Neat Tricks

Google rolled out some new crap-o-la at their annual Media Day today.

One neat tool -- Google Trends. It takes charts styled after Google Finance, and shows you trends in the volume of specific search terms over time.

So, for example, we can see that searches for Kobe Bryant have spiked significantly three times since 2004 -- once when he scored 81 points, once when the prosecutor in his rape case dropped the charges, and once in an unattributed spike. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it might have had something to do with a hotel clerk in a certain Colorado hotel room. Just guessing.

Sadly, there is no trend information on this...

In other Google news from Media Day (comments/changes are mine):

Google announced Wednesday that new features will let ordinary people influence (yeah, right, I'll tell my mom) its famously secret search algorithms, as well as see what the entire world is searching for at any given moment.

That new openness became a theme of the day at its Mountain View headquarters, where executives used product announcements and vision statements to argue that the juggernaut can still be friendly (Do No Evil was so pre-IPO).

``The goal of our team is greater transparency,'' said chief spokesman Elliot Schrage. He vowed Google will be ``more open about what we are doing and what we aren't.''

What Google isn't trying to do is be the next Microsoft (sluggish stock) or eBay (spending $2.4 billion on Skype), said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt (rich fella). It was a peaceful message perhaps crafted to calm industry fears that the growing search giant will soon focus its energy on desktop software and online marketplaces get journalists like this to write fluff pieces.

What Google is doing, executives said, is solving new problems in new ways, while maintaining supremacy in search. According to researcher Nielsen//Netratings, about one out of every two U.S. Internet searches goes through Google (holy crap), versus one out of five through Yahoo (get your act together) and one out of ten through MSN (why try?).

Google is hoping to lengthen that lead by incorporating feedback through a method called labeling printing money, which allows users and Web site owners to influence some search results. Fans of a Web site can label it with information that alerts others to its specific usefulness -- for instance, adding a ``side effects'' label to a site about penicillin. The practice is already underway at Yahoo, which encourages people to tag sites so they can be easily found by others on a similar search (this sounds like two completely different things, but what the hell do I know).

Yahoo calls the results of such tagging and sharing ``My Web.' collecting more personal info, bundling it into useful packages, and then selling it to the highest bidder. The results can be reached by clicking on a link on Yahoo's home page. Google calls it's equivalent the ``Google Co-op'' collecting more personal info, bundling it into useful packages, and then selling it to the highest bidder, and directs users to www.google.com/coop http://finance.google.com/finance?q=GOOG.

What both search engines are trying to do is get users to help computers better understand the relevance of certain Web pages, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research (apparently the only analyst at Forrester Research). For example, a page about diabetes could be about symptoms or treatment (or warnings not to eat 6 Kit-Kats in one sitting).

``This is about them building more intelligence into the rankings,'' Li said.

Google said people who participate will be rewarded because they will improve search results for themselves and everyone else (it all $eem$ so innocent).

The four-hour presentation, made in the company's cafeteria, was devoid of splashy effects (strippers, kegs, etc.). A WiFi network for Google guests locked out the crowd of more than 100 journalists, to the embarrassment of executives who said the malfunction was not on purpose.

Despite Google's focus on search making money -- Schmidt said he expects that to be its core business well into the future -- the company continues to roll out free browser-based applications that allow people to do things like write documents, track appointments and organize e-mail without launching Microsoft computer programs (you mean besides MY ENTIRE OPERATIING SYSTEM -- it's called WINDOWS).

On Wednesday, Google debuted an application it calls the ``Google notebook'' that allows people to easily copy snippets of information they find online, similar to a feature included in Microsoft's toolbar (note to self -- this sounds really useless).

If that's not enough, Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management (rich dude), offered on Wednesday ``the keys to the zeitgeist,'' a new program known as Google trends (covered above). The program, available at www.google.com/trends, shows the location where people search most for ``Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream'' (Salt Lake City), as well as virtually any other term of modest popularity (which would explain the lack of results for "Michael Shafrir") that is typed into the search engine anywhere in the world.

In an admission that appeared to be part of the new spirit of openness unplanned, unauthorized, and likely caused by alcohol, Schmidt said the freedom of Google engineers to pursue such quixotic products had caused the company's focus to slip a bit.

He said the company's engineers are supposed to spend 70 percent of their time on technology related to search and advertising, but they did not reach that goal in recent months, as the company has unveiled products as diverse useless as a online calendar and a 3-D sketching service.

Schmidt said the company's ``many different teams and many initiatives'' had begun ``to run into each other made it diffcult to remember everyone's name.

In a candid (pants optional) interview with a handful of journalists, Google co-founder Larry Page said disorganization is a hallmark of the company's culture but that recently it had increased (so, it's a hallmark, but not like, too much, you know, cause then it's like, difficult to manage).

But neither Page nor Schmidt appeared worried (Page is worth something like $8 billion dollars, just so we're clear). ``We have the luxury of time now to expand our product offerings using this innovative model,'' Schmidt said.

Looking into the future, Schmidt said he believed that giant information companies (oooh, what does one look like I wonder) would likely be built using the information Google had aggregated. ``How far can this go?'' he asked. ``This is not going to stop.'' (and with that, a raucous cheer rang out from the Googleplex!)