Friday, December 12, 2008

LeWeb08-Google's Mayer tips Local Search as key opportunity for 2009


PARIS-Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product & User Experience at Google, gave an insightful view on various challenges facing both Google and its competitors in terms of Search.

Marissa pointed out that there is still some way to go to improve search (harking back to a previous interview she had given where she had stated that 90% of the work on search has been completed but that the last 10% was the tricky part).

One area where Google is looking to improve its game is in personalised search, with the recent launch of the Google Search Wiki seeking to test the waters in this area.

Another area, is search through devices other than the PC, notably through a mobile phone and, linked to this,voice-activated search.

Loic le Meur asked Marissa whether she thought any improvements in video search were in the pipeline. She answered that improvements are imminent in detecting voice within video and searching on this. However, graphic recognition (e.g.of a face in a video) is still a few years away partly due to YouTube's success and the proliferation of video content on the web.

Finally, and critically for companies in the LBS space, Marissa stated that "local search is one of the big opportunities in 2009".