Google's strategy - connecting the dots - II

Continuing from my previous post, here I would delve upon, how these products/features impact Google and provide it an upper hand.
Given that, it would improve its search quality, an obvious result would be increased number of advertisers. But more importantly, it gives them more media to explore. They can now provide context-sensitive ads over video and audio. Think of it, if some of the channels on youtube have advertisements, related to any product which may be spoken about in the video, users may not be that bugged at all. Anyways a similar experiment of providing video ads, on text web search is running currently. Video ads surely mean, much higher revenues as compared to the text ads that it currently features. It has also started extending its Ad platform to TV, by partnering with NBC among others, extending the media that it can earn revenues from.

One of the highly awaited developments is in the desktop space, about Google's answer to Microsoft Office. It started off with an online version, and with Google Gears, it had made it available offline too. Now, there is a thin difference between keeping a document on my desktop and making it available over any other desktop. That too, without using any space over my disk. It will continuously be looking at exploiting the cloud computing space, with other products too. What does Chrome bring in? I believe, that it is more of a desktop environment or the first step towards an office suite or even an OS rather than a browser. Bold statement?Yes, I too feel so. But, then what it is trying to do, is letting the users get used to the environment where there is nothing called online or offline. When it asks you to make an application shortcut, it makes you feel that Google Docs is an application. With Google Gears visible in the settings, the next obvious feature is to allow you, to edit it on your local machine, if you are offline. If online, publish it onto the cloud (though this feature is still available with Gears, I believe, it would extend it across products and applications over the web, in some form). The absense of all the toolbars and menubars from those windows, is exactly to make you feel so. You should never feel that you are in a browser. And with its own V8 scripting, it is giving itself that flexibility to use this prototype for future moves. There was a time when analysts were speculating a network OS from Google. With its focus on cloud computing, and all its products inching towards that, I don't feel it is an impossibility. (And, do not believe when Google says, we don't want to do it. They said the same for a browser)

Disclaimer : Though many of you may be aware of these features and its consequences, it was meant to give a small insight into the bigger picture - "connecting the dots" as I call it. Also, many of these are personal inferences, and may not be an 'expert' view of the days to come :). Do let me know of any other products/service that you feel perfectly fits into its strategy and I missed it here.

PS: As an aside, check out how Google is desperately trying to increase usage of its App platform, through this contest :)

PPS: Why did this no-nonsense post seriosly pop up? 2 reasons - a)To commemorate 10 years of Google b)To remain in-line with my description in 'about me' (look rightwards), which has been reminded by some of my readers (and who, I assume, would appreciate the same in the comments section ;) )

Google's strategy - connecting the dots - I

Many of us have started using Google's new browser Chrome, being impressed by some of its features (which I still believe have been lifted from its rival browsers). But, what exactly is the story behind its investments into this already (seemingly) stable segment of browsers. I have been thinking of Google's strategic motives for long, and with the launch of new products and talks of few more, things are getting clearer. Let me explain.

Start with its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Most of us wrote it off as simply a way to say 'better search'. But they have been restating with every product launch of getting closer to this mission. With Marissa Mayer ans Susan Wojcicki posting constantly on their blog, about the next 10 years for Google, its obvious that they are not sitting quiet. In her post, Marissa speaks about how she would want the search engines to work upon the modes of search, media covered under them, personalization and language features to give a better user experience. When Google started with its GOOG-411, it was seen as a voice enabled search. But later they accepted that its a way to train its audio engines to recognize text withing audio. That learning may even have been incorporated in its GAudi, audio indexing feature. Now, it has added features for you to overlap captions on Youtube videos. I'm sure this is again a way to train its video engines, to 'learn'. One of the features that I was expecting Google to launch was face recognition. And here it is. This provides Google the power to train its algorithm to perfection (Anyone working on face recognition would agree that the larger the face base and the manual confirmation, the better would be the accuracy). Basically, it is employing YOU to check whether the algorithm is working fine or not. Not that their employees aren't trying. One of its patents talks about recognizing text directly in images, be it computer-generated or photographs (captured by its cameras for Street View) or a series of photographs (videos). Which means - given either an image, video or audio - and it has a way to find out information from it. Picture all of this put together. You give a search term,e.g.MacDonalds Mumbai. The search engine, of course can give you results from conventional text web(not only English language. Google is improving its translation tool to expand the number of languages that it can search, so pages of most of the languages are still available to you). It can also do it for any piece of audio (probably a jingle), or video (any MacD ad) which mentions the phrase. Any image on a website or photograph from someone's public album or an photo present in Google Maps(an image of the outlet) which contains that text is returned to you. For that matter, why should you even give a term. You could even give it some random image of a person whom you would wan't to find out (like the ones that we generally need in quizzes & puzzles) or some piece of audio, that you would want to know more about. I even believe that Google would have been working on the other facets of an audio, like distinguishing voices or finding out genres. May be useful, when you would want to find out who was the speaker in some speech that you have been hearing (or in the Indian context, which raaga does a particular Carnatic song belongs to) - it's nothing but identifying patterns. Isn't all this 'organizing world's information'? (Of course, analysts also spoke about extending it to barcodes, RFIDs and ISBNs and letting you know which product is available in which shops)

With its development in the mobile space, and providing access to all the features on the modern-phones, it is making sure that you need not wait till you reach your computer or internet to get the information. With its Android powered phone, Dream, launching just few days from now, it would want a better control of this all-important medium. Talking of personalization, there has already been a big hue and cry over the information that Google stores about its users. Using your past searches to find out whether you are wildlife enthusiast or a golf follower, would help its search engine to present appropriate results when you search for 'tiger US'. Similarly, given the location, especially, relevant for your mobile phone, it can provide you the local info accurately; when you say MacD, it would make sure that nearby outlets are presented to you. Isn't this "making info universally accessible and useful"?

This is about some of the obvious steps that it has taken in its homeground-search. For restraining the length of this post, I would be going ahead with its other revenue-centres in the next post.