More Innovation from Google
The battle for continuing web search dominance continues, with Google now providing a range of new capabilities, including a first stab at realtime search and an image recognition function.
While Google’s immediate target with its announcements is Microsoft’s increasingly competent (and threatening) Bing, the target that the CIO should be aware of is the consumer user. As we have found with a range of technologies, from instant messaging to search engine user interfaces, the consumer is also an employee and judges the effectiveness of the corporate systems they have to use by what they see in the ‘wild’ of the Internet.
Being the canny organisation it is, when Google identifies widespread adoption of these functions in the consumer environment it will then build them into its enterprise offerings, notably its search appliance.
Realtime – really useful or really revealing?
Realtime search, like realtime analytics, is the nirvana of the information manager in the enterprise, just as realtime updates are to the consumer using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But the latter is all that Google appears to be offering at present with its recent announcement, and rival Bing got there first, with Microsoft announcing partnerships with Twitter and Facebook in October. Yahoo is also working on similar functionality. Google already crawls its ‘top sites’ on a frequent basis, as can be gauged by the time periods in the side bar on Google News. However, other sites may go considerable periods before being revisited, which is something that inevitably has to change with the rise of social networking sites, whose raison d’être is to be interactive and where a lack of updates in search results becomes very evident.
Importantly for the user, by highlighting the issue of realtime search Google will raise awareness that search engines are not indexing the whole web in anything like realtime. So, while many users undertaking Internet search may have assumed that if they did not get the information they expected then it did not exist, they will now realise that it could just be that the search index is out of date.
Image recognition – seeing is believing
Two years ago the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence demonstrated an application that could analyse a picture of a model of the Brandenburg Gate and then link it to the URL of the webcam on the actual Brandenburg Gate.
With the announcement of its Goggles product, which provides a search facility for pictures captured on an (Android) mobile phone by comparing them with the billions of images in its databases, Google is releasing such technology into the ‘wild’. This provides the masses (albeit in a limited form) with technology that only used to be accessible to the few large enterprises that could afford the research and deployment.
Constant innovation is the key to Google’s success and challenge to enterprise IT
Both products illustrate yet again that Google is an organisation continually trying to reinvent and differentiate itself. The company’s VP for search, Marissa Mayer, reported that Google had launched “33 different search innovations in 67 days”. Given its user base, the company will have millions of data points to validate the effectiveness and adoption of those innovations, and the most relevant will rapidly make their way into the software on the enterprise-focused Google Search Appliance (GSA). Google is reportedly already looking to put Goggles visual search into its Chrome browser.
The innovations in Internet search have undoubtedly raised the expectations of the user, rapidly becoming the benchmark for the interface expected in enterprises, whose upgrade cycles are normally a great deal longer than 67 days. Trying to address those expectations could push many organisations towards the GSA as an enterprise search tool.
Google was once labelled the ‘next big thing’ – that is a title it intends to keep in the Internet world and to win in the enterprise world.
With thanks to Ovum. www.ovumkc.com 