In a series of in-depth interviews, Google executives, designers and researchers provided TIME the clearest picture yet of the company’s plan to transform itself in the coming years. For Google, which will make an estimated $44 billion from search ads alone in 2015, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Every user need they can fulfill through their services is one less query being fed into the Google search box, and often, one fewer set of ads enticing users to click to destinations elsewhere. These companies view assistants as the way to control the cars, homes and other connected devices of the future. Facebook has M, a digital assistant accessible through its Messenger mobile app. Amazon has released a smart home appliance called Echo that sits in your living room and awaits voice commands. Microsoft’s Cortana is an integral part of its new operating system, Windows 10. Apple’s Siri is likely the most famous competitor, automatically installed on hundreds of millions of iPhones and this year migrating to the Apple Watch and Apple TV. If Google doesn’t figure out how to make the perfect virtual assistant, another tech company will. The company’s hope is that, together, this transforms the concept of “Googling” from something that happens via a static search bar into a kind of ongoing conversation with an omniscient assistant, ready to step in and fulfill any request-even ones you haven’t thought about yet. It is accessible in two closely related products bundled in the company’s mobile app: voice search, which lets users speak their questions instead of typing them, and Google Now, a predictive service that shows users vital information before they actually go searching for it. The solution starting to take shape is a brew of Google’s myriad Internet services, ambitious artificial intelligence and massive troves of user data. Google plans to plug its software into all these devices-and many more-so it has begun to systematically rethink the way it presents results to users. And they’re impossible to implement safely in a moving car. They’re an impractical annoyance on a smart watch or smart television. Google’s traditional search result listings, against which it serves ads to generate much of its revenue, are less than ideal to scroll through on a smartphone. While is not going anywhere, the difficulty for Google is that the way we access information is undergoing its most fundamental shift since we were first introduced to ten blue links in 1998. “We are having to start from scratch again.” “Mobile has actually made us very vulnerable in that sense because the future is nowhere close to what we earned on desktop over ten, 12 years of hard work,” he says, sitting in the company’s Mountain View, Calif. In person, Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president in charge of all search-related products, acknowledges that the shift also brings unprecedented challenges for the company. In the post, Google called the shift a “ tremendous opportunity.” Google wrote the first line of the website’s elegy in a May blog post announcing that mobile searches had surpassed desktop searches in at least ten countries, including the company’s biggest market, the United States. And it created a new verb at the same time it destroyed the need to remember all kinds of basic minutiae, like state capitals, website URLs or the definition of the word “minutiae.”īut, with more and more of our time online being spent far away from desktop computers, the website’s days as the central focus of its parent company have come to an end. For years, it was the core moneymaker for what has become the most valuable Internet company of all time. For years, it was the entryway to the World Wide Web for millions of people every single day. The technology giant faces the biggest shift since its founding
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |