good thing.

  32. Mike, fully agree. Anywhere users can add links and is NOT moderated, becomes a spam hub. Not only twitter.

    Me thinks Google has (or will some day) a vested interest in Twitter, just as it does with forcing YouTube results on users when YouTube has its own Google SE.

    Slowly but surely, shareholders are forcing the hand of Google. Sad and bad.

  33. I love this real time search. So many times you’re stuck in a traffic parking lot because of an accident, most of the time you don’t know how far up the accident is to decide on an alternative route. I can see sitting in the car, not moving of course because you’re stuck, and hitting the mobile in real time to get info about the traffic jam. It’s so disheartening to be sitting around not knowing what’s happening and many times you’re flipping through radio looking for info about what’s going on. A true great innovation.

  34. It’s an amazing news showing how search has become such a tremendously essential part of the web experience. Also, it’s indicative of how Google is trying to catch up with Twitter, FriendFeed and other social media. It’s even encompasses individual blogs.

    I’ve gone through Google’s new search options and seen things that made me think more seriously about appearing in SERPs more often. IT seems that having a blog updated as frequently as possible is becoming so vital. On the other hand, you better have press releases published every now and them although they will be of use only one day in Google Web Search. The better news is that it will appear in Google News for a month.

    So, the bottom line is you have to build content again and again to get targeted website traffic. I don’t know if real-time search results will cover the latest blog comments (like “Jump to” function for anchored name thing)! Does anyone have any idea?

  35. I agree with previous posters. Twitter results in the first page of Google is a god send for talented spammers.

    I like the idea of real time search and it will certainly be useful, though is Twitter the best way to bring this to market?

  36. Nice Q & A section… 🙂
    Real time search and Updates…really a good initiative.

    btw who is amit?

  37. At the end of the day, Google is Google, Twitter is Twitter and Facebook is Facebook. They all serve their own individual needs (hence why they have grown the way they have).

    I don’t want to go to Facebook to search for something, the same way I don’t want Twitter results when I visit Google.

    It like a Butchers selling lawnmowers!

    What does Google have, 95% of the search market? You are doing things right Google! Don’t change! Are you so greedy that you want 96%???

    Keep doing what your doing and work harder to improve web results and fight spam, not spending all your time give us useless results we don’t want.

    I will be surprised if the live search thing lasts a month.

    Sorry for the rant Matt, don’t hate me, just my opinion. 🙂

    Peace out.

  38. Exellent news! real time search is a great tool for us! Thanks Matt!

  39. It is absolutely impressive how the world wide web has evolved through the years. The google search stood out from the rest because of the functionality it offers: real time search with real time results. Not to mention the hardwork put in in eradicating rubbish sites that serves no purpose except for spam. And despite all this, Google continually pursue to further enhance its functionality with search by voice and search by sight – a complete and utter brilliance. It would be interesting to know what Google Search and Google in total has to offer a decade from now.

  40. Matt, Just curious what’s your opinion on this blog regarding Outspoken Media “Google Enables Real Time Spam and More.” Rae Hoffman has some really good points regarding real time search and how it can be manipulated very badly.

  41. Matt, why does google actually need to completely de-index websites following a ‘violation’?
    Do you guys need to preserve diskspace? lol 🙂 This sounds to me a bit like stoneage.
    If you determine that sites or pages do not deserve a particular ranking, you can always put them somewhere else, into the thousands, and the problem would solve itself over time anyway, to the good or the bad of that domain or page, depending on how its managed by its owner.

  42. Amazing. I’ve published a post today and could easily go from web > Updates to web > blogs and find my posts in minutes. I see how powerful this new feature is.

    When choosing tweets, I could read the title, landing page name, account names, etc to make my mind for choosing the right link. The search experience is getting richer and richer.

  43. So, the bottom line is you have to build content again and again to get targeted website traffic.

    That one SEO myth of many. Quality content pages only get more links and PageRank as time passes. Hence the other myth of “aging delay” or “sandbox”.

    THE single biggest mistake is relying on a few pages for most traffic. When those pages drop (which will happen) the owner is up shit creek without a paddle. Those you spread their incoming traffic over 100’s or 1000’s of rarely see a dip in traffic.

  44. I was watching the video and thinking the same as Mike is posting already 3rd time here.

    First thing I thought – why should I see some spammy or may be even SCAMY tweets or facebook updates in search results, even if they are “fresh” and “relevent”.

    Google had and has the best algo for determining relevancy of the page with best content, but now with this real time search the unexperienced users/searchers are more vulnerable. I’m already getting tons of spam via twitter, how many spammers will start using twitter more and more proactively and I’m sure google will catch them in its search results.

    Mat – Google makes webmasters use more twitter or/and facebook then create pages with great content inside for users.

    Don’t let it happen Mat.

  45. Hi Matt,

    This is super exciting for a geek like me 🙂

    I like the sound of Google Goggles!

    Cheers!

  46. WOW … faster is Always better when the internet is concerned!!!

    Thank you for the great post!

  47. It is absolutely impressive how the world wide web has evolved through the years. The google search stood out from the rest because of the functionality it offers: real time search with real time results. Not to mention the hardwork put in in eradicating rubbish sites that serves no purpose except for spam. And despite all this, Google continually pursue to further enhance its functionality with search by voice and search by sight – a complete and utter brilliance. It would be interesting to know what Google Search and Google in total has to offer a decade from now.

  48. I wonder if this will become a hub for spam or not. Google seems to thrive on natural exclusives like old domains, number of links, keyworded URL’s. There are natural limits to the length of twitter posts and given their size might be easier to see through spam.

    I do think this will push more into social media in response. It will be interesting to see what this does to the “culture” of social media. The 80% personal, 20% business is definitely a thing of the past.

    It is impressive technology though it is interesting to see how people actually digest it and use it.

  49. Hey Matts,

    I love the way google search providing real time search. But I dint understood how it is taking tweets from Twitter…?

    if we find with ” christmas shopping ” fortunately we are getting only tweets from real people … not from the coupons shouters … 🙂 🙂

    but if i search with ” holiday shopping ” tweets are not coming … why it is happening ?

  50. I always want to get updated with regards to this issue. However, my location limits me. Hope to have smooth connection via webcast.

  51. Hello Matt,

    I have a question that you may be able to answer and may also be of interest to other people, so I hope you’ll want to answer it:

    Let’s say that a service provider (such as a hosting company or and ISP) allocates a bunch of IP addresses to a customer which hosts his server (or servers) at the service provider’s hosting farm. The IP addresses the customer buys are not necessarily sequential.

    Now, if the customer make use of those IP addresses to perform web sites promotions, can his actions infect the page ranking (or search result location) of the hosting company/ISP which hosts his servers and allocated him the IPs (which, of course, where given from an IP address pool the service provider owns), and by that infect the hosting company/ISP presence in Google search results?

    Thanks,

    Jim

  52. This is pretty incredible. I was worried for a minute and thought real time search results showed up automatically (similar to images, videos, news posts). But then I noticed this

    “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.”

    Thanks for keeping us in the loop Matt

  53. Its great ! Real time search and Google goggles both are the defining new innovations and really a new era of Google search.

  54. “Search by Sight”, YIKES!!! I mean don’t get me wrong, the thought of it is totally cool and absolutely amazing, but YIKES! …How much longer before Google can recognize actual faces?

  55. Great Post!

    Yep, faster is always better, and relevancy on top that is even MUCH better! I’m looking for to all the new adventures Google has for real time search, I’m liking the Goggles as well!

    Jason

  56. Sorry Matt I see no usefulness in having real time search at the moment.

    I can speak from the perspective of a user here…

    What I would find, let’s say, twitter results to be useful for in real time?

    Well for a start, if there is a news event, I would love to see tweets of some authoritative figures tweeting about it, or some people expressing their own opinion. I don’t want to see re-tweets of the news with a link next to it, nothing useful there.

    I think that would require relevance algorithms beyond the ones you use to rank pages (like number, quality of links, on page factors). Maybe some algorithm that analyzes the language or stuff like that. Very very advanced.

    I think marketers and some other CEOs have mis-understood the web a bit with the web 2.0 era..it seems that the web is mirroring the real world really. You have most of the people spending time in front of the TV (now facebook, twitter) chatting and not interested at buying nothing at the moment. They’ll listen/watch/read everything that makes them relaxed and cooled…and i guess twitter/fb is a place for that. But inserting those types of tweets/fb status updates in a place where people are looking for something specific is a bit crazy imo and I think the user testing data will show data, users will not react positively to that since they aren’t any useful..it’s like me searching for ‘lessons to learn German’ and some people pop-up that tell me…whew yesterday learned German it was very hard! or..learning German with my aunt. I mean wtf? I want to hear from people that spent years and have credibility in learning me German not seeing status updates from those people on Twitter 🙂

  57. Really nice! Great to hear that.

  58. I know this is a very strange question but I hope I can get a response from you or someone. I have a blogspot blog that ranked very high for a bunch of keywords but after changing one of my post settings to “Don’t allow, hide existing” for comments it dropped to page 2 or further back for all keywords within 24 hours. Eventually my blog returned to page 1 several weeks after I changed things back (I had no idea at the time that this small change may have caused my drop). About a month later I again set the comments on one of my posts to “Don’t allow, hide existing” for comments and again it dropped to page 2 or further back for all keywords within 24 hours.

    Does this make any sense? Is this some glitch with blogspots or Google?

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.
    Jesse

  59. Its gonna be interesting to follow progress with the real-time search.

  60. So, what is the most important thing for 2010? Is that site speed as you mentioned earlier? Thanks

  61. I hate you fucking google – burn i hell !

  62. Oh, you’re so cool – FUCK YOU GOOGLE !!!!

  63. Its amazing what google is currently working on. Can’t imagine what companies like Google & Microsoft would comeup with after 10 years. I have personally used Google’s app on my iphone and the voice recognition is fantastic. I think actual real-time search can never be possible at least in the next 10 years.

  64. Google’s app on iPhone has fantastic accuracy for voice search on the other hand iPhone’s native voice recognition sucks.

  65. that’s really good…Well have seen the real time search..its awesome..!

  66. Thank you Matt for the great post!

    It’is very exciting but this’s also a bit scary to a small business owners.

  67. great to know about all these technologies invented by google. I was really shocked when i tried to see my post (about Google Goggles) on the top of the serp’s to check google’s real time search results…

    Thanks to Google

    Kranthi

  68. Excellent post as always, great to get an insight into the direction of google.

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