IndustryTeraGoogle, Google’s Social Search Aspirations & More From Accidentally Released Analyst Day Notes

TeraGoogle, Google's Social Search Aspirations & More From Accidentally Released Analyst Day Notes

Imagine Google "as ubiquitous as brushing your teeth." That’s how Google
would like you to think of them, at least according to

notations
accidentally released in their
Analyst Day
PowerPoint slides. Those notes also contain other interesting tidbits such as a
TeraGoogle project and plans for Google to expand with social search.

The PowerPoint faux pas — which had unspoken comments about everything from
AdSense margins to specific ad revenues — prompted Google to file a

Form 8-K
with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after the notes were
inadvertently left in the PowerPoint slides released to the public on March 2,
2006.

The slide notes make reference to how Google wants to be everything they can
possibly be to everyone, a one-stop-shop so to speak, for consumers and
advertisers. Comments like this included:

Think of Google "as ubiquitous as brushing your teeth."

Treat advertisers as full-fledged businesses with a broad set of needs (not
just advertising).

The notes made reference to additional offerings for advertisers, including
direct mail (something not previously associated with Google) as well as
previous moves into
print,
radio and
television
ads.

The notes also mentioned worries that "[Yahoo] and MSN will do un-economic
things to grow share" in regards to the ad network. In other words, both
companies might provide sweetheart deals to partners that might cost them money
in the short term, as a way to secure long-term gains.

Ironically, Google has done these same things in the past, namely paying more
to some AdSense partners than they actually earned from them. It came out during
their SEC filings in 2004 and Bambi Francisco
commented
on the special deals given to some partners:

Google didn’t disclose which of its distribution partners are getting that
"more than the revenue we receive" payment. But many analysts speculated that
some distribution partners were receiving 80 to 90 percent of the revenue
generated from the traffic they sent to Google’s advertisers. Now we know it’s
more than 100 percent in some cases.

The slides also gave a revenue projection for AdSense and margins, as covered
more
here
on my JenSense blog. In summary, Google said to expect advertising
revenues from AdSense partners to grow from $6 billion this year to $9.5 billion
next year.

The user interface in search was also discussed on several levels. The notes
mention, "Experiment with several new UI features to make the user experience
better." We have seen many of these interfaces being tested over the past year,
sometimes to the point of confusing searchers (see
here and
here), but
none of them have been locked down for a widespread release to users.

Google’s also looking at some type of
invisible
tabs
solution to expanding vertical search, meaning that users will see more
verticals but not more tabs. Notes from the slides included these references to
that:

For example, we need to provide unified search experience by integrating
multiple verticals & data sources through UI and ranking solutions

Add features, not properties and make it really easy to use

Guide users to help them search better

The notes also hint at the possibility of user interaction or a social aspect
being added to refine the Google search results, as well as leveraging implicit
and explicit user feedback to improve popular and navigationally-oriented
queries:

Encourage our large user base to actively contribute metadata that leads to
better search results

Wiki of search: empower users/experts to improve search results in their
domains of expertise ? create a million verticals

Effectively integrate user feedback (ratings, comments, tags) into search

Bringing a social aspect into the search results first began with the Google
Toolbar’s voting mechanism
back in 2001,
where users could click a smiling or frowning face to vote for or against a
particular web page. However, if this data was actually used for anything
internal was unknown. Of course, new personalization elements being introduced
is also mentioned, most significantly through recent
tagging,
results removing,
bookmarking
via the toolbar
and making personalize search more
mainstream.

Exactly how Google plans to integrate user data into the results is unclear,
other than through
Google Base
which especially depends on meta data. Social search, of course, has been a big
area that Yahoo has been
making inroads
on.

The Google notes also say the company wants to "expand to include other, new
information." Photos are named as part of that, meaning that Google might be
planning a competitive product to Flickr,
which is Yahoo’s photo community and makes heavy use of social tagging.

Lastly, the slide notes include references to the size of the Google search
index, including the bold statement of "Get all the worlds information, not just
some." There is also a mysterious reference to "teragoogle", which implies it is
an internal project Google is currently working on, in reference to "All
webpages included in the Google index and searched all the time", which the
teragoogle makes possible.

The edited PowerPoint slides can now be
downloaded in
PDF form
. The complete webcast (video & slides) can be viewed

here
.

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