Slashdot Mirror
1-800-Google Launches
The Webguy wrote to mention a C|Net article talking about Google's newest toy - Local Voice Search. The service is dirt simple: you call a 1-800 number and, via voice recognition software, say the category of business you're trying to reach. You can also try for a specific name, though the C|Net blogger had some problems with that. The Google Blog has been updated with details as well: "Google Voice Local Search lets you search for local businesses from any phone and for free. If you're in the US, call 1-800-GOOG-411 and say what you want to find. Here are some of the features -You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example. You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS. The service is fully automated, so it doesn't rely on human operators. It connects you directly to the business, free of charge."
"Nookie."
I am not left-handed, either!
Finally there is an easy way of calling 911!
It's impressive to think the resources it would take to run this service. I wonder what software they use to do the voice recognition.
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
I wonder if it recognizes "Escort Services".
*sigh* who am I kidding?
Why? Doesn't Google do enough? Is anybody but me reminded of the dot-com boom? Big companies doing too much at once, gaining money/people at an alarming rate, and then inevitably crashing and burning. With every "BETA" they release I get more and more afraid one day I'll go to open my GMail and get a "Google has gone into Chapter 11" message or some such.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
.... just how does Google plan to make money from this? Sure it takes away business from traditional directory based searches, but I still fail to see how the cash that those services would get end up in Google's pocket. I'm sure that if I'm missing something that /.'ers will point out what that something is.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
It's their answer to Microsoft's acquisition of TellMe. (1-800-555-TELL). Presumably, like TellMe, after a while they will add ads.
Well, one idea is that they could sell what company shows up first in your area when you ask for "Pizza." That ought to be worth a lot.
sure. you pay to have your business listed preferentially.
If no business is preferential or there is a "tie" then the user gets a short voice advert "while we find your numbers" and gets connected.
On a related note I got bored/frustrated with Delta airlines automated attendant some time ago and had lots of fun. Got into a sorta dialogue with the blasted thing then managed to end up in some sort of maintenance mode. Couldn't change any settings (required password, lord knows I tried) but I could monitor status.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I see it as a way for them to know what people are searching for, just like their google search engine. You'd be surprised to know how much that sort of information can be worth to companies.
Well, I've been able to reverse engineer about 80% of their business plan:
...
1. Launch effective and popular online search tools
2. Make money off of ads surrounding online search tools
3. Launch phone-based search tools
4.
5. Profit!
(No, but seriously, they'll probably get kickbacks from the phone companies for sms messages, or listed companies will have to pay for each time a searcher gets connected to them or something)
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Does this sign you up for phone spam?
Chances are the money will come from ads you'll either hear when waiting for a response (if there is a wait time), or from 'text ads' when you receive results via SMS.
Results: Tom Nook, The Nookie
To me, it sounds like they are planning a slow takeover of VoIP by offering tidbits of functionality here and there, to regroup them all in the future as a mega-package...
Maybe the companies that they promote will pay some amount for every call?
Or a percentage of the purchases that Google refers?
Or even pay a premium to be on top of the results list?
This would all be very easy to track, and it could be the reason that this specifically only focuses on businesses.
.... just how does Google plan to make money from this? Sure it takes away business from traditional directory based searches, but I still fail to see how the cash that those services would get end up in Google's pocket. I'm sure that if I'm missing something that
.... just how does Google plan to make money from this? Sure it takes away business from traditional directory based searches, but I still fail to see how the cash that those services would get end up in Google's pocket. I'm sure that if I'm missing something thatThis is what an existing service does (1-800-FREE-411) where after you give 'em all the information, you hear a short ad, and then are given the option of connection to that advertiser
P.S. Bummer Google didn't release this on April 1st ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Once people start using the service, it becomes fairly easy for Google to charge for placement within the results page, or even listings in general. If 1800GOOG411 becomes some sort of phenomenon, it'd be a cash cow to charge businesses something a month like the yellow pages...
I think it's been pretty clearly established by now that Google is not very concerned about the short term money-making prospects of most of the products that it launches. In the long term, ads can be added to anything, and there is probably even some less-tangible value to running a free service that people like and use. Besides, this was probably a 20% project that a handful of people got together and created in their free time--there's little to lose even if it turns out to be a catastrophic failure.
There are so many threads lately where everybody whines about software companies that can't see anything other than the bottom line, even if it means getting sub-par workers to do a sub-par job. This is the other end of the spectrum, which is presumably what we'd all like to see more of. Why should you insist on questioning or worrying about what the short-term bottom line is? Given their earnings history, I'm plenty confident that Google is worrying about the money in the places it actually matters.
Not releasing products & changing the world.
If you can do it well and get enough people using it, running a business directory is basically a license to print money; the number of upsells you can add for the businesses to buy is staggering, and they will buy.
So all I have to do is come up with the perfect description for the number I want to call, and I get toll-free access to any number "local" to me?
Anyone else see some holes with this?
Payphone?
My internet browser heard us saying the word Fry and it found a movie about Philip J. Fry for us. It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some french fries.
Prof. Hubert Farnsworth
I'm feeling lucky
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Google also recognized the term "brewpub", and located my favorite one, too! :-)
Sadly, they didn't understand my search for, "beer and hookers." But my search for "prostitites" in Scottsdale resulted in a response of, "We didn't find any exact matches, but here are a couple that come close ..." I got a kick out of the fourth listing they provided, which was for the Alliance Defense Fund,. . . (no joke ;-)
An an unrelated note, if all of use call this number tonight, do you think it might be a first to "slashdot" a telephone? ;-) If we can slashdot Google's number, we should have CowboyNeal post a Telemarketer of the Week's number on slashdot ... try to bring down some truly useless and evil people,... :-)
I noticed the service automatically connects you to the business. Does this mean that Google pays if you are transferred to a long-distance number (i.e. since your call is actually connected to 800-goog411)?
If you don't know what Cmd-Shift-1 and Cmd-Shift-2 are for, GTF..
oh wait, wrong troll.
Been playing with it and it responds to zip codes for better results than with cities and states.
Well, the way I understand it, businesses would pay to be the first on the list. I'm sure than in any given suburb/city/whatever there will be more than 1 cafe, more than 1 pizza delivery. A list will ALL those businesses wouldn't fit in one SMS, or one hundred, so how does Google know which ones to send/show? Money from those businesses!
I have a friend who works at Amazon who told me that most of their profit is from selling their sales data, not from the sale itself. Selling on the internet has razor-thin margins for produces, but due to its size Amazon gets high quality marketing data that companies will pay a premium for.
Here is how I believe Google will profit from this. Let me first state that I love Google, and this service sounds cool. This will be paid for by chain stores and corporations that will pay google for preferential redirecting. For instance, if you say 'Pizza' with no name, you might get directed toward your local Papa Johns instead of the closer Domino's. Hell, if Google can get away with it, it could take payments from both Domino's and Papa Johns at the same time, maybe a 50/50 random chance deal.
The advertising potential for this is huge. Don't forget, thats how Google makes its money.
When i asked for it to find porn in Oklahoma, it gave me the first three results:
1. First Christian Church
2. The local police department
3. Animal Control
Maybe it's just not the same as the real google.
"...just how does Google plan to make money from this?" Volume.
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. -Dave Barry
Seems very much like 800-FREE-411 but hopefully without the ads?
Possible motivations for Google:
1. Further promote Google's value and brand in the minds of consumers and business owners alike. This is following in the same vein as the Google Local Business Center's completely free coupons that you can create for your business to appear on Google Maps. Call it good PR.
2. Statistics. Useful not only to them, but to local business owners. Again, develops brand loyalty and is good PR.
3. As part and parcel of 1 and 2, they hope that some of these local business owners will later purchase normal ads on Google.
In short, even if the added revenue from 3 doesn't completely offset the cost of running this service, 1 and 2 add value in ways that are hard to directly quantify in monetary terms. Though I suspect they will indeed make more (regular Adwords/Adsense) revenue as a direct result of this service's availability than it costs to run it. The usual exorbitant $1.25 per 411 call is not even close to what it costs to run such a service (especially without human operators).
4. Don't be evil. And while you're at it, if you can take out a few of the other evildoers out there, all the better! Google has taken the lessons of "disruptive technology" to heart, and it's worked for them time and again.
As usual, Google wins by not being overly (or at least overtly) greedy. It's for this reason that I doubt we'll ever hear paid ads or purchased placement when calling the service.
Dear aunt, set that double the killer select all
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Google uses Nuance Communications' speech recognition engine. Even though Google has hired a few folks from Nuance a while ago, it is NOT using homebrew technology, at least not as far as the engine is concerned. And even if Google had planned to build their own engine (they have no good reason to, really), it would have taken longer than a couple of years and much more than a handful of ex-Nuance engineers to be able to come up with a competitive speech reco engine -- the entry bar is high, even for Google. But like I said: Google has no good reason to re-invente the well -- it would have been just ridiculous; heck, if they seriously wanted to own the engine, they could have bought Nuance (the pre-merger Nuance, not the merged-with-Scansoft Nuance) with their pocket change.
Google wouldn't do that unless they were desperate (provided they play by their current rules). After all, if they gave you some pizzeria that was all the way across town, that wouldn't be very useful so people wouldn't use the service.
It recognized everything, even in my son's nasaly, five year old voice which I tested. Even when mumbling it still worked, and it worked quickly. The sounds were entertaining, and the computer's voice was clear. I searched under the most random keywords. If you want a restaurant that makes good chicken, then you say chicken, and it comes up with those restaurants. I can see this being very useful. Hell, if it becomes more popular, they could implement entering in a street name or intersection feature so that you can locate the closest ones. It is a cheap alternative to using a GPS that has this function built in, for that is all I use my old GPS for. Looks like I won't have to upgrade it now. The only problem was that it had a hard time pronouncing some words, like original. I hope to use this service a lot in the future.
when i searched for pizza in my town, i got the same buisiness twice in a row as the top two results. they were also my favorite buisinesses
anyone hear the weird squiggle thing? its funny
i'm guessing that they would probably put ads as your search is being done.
Maybe they will charge businesses to get a preferred find? for example, if you say 'pizza' domino's would come before pizza hut because domino's paid google money for that?
YAY the 411 racket is no more!
They're using their grammar skills there.
"free of charge..." to users
It's the "Yellow Pages" business model:
paid ads, free to users. Bigger ads cost more.
The "biggest" ad is the one heard first. Adwords-like pricing (ie bid-for-placement). It's harder to skim audio than text, so ranking might be even more valuable in this medium...
No need for "pure" search results, since users seek by known-categories, for a commercial service. Just like Overture, before they got killed by Google.
I like that.
If pay-for-position gets in the way of most-relevant-results, then it ain't google. Google's appeal on the user side has always been best results on clean pages. If they lose that, the service will tank.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
It's pretty obvious - if Google connects you through to the business you choose, then that business will ertainly pay through the nose for the privilege.
[FUCK BETA]
...
*Bing!* "White House Operator. How may I direct your call?"
Man, I *wish* that still worked.
Just to pick nits, Overture is still very much in the game. They're still generating a few billion dollars a year for the company that acquired them, Yahoo. It's certainly fair to say that Google is pulling ahead in that race, but nobody's been killed yet.
The question then becomes how they indicate that it is a sponsored listing. I would hope they would notify you in some way that the person at the top PAID to get there rather than being the most relevant.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You're probably right, but the phone charges (especially from pay phones) mean that this will cost them more than most other 20% projects that just use a small amount of server space and bandwidth.
Anyone else think the voice is creepy? It's more realistic than other automated voice systems, but still doesn't sound human. Maybe they hit the uncanny valley.
The voice was a guy though; perhaps that's what I think is wrong. All the other automated voices I've heard (local transit system, 1-800-free-411, etc; have all used female voices. Perhaps the softness of a female voice helps gloss over the realism flaws in the voice?
How to hear the contextual ads?
"I'm sorry, there were no direct results. Here are some related results:
Number One: Federal Bureau of Investigation"
yay Rochester, NY.
Well, obviously it's going to take some time for them to work out the bugs. I asked for a place to get a hamburger. It thought I wanted to be connected to the library.
Heard any good sigs lately?
Supposedly Google has a lot of smart people employed that developed the voice recognition system from scratch. Once they get it out there and the public becomes aware of the technology maybe they plan to market it as a voice menu replacement. It appears to be much improved compared to the existing phone menu systems most other companies use. A friendlier phone menu system could cut down on costs and probably customer hostility as well. Companies will be all over this.
http://slashdot.org/comments.
I didn't articulate it, but I meant that Overture's business model got killed (ie, of listing paid results only, by position - with no search results at all). I believe that Yahoo now uses Overture's technology in the same business model as Google (ie, paid-by-position results alongside pure search results). Interestingly, "paid results alone" may be superior to "search + paid results" for a phone service - ie, Overture's business model may be revived here.
Google wouldn't do that unless they were desperate (provided they play by their current rules). After all, if they gave you some pizzeria that was all the way across town, that wouldn't be very useful so people wouldn't use the service.
OTOH, if you live in a college town it's not impossible (or unlikely) that there will be three or more pizza places within a couple of blocks, let alone a couple of miles.
Twenties Retirement
I wonder if anyone has tried to use this service from a pay phone. If it connects you automatically, then the call should be free, right? ...I get blasted at the bar, lose my cell phone, need to call a cab....damn! no quarters. As long as I can remember goog-411 and the voice recognition software can recognize my slurring 'taxi' I should be OK.
I realize nobody uses pay phones anymore, but as soon as I find one, I'm gonna give it a shot.
Google should add a 'I'm feeling lucky' option to the service, which would automatically dial the top-rated business for that category. That would be really exciting, especially if you're searching for something like 'escorts' and it dials the PD.
They'll also have a de-facto archive of everyone's voice who uses the service--something to think about later when Google or some other search engine company that might later buy Google's entire assets invents a voice-to-person analysis engine based on a small voice snippet. That's much more identifiable (and therefore valuable for targeted marketing) than just an IP address or even a computer ID obtained from a cookie.
(Convince me otherwise that they aren't logging or recording the voice samples instead of just converting the speech to text and then dumping the voice samples.)
Goog411 has been useful already - to locate coffeehouses in Philadelphia that I had not known about.
-- John S. James www.RepliCounts.org
Do you think the "don't be evil" crowd has any idea that they're acting like Wal-Mart here? They're not just shutting down the phone carriers' 411 charges, they're also trying to cut into the market for 1-800-free411, a legit small business. Actually, come to think of it, Goog-411 only has business information, and doesn't have live customer assistance, as 1-800-Free411 has. Free 411 also has category search now, so as things compare, I don't think Google has the better service.
What you've described is how AdWords (and AdSense) works. In both, the amount the advertiser is willing to pay is taken into consideration, so higher pay can lead to higher placement. At the same time, relevancy of the ad, and of the target page, is also taken into consideration. Both variables are multiplied by some coefficients, and the resulting score is how ads are placed. So the top ad in any box of AdWords is probably more relevant, or at higher cost to the advertiser (or both), than the #2 spot.
Google's normal organic results, of course, are a different story. Helpfully, Google pretty clearly labels which results on a page are organic, and which are pay-per-click. Hopefully, the 411 service will do the same (make it clear which results are ads and which are not).
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.