Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
International search has also been a huge focus for Google over the past couple of years, with all languages targeted, not just the “major ones”. Azerbaijani has seen major improvements, a language spoken by 8 million people, while spell checking has been added to “Estonian, Catalan, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukranian, Bosnian, Latvian, Filipino Tagalog, Slovenian and Farsi” – with plenty of feedback solicited from users and multi-lingual volunteers.
New features and new user interfaces have also been a major focus, with the UI team “helped by a team of usability experts who conduct user studies and evaluate new features. They travel all over the world, and they even go to people's homes to see users in their natural habitat”, with Manber saying “Don't worry, they do not come unannounced or uninvited!”
Web spam and other web/search abuses are also being focused on, from “hidden text to off-topic pages stuffed with gibberish keywords, plus many other schemes that people use in an attempt to rank higher in our search results” – on an international basis.
Manber finishes by saying that: “One of the key things about search is that users' expectations grow rapidly. Tomorrow's queries will be much harder than today's queries.”
An interesting observation: “Just as Moore's law governs the doubling of computing speed every 18 months, there is a hidden unwritten law that doubles the complexity of our most difficult queries in a short time. This is impossible to measure precisely, but we all feel it.”
Manber promises that Google knows they “cannot rest on our laurels, we have to work hard to meet the challenge. As I mentioned earlier, we will continue providing you with updates on search quality in the coming months, so stay tuned.”
So, Google’s sneak peek into their operations shows their never ending quest to produce and provide ever smoother, nicer looking and ever more useful products for us all.
Manber made no mention of the much rumoured Google Backup tool, but it’s certainly been interesting to read about the inner workings of Google, something that has been quite mysterious to most of us whose main interactions with Google revolve around the search engine, email, news and images – amongst their many other products and services.
And it’s amazing to think that what pays for all of this is... advertising! Thank goodness for the free market, companies, business and capitalism.
Without it, the world’s most widely used Internet products and services to level the information playing field couldn’t exist – and what Government would fund it or could ever afford to?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
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