Common Paradox Tech Blog

It may not be flying cars and unisex clothing, but Google’s plans for the future are interesting nonetheless. Emma Barnett, of The Daily Telegraph, sat down with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products and User Experience, and reports back some of the things Google has in mind.

Mayer says that Google has three focuses for the future. The first is to better aggregate and integrate the various forms of media available on the internet: text, pictures, video, sound. Searches should be able to access and return results for all forms, so that users aren’t artificially limited to text (or even a particular langage). And the results should be real time (e.g, Google’s real-time web), so that information will be available the moment it’s created.

The second area of focus is mode of access. Integration of various media doesn’t make much sense if it can’t be searched on its own terms. Google Goggles is a new mode, allowing users of Android-based smartphones to capture an image and search for that image on the Internet–no text required. (To assuage privacy concerns, Goggles, at present, doesn’t do faces.)

The last area of focus is personalization. Google would like you to get what you want, and would like to see your efforts doing so minimized. Google’s search engines will ‘learn’ from individuals what information they want, and from where they want it (including more meaningful links with personal social networks). The end result will be a more individualized web experience. (And a diminishment of serendipity?)

Mayer acknowledges that privacy might be an issue, as personalization would require tracking user information for 180-days (unless the user opts-out). She adds that privacy concerns are a bit over-blown, as user information will be cookie-based, which only identifies a particular machine on the web, not a particular user. “We always follow a code of privacy–transparency, choice, and control,” said Mayer, “People can easily opt out.”

Image Credit: Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons

Tim Schulz has resigned from his role as Senior Product Manager at MySpace, he confirmed a couple of hours ago on Twitter. Schulz let the MySpace executive team know that he was leaving the social networking company on Friday, and he informed us that starting January 2010, he’ll be running products as part of the general management team at e-commerce startup Magento.

Schulz was hired in the Fall of 2008 to work for MySpace International, and later moved to a senior role in the Product Strategy team together with Todd Leeloy (former VP of International Product and now VP, Strategy under Jason Hirschhorn). Schulz focused a lot on the realtime web.

The Internet is all a blur, to be sure, but it’s not a realtime blur. Searches, for example, prowl through databases of constantly complied and updated information, which means there’s always a disconnect, albeit a small one, between what you see and what is actually out there. Google announced plans to eliminate that gap with something it calls the “realtime web.”

The key to realtime is relevancy, and according to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, presenting at Google’s Search Event, Google’s relevance technology has matured to the point where realtime is possible. According to Singhal, “the importance of relevance has gone through the roof as the amount of information out there is growing. Relevance has become the critical factor.”  MG Siegler, of TechCrunch, reports a demonstration by Singhal showing hits on freshly available information, even from Twitter.

Right now English is the only language realtime is available for. But Google plans to expand the number of languages to ensure relevancy remains intact. Other languages are expected to be incorporated by the first quarter of 2010.

Google’s realtime searches will include not only Twitter, but blog posts, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Facebook. Searches can be performed not only on PCs, but iPhones and Android devices.

You can try out the realtime web at Google Trends. Click on any “hot topic.” On the search results page look for the entry “Latest results for…”

Image Credit: Google

Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal (who recently participated in our Realtime Crunchup) took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime. “It’s Google’s relevance technology meeting the realtime web,” is how Singhal described it.

As we’ve learned over the past several months with Twitter Search, relevancy is perhaps the key to making realtime search a pillar of the web. Google seems to believe it has cracked the code for this, and has been internally testing it for a while now. But starting today it’s going live for everyone.

The year is 1963. It’s November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.” Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in.

Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It’s just a matter of time.

If it were to happen today, most people would still turn to their TV sets to get the most up-to-date information on such an event. We saw that on September 11, 2001. But a large number of people would also now turn to the web. And there they would likely find the information they were looking for faster than those watching on television. We’ve seen it time and time again recently.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below).

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.

You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.