This is the summary of an article by Claire Cain Miller. Here’s the link to the behavioral targeting article: Google, a Giant in Mobile Search, Seeks New Ways to Make It Pay.
During the beginning of the iPhone era, 2008, engineers from Google noticed that many iPhone users were searching the Web through their phones. This despite the fact that it was very difficult at that time to browse using a mobile device. For one, the screen is too small, and it was too hard to type on the mobile keyboards, not to mention web pages load slowly on these devices.
Google Mobile Search
In response, Google formed Grand Prix, a period of six weeks of mobile search revamping by Google engineers, and they came up with search through taking pictures or talking. With this new technology, Google was either coming up with a new way to gain more profit, or opening an avenue for other competitors to discredit the value of having a search engine altogether. It turns out that at present, mobile searches have increased 6 times since two years ago and Google’s market share for mobile searches is at a commanding 97 percent.
The success of Google mobile search parallels that of the sucess earlier obtained by Google’s web search. That’s why they are investing so much on resources trying to improve this, creating new applications such as instant translation of calls and recognizing pictures of objects, including clothes and plants.
The Future of Google
Google has been criticized for being slow to grab other business opportunities, but mobile search and other Google mobile applications is an exception as the company has adopted a mobile first policy to develop products both for the PC and mobile phones at the same time. The head of mobile advertising, Karim Temsamani, goes so far as to say that the future of Google is on mobile.
Google’s position in the mobile market is established, for now. The company needs to take advantage of this position and innovate and create mobile ads and mobile products. Google estimates that 1 billion dollars in revenue will be obtained next year for mobile.
Google Mobile Apps
For now, mobile users can use Google for a variety of applications, including taking pictures of movie posters and getting a trailer of that movie. Another application is called near-field communications, allowing advertisers to give out loyalty gifts to customers if they get inside their stores. Users can also do voice search, and translate English to Spanish or vice versa through spoken conversations. They can also use Google Goggles to snap pictures of wine labels, and landmarks to know more about them.
Google Mobile Ads
The downside of Google mobile ads is that they cost half the price of Google online ads, so there’s not much profit. Furthermore, the Android software is not for sale to mobile devices using them. Google approaches the market for mobiles in their typical fashion, by understanding that products out of application problems will make money eventually if they are useful to people. As such, the company provides massive computing power and data to computer scientists to create these products.
More Google Mobile Apps
Academic institutions support and marvel at Google’s capacity to create massive solutions to application problems using thier computing power and resources, that can then be utilized by the general public. For example, for voice search, Google actually had their computers listen to tons of voice recordings so that the accents and regional speech characteristics won’t matter at all in the mobile phone’s recognition.
Furthermore, Google trained voice search to filter unecessary words, much as you would when talking to someone. As it turns out, users are already fond of using keywords even when they’re speaking the search.
Goggles can recognize many objects, but if the differences are relatively subtle, like the picture of a black cat and a black chair, Goggle can’t recognize the difference and the Google engineers are still working on improving that technology. Furthermore, Google can already recognize faces, so this can be tied up to searching up one’s online profile for example. But this is still in the works as there are privacy concerns with this kind of technology.
Google can also snap pictures of a foreign language menu to translate it, and talk in English and hear what it’s Spanish translation is. The main goal of the machine translation group of Google is to translate phone conversations while they are going on.
Google search results online is different from that of mobile search. In mobile search, the location factor is added. For example, if you search for a particular store, mobile search will think that you are looking for the location of that store, whereas online search will think that you want to know about the job openings, etc.
Mobile search will continue to grow and will definitely be even more popular than desktop search, according to Scott Huffman who leads the search evaluation team of Google mobile search.
