Here’s my newest TIME.com Technologizer column, on the new search features which Google unveiled this week.
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Google Doubles Down on “Ten Blue Links”
Google's Johanna Wright shows off the new Search by Image feature.
“I don’t need ten blue links — just give me the answer!”–Bing Search Blog post, October 2010
“Yahoo Vows Death to the ’10 Blue Links'”–IDG News article, May 2009
It’s funny: Google’s competitors spend a lot of time explaining that “ten blue links”–the traditional search results that we’ve known since the dawn of search engines–are annoying and/or obsolete. But I haven’t noticed any consumer uprising over them, or a mass exodus from search engines that use them. Actually, I suspect that any company that rails against “ten blue links” would cheerfully swap places with Google if it had the chance, dependent on blue links though Google may be.
And at Google’s Inside Search event today, thee was lots of news–but the company didn’t seem to be on a mission to deemphasize traditional results pages. Instead, most of the news was about making the blue links more useful–getting you to them more quickly, in more ways, then letting you get past them and onto a Web page that provides the information (Google would probably say “knowledge” rather than “information” which you’re looking for.
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Live From Google’s Inside Search Event
I’m at Yerba Buena Center for Google’s Inside Search event–liveblogging is commencing now at technologizer.com/insidesearch.
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Live Coverage of Google’s Inside Search Event
I’ll be at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens on Tuesday morning at 9:30am to liveblog Google’s “Inside Search” event. You can come hang out with me and get the news as it develops at technologizer.com/insidesearch, and I hope you do…
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What’s Gotten Into Gmail?
My, how hyperactive Gmail has become.
Google’s web mail service just rolled out a “people widget,” which shows information about the person you’re e-mailing right next to the message, but that’s not the only change we’ve seen recently in Gmail. Here’s a quick rundown of other changes:
- Importance Markers: Like a light version of Gmail’s priority inbox, these little yellow tabs attempt to decipher which e-mails are truly important. You can help the algorithm out by using plus and minus markers in the top navigation bar.
- AIM in GChat: AOL now lets Instant Messenger users migrate their buddies to Gmail’s chat service. You can add individual buddies by typing their screen names followed by “@aol.com,” or add everyone by choosing “options” in AIM, clicking “Add to Buddy List” and selecting “Set up Google Talk.”
- Advanced advertisements: Google’s been rolling out a new automated ad system for Gmail that looks not only at the content of e-mails, but at whether the user is reading or deleting messages. The idea is to make ads smarter by pinning down the user’s main interests.
I don’t know what’s going on in the Googleplex, but Yahoo, meanwhile, has been rolling out its own big upgrades for Yahoo Mail, and they’re quite nice. Perhaps Google is rapidly releasing its own new features to stay competitive, or maybe it’s just coincidence.
Whatever the case, I don’t find any of Gmail’s recent changes intrusive or offensive, but they’re not game-changers, either. And that’s okay; I like Gmail just the way it is.
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Gmail Adds a People Widget
Google is rolling out a “people widget” for Gmail that puts info about the folks you e-mail with in the space to the right of a message. (It looks rather like Rapportive, which I use and like.)
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Google Wallet? I’m Going to Need Some Convincing
I’m not a luddite. I don’t have an instinctive distrust of Google. But my gut reaction to Google Wallet–Google’s new NFC-based system that will let people make payments, receive “loyalty” rewards, and perform other retail transactions by tapping their phones–isn’t wildly enthusiastic. I’m trying to figure out why.
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Google Mobile Payments: Don’t Get Too Excited Yet
All bets are on Google launching a mobile payment platform with Sprint on Thursday, allowing people to pay for goods and services with their smartphones.
The mobile payment concept, which relies on technology called near-field communications (NFC) embedded in smartphones, has a lot of potential. In the long haul, it may eventually replace the need for credit cards. But I wouldn’t get too excited about this rumored announcement just yet — assuming that is what Google will talk about at a press event in New York on Thursday.
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Alas, Google News Archive, We Hardly Knew Ye
The Boston Phoenix is reporting that Google has decided to quit further work on Google News Archive, its plan to scan and index 250 years’ worth of microfilm copies of newspapers and turn them into a searchable database. The Phoenix says that Google wants to concentrate on projects of more immediate benefit to newspaper companies, and speculates that the News Archive may have been tougher to implement and less popular than Google expected.
It’s sad news. No other Web company except Google would have had the ambition and good intentions to try and do this in the first place; it’s possible that very concept of a grand unified index of the world’s newspapers just died. But while the project was a success in terms of sheer bulk–according to the Phoenix, Google scanned 60 million pages–it had crippling usability issues. I suspect that many folks who’d find it immensely useful have no clue that it exists–and even if they do, they may find it weirdly difficult to navigate.
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Is Traditional Search Passé?
Microsoft Bing chief Stefan Weitz made a pretty significant pronouncement in an interview with The Huffington Post on Wednesday: search as we know it is dead. That’s quite the statement.
In simplest terms, the old fashioned way of search results being nothing much more than a list of returned links just isn’t cutting it — a business model that’s made Google a ton of money.
Lets be fair, though: Bing isn’t that much better. In both cases the two search engines have focused their efforts on “the social,” hoping that is the answer. Google’s social search solution is +1, which gives greater weight to returned results that people in a user’s social circle may have liked. Microsoft is doing something similar, but in that case their using content culled from a friend’s Facebook stream.