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Google's Mayer Says Personalization is Key To Future Search
rsmiller510 writes "In a wide-ranging interview with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington on Wednesday at Le Web in Paris, Google's Marissa Mayer talked about all things Google, but what I found most interesting was when the conversation turned toward the future of search. Mayer said the key to the future of search lies in personalization. ... Mayer said in the future, Google (and presumably other search tools) will understand more about the user and be able to deliver more relevant information based on that knowledge. 'We think that when you look at the winning search engine in 2020 and what traits it's likely to have, we think the one thing that will be true is that it will understand more about you the user.'"
Video of the interview with Mayer is available at Tech Crunch. The personalization of search content focuses mainly on SearchWiki, which we discussed when it went live last month. The Register has a more cynical take on the discussion, seizing on comments by Mayer which indicated Google employees may evaluate SearchWiki's user ratings and use them to make "obvious changes" to search results for everyone.
How convenient. The future of search requires giving up libraries of congress worth of personal info, to advertising companies with a sideline in search.
links with actual information. NOT links to sell me shit!
You, the Google Search/Gmail/Chrome user are the "product". The advertisers are the "customer". The servies on offer are the "bait". It's the television model.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The future of Google is more data-mining of your private information. Fantastic. Please, bring on the bread and circus... I wonder when Google will delve into the "free" entertainment for your personal information business? GPorn? GPoker? GQuake? GWarcraft?
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
While a Personalized search is likely to give you results that would probably most interest you, it is also likely to exclude results that don't fit your "profile" but are relevant to what you are looking for.
So the search engine is always returning results it thinks you would like to see, but not results that you probably should see.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The future of search is not clogging every query result set with commercial links. You almost can't access legitimate information anymore, because every search returns advertisement after advertisement. It's almost to the point where you might as well go straight to wikipedia instead of bothering with Google.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
10 years on, and Google have a lot of data but are on the skids as a viable business. Imagine the US government offering to "help" by buying Google (and it's mountains of personal data) to "maintain stability". Imagine all Google's data being made available to every department of the US government for "national security" purposes; after all the war on terror will last a lifetime....right?
Many corporate events have happened which would have been unthinkable just a few years before the shit hit the fan. By the time it starts to crumble, people will start to wake up to the fact that Google knows a LOT more about them than they are comfy with.....specially if it can then be used by the government without any legal niceties like warrants, or even home / work / school visits.
I try to avoid Google as much as possible. I have done for a while, this story is just another reason not to change those habits.
no company should be worthy of complete trust
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
My wish is less ambitious than that. The search engine and indexer need to have a basic understanding of the query and the page content. When I search for, say, 'image viewer for Mac', I want pages that are about -- astonishingly enough -- an image viewer for Mac, not a page that happens to have all those words scattered through it. When I search for pages about a person named 'John Lee', I want pages that at least mention a person with that name, not pages about 'John Lee Hooker', or about companies that happen to have 'John Lee' in their name. Enough semantics to know that 'photo' will do as a substitute for 'image', for example, would be helpful as well.
(You listening, Google? I'm an ontologist / NLP developer; let's talk.)