Google Dreams Big

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Google Dreams Big
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 15:10:13 -0500
From: Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>
To: Dave <dave () farber net>, Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>

http://htdaw.blogsource.com/post.mhtml?post_id=269916
[Links at the site]
Google - Don't Dream It, Be It
Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 3:08 PM EST
In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power
Google is hosting an analyst day today. I found skimming the 94 slide
presentation (PPT, PDF alternative) to be interesting and worthwhile.

In particular, I liked slide 19, 20, and 31, all of which makes it clear
that Google isn't losing its wide-eyed optimism.

Slide 31 says that Google's philosophy to new product development is "no
constraints" and that they initially ignore "CPU power, storage,
bandwidth, and monetization."

Slide 20 says (in the notes) that Google plans to "get all the worlds
information, not just some."

And slide 19 (in the notes) talks about how their work is inspired by
the idea of "a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power."
They say that "the experience should really be instantaneous". They say
that they should be able to "house all user files, including: emails,
web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from
anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)" which leads to a world where
"the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your
local-machine copy serves more like a cache". And, they say that they
want "transparent personalization" that uses user "data to transparently
optimize the user's experience ... implicitly."

Google also recommits to a future with personalized search. They say in
the notes on slide 12 that they will "introduce new personalization
elements" and that they view that as one of two major directions for
their efforts to improve relevance rank.

Some might be inclined to dismiss all this talk as the wild fantasies of
engineers with too much caffeine, but I think Google does see their
ability to build out their massive cluster as one of their primary
competitive advantages. I think they do intend to continuing extending
their computing infrastructure until everyone everywhere really does
feel that they have near infinite CPU power and storage at their
fingertips.

[link to presentation via Paul Kedrosky]

Update: It appears Google suddenly removed the PPT file. Ugh. Well,
sorry, but, unless you moved quickly, looks like there's no way to see
it anymore.

Update: Google just made a PDF version of the slides available.

Unfortunately, this new PDF version of the slides no longer has the
notes attached to each slide, so you can't see some of what I was
referring to in my comments above.

However, I did download the original PPT presentation. Though I didn't
keep a copy, I recently discovered that my Google Desktop cache does
contain a text-only copy of notes for slide 12 and most of slide 19. The
cached copy ends in the middle of the notes for slide 19.

Here are the notes from slide 12 with the reference to using
personalized search to improve relevance rank:
        Lead in Search
        As the market leader, we need to ensure search doesn't become a
        commodity. Our focus on search is nothing new. We built our
        brand on being the best search engine, with the best results,
        and as our competitors have caught up to us, it's become even
        more important for us to focus on:
        1) Speed
        Solve international speed issues and bring international users
        to US performance
        2) Comprehensiveness and freshness
        "All webpages included in the Google index and searched all the
        time" -- Teragoogle makes this possible
        Expand to other sources of data
        Become the leader in geo search (any search with a geographic
        component).
        New forms of content -- video, audio, offline printed materials
        3) Relevance
        Leverage implicit and explicit user feedback to improve popular
        and nav queries
        Introduce new personalization elements
        4) User Interface
        Experiment with several new UI features to make the user
        experience better
And here are part of the notes from slide 19. Unfortunately, my cached
copy ends right before the discussion of "transparent personalization"
that I mentioned above:
        In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power,
        here's what we could do with consumer products --
        Theme 1: Speed
        Seems simple, but should not be overlooked because impact is
        huge. Users don't realize how slow things are until they get
        something faster.
        Users assume it takes time for a webpage to load, but the
        experience should really be instantaneous.
        Gmail started to do this for webmail, but that's just a small
        first step. Infinite bandwidth will make this a reality for all
        applications.
        Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data
        With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including:
        emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it
        accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).
        We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive,
        GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage
        constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on
        server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather
        than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will
        help us make the client less important (thin client, thick
        server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and
        is also of great value to the user.
        As we move toward the "Store 100%" reality, the online copy of
        your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine
        copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this
        theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it
        would be on your own machine.
        Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100%
        of a user's data makes each piece of data more valuable because
        it can be access across applications. For example: a user's
        Orkut profile has more value when it's accessible from Gmail (as
        addressbook), Lighthouse (as access lis... [...TRUNCATED...]
Update: Derrick made the full notes for slide 19 available in the
comments to this post.

posted by Greg Linden at 3:00 PM

http://tinyurl.com/mflug




-- 
"The people who still support George Bush are the same people who
believe Adam and Eve rode to church on the backs of dinosaurs". -  SNL



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