Peter Morville – the Future of Search from Interaction 10

An interesting presentation of the nature and future of Search from Peter Morville at Interaction 10.

[Vimeo 9687950]

Here are the slides from the talk:

Morville is a long-time writer on all things Information Architecture – and is the author/co-author of 3 books: Information for the World Wide Web (3rd ed), Ambient Findability, and Search Patterns: Design for Discovery, upon which this talk is based.

More information on the Search Patterns book can be found at the searchpatterns.org website.

glenn

Innovation at Google

So this weekend for me was, in part, devoted to exploring innovation at Google. I found several educational gems that I will reference in this post.

Innovation at Google – Alfred Spector

A very informative lecture given on Innovation at Google give by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google, in January 2009 at Berkeley’s Engineering School.

Spector talks about both the cultural aspects that promote innovation at Google, as well as some of the available infrastructure and approaches that enable Google to innovate as quickly and consistently as they do.

Innovation at Google – Jeff Dean and Amit Singhal

Here’s a video more focused on technical innovation at Google in which Alfred Spector interviews Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Amit Singhal – where they discuss the challenges Search Quality and Large-Scale Search Infrastructure considerations.

Innovation at Google – Hal Varian

Finally, focusing more on business innovation, a couple of very interesting talks from Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. The first is a podcast from McKinsey Quarterly in which Varian new models for innovation that the Web economy provides (more on this below).

The video of Varian’s second talk is provided below, this talk delivered in Brussels in June 2009:

This is a truly fascinating talk which echos Varian’s comments in the podcast above. Oh, BTW, here’s a link to the slide presentation of Varian’s talk.

The idea I find most compelling in Varian’s two talks is what Varian calls “combinatorial innovation”, the idea that a set of technologies can be combined and recombined to create new innovations. Varian provides examples of combinatorial innovation from previous innovation waves in history including:

• 1800: Interchangable mechanical parts (for example, in gunmaking
• 1900: Gasoline engine
• 1960: Integrated circuits
• 1995-now: Internet

Of course, Google is one of the key suppliers of the digital interchangeable parts on the web, in the form of its APIs, development platforms, and hosted operating environments.

I should also mention that one of Varion’s key roles at Google is broad oversight for Google’s Ad Auction algorithms. Please see the video below for an overview of how Google prices its search ads:

In Summary

Food for thought for anyone interested in the culture and conditions for supporting business innovation in today’s economy.

glenn

Google Search Event 2009 – video

Here’s a video of the Google Search Event 2009 keynote held on December 7th of this year:

One of the new capabilities/features Google announced at this event is Real-Time Search. Here’s a brief video:

As Google fellow Amit Singhal says,

Google Real Time Search is Google’s Relevance technology meeting the Real-time Web … and Relevance is the foundation of this product.

For more on Relevance technology at Google, see the blog post Introduction to Google Ranking. For additional coverage of Google’s real-time search announcement, see here and here. For an excellent overview of the presentation, please see Danny Sullivan’s post live-blogging the event.

glenn

Web Search at The Guardian’s website

Ho hum. Just more great material from The Guardian’s Martin Belam. With the rise of Google, Search has become a cornerstone of the Web. Here’s Belam’s archive of all things Search at The Guardian.

There’s a whack of good content here.

glenn

Future of Search at Google

Google recently (in May 2009) held its Searchology 2009 event, where they present the future of Search from Google’s unique vantage point.

You can find a couple write-ups on the event from ReadWriteWeb and the Google Blog Scoped site.

The slides from the presentation (in a kind of weird format) can be found here.

glenn