yesterday opened the kimono (a little bit) to reveal glimpses of what is coming to Google. In her post on the Official Google Blog, she discussed where innovation is most likely to come from. She also gave an update on Google Health.
“When we talk about search, we mean images, news, finance, books, local, and geographical information as well as web search. These media types are becoming more and more integral in our core universal search, but each presents its own challenges, innovations, and triumphs,” she said.
At an “informal gathering” at Google for invited close friends only, visitors were given a peek at what’s to come. R.J. Pittman, Director of Search Properties, showed some of the advances Google’s made in image search — an early form of face recognition is now available on advanced search (strangely, Google did not provite a link, but we have), for example. He also showed how ads might work to enhance the user experience on image search. Pittman also demonstrated the underlying technologies that Google News has deployed to support features like quotes from newsmakers and better quality search for local news.
Carter Maslan, Director of Local Search Quality, then talked about Google’s Geo products (Maps and Earth and their features) and the fact that they represent a considerable search problem: how do you take all of the information about the physical world and make it searchable? How do you label disputed borders? How can Street View help you find where you are going? She recounted that Google Earth has helped archaeologists find things they’ve looked for for years (i.e. a Roman villa in someone’s backyard). According to Maslan, and we’ve noticed it also, user-generated content is the rage right now, but in addition to entertaining shared videos and photos, the user-generated content that Google says its seeing on geo products is profoundly useful (I wish the post gave some examples).
Johanna Wright, Director of Search Quality discussed the search quality team’s efforts toward understanding the ever-elusive “user intent” (“this is what you typed, but here’s what you meant”). This makes universal search even more useful. In the future, you’ll get pictures or maps when that’s what you meant. Understanding user intent also helps “break down language barriers and find the best possible answer regardless of what language it’s in or where it lives on the web,” she said.
Google Health was also first made publicly available. It offers users a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage their medical records and health information online. As Ms. Mayer observed, “How many of us have touched, or even seen, our medical records? In this day and age of information, isn’t it crazy that you don’t have a copy of your medical records under your control? You could use those records to develop a better understanding of your health and ultimately get better care. It’s your data about your own health; why shouldn’t you own and control it?”
(This is an issue Ms. Mayer first wrote about in February. The objective of Google Health is to harness the power of the Internet to put users in control of their own medical records. Data will stay with you — “if you change doctors, want a second opinion, if you’re traveling — and not stay siloed or stuck in files or databases that you can’t get to,” she said. Google Health was today with several partners and third party services already integrated and include CVS, Walgreens, Quest Diagnostics and Longs Drugs.
To avoid public ouutcry, Google has put strong privacy policies in place to keep the information safe and private. (I found the controls so strong that I was not able to access any of my date stored on partner’s websites, for lack of a “pin” controlled by my physician gatekeepers who were totally unaware of the program. Ms. Mayer recognizes that “there’s a lot left to do in health — literally thousands of partnerships to forge and petabytes of data to move around”. She says that Google is looking forward to hearing feedback from early Google Health adopters about this first step. I’m guessing that they will get a lot of it.
You can see the webcast here.
The information provided on Google’s blog is tantalizing, but rather than “opening the kimono” where all is revealed, it’s more like hiking a floor-length kimono up eight or ten inches. Nice, but you want to see more.
Filed under: David Sarna, Google, Google Advanced Image Search, Google Health Tagged: | CVS, David Sarna, Google Advanced Inage Search, Google earth, Google Health, Google Maps, Longs Drugs, Marissa Mayer, Quest Diagnostics, R. J. Pittman, user intent, Walgreens
