The most powerful woman on the Internet…
With apologies to Meg Whitman, Marissa Meyer holds the title. At least today, anyway. Meyer is the VP of Search Products & User Experience for Google. She keynoted an event yesterday discussing the future of search – though really she was talking about the future of Google. While it’s likely that the search engine you use five years from now won’t be Google (or, at the very least, not the Google you’re using today), it’s well worth reading how Meyer sees that future unfolding.
Notable elements:
- 1800Goog411 – Voice-activated search. Very cool. Get ready for the age of device-independence.
- Universal Search – Elimination of the silos separating image search from news from web from whatever, and so on. It could overwhelm the typical user with the sheer volume of results. But, if the results could somehow know what’s most important to the user, maybe having video, text, images, news and the like about a single topic side-by-side would provide tremendous utility. Which brings us to…
- iGoogle – Personalized home page on Google, incorporating RSS feeds and widgets (which Google calls Gadgets). As search results get increasingly broad, iGoogle should enable Google to understand what you’re looking for specifically when you type in a term like “java” (tropical island, programming language, coffee?). If your Gadgets and RSS feeds indicate a preference for one item over another, then your search results will likely incorporate those preferences. Allows for more targeted advertising, too.
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[…] Sean Ammirati at Read/Write Web wrote up Google exec Sheryl Sandberg’s keynote at the Supernova conference in June about the “future of advertising” (around the same time that Marissa Meyer spoke about Google’s overall future). This relates pretty closely with a dialogue a colleague and I had recently regarding possible approaches to advertising and the merchandising of products going forward. Clearly, other folks must agree with this approach, given that AOL just announced it’s buying Tacoda. Advertising is increasingly less about interrupting folks while doing things that interest them and more about meeting a need at the appropriate time. My only issue is its presentation as "the future of advertising." William Gibson once said "the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed." Is the future Sandberg describes already in place for your competition? Is the future already here for you? […]
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