Google Open House report

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a Google Open House evening last night (thanks to Elspeth from CILIP Update) to talk about search. It was an interesting evening, for lots of reasons. The people at Google were very hospitable and courteous, as I'd have expected, but they were also very clearly in control. There's a particular section of the office that's for visitors and the sign 'Only Googlers past this point' was very clear. The room that we were in was designed like an open space, with carpet looking like grass and a nice little brick path, and images on the wall to emphasis this. Lots of bright primary colours, which again was to be expected.

The evening was with Amit Singhal, one of only 4 Google Fellows, and a senior search engineer. He's been with Google for 10 years and was doing search for another 10 prior to that. The audience was, to be honest, a strange mixture. Elspeth and I, someone from a small provincial newspaper, journalists from a computer magazine, someone from the BBC, and about a dozen others. I just guess that I'm used to being told at the beginning of a presentation if I can tweet, blog, record or whatever, but no. I also expect to be told 'this is where the presentation is on the net', but again, no. So, these are the scribbles that I took during the talk.

Amit wanted to give us a sense of what it takes to run a search engine, and his title was 'The science of search - thoughts on the perfect search engine'. So - what's a perfect search engine? The information that you need instantly. (Even at this point I wasn't really agreeing with him. A perfect search engine wouldn't give me 'information' it would take that information, filter, sieve it and collate it for me.) Amit talked about the dreams that he had many years ago, and took us through them one after another.

Dream #1 Search beyond text. We didn't know how to search for images and video, but that's now possible. Google's vision is to make information universally available (China anyone?) but also to actually create information where it hadn't been before, and he gave the example of Google street view.

Dream #2 Search beyond language. We had a demonstration of how Google can translate data into different languages.

Dream #3 Search that knows me. A search engine relevant to each person. The example given was "tea" which gives different results depending on the country version of Google used. The Google suggest option was also demonstrated as being geographically related. (I did want to point out that this isn't always very helpful, and that Google searches on a public computer will not be much use, but didn't get the chance to raise that.) Amit talked about how much Google knows about us, and pointed out that we control this via the Google profile/dashboard, is very transparent and we can opt out. He didn't mention how long Google retains our search history for which I found interesting.

Dream #4 Search the present moment. Time has shrunk between publishing and availability of data via search. "Anything available now is available in Google real time search" (except of course that it's not, and other search engines out there are doing better and more interesting things) We then had an interesting brief discussion on the position of news results on a page, which we get automatically. The example given was for the Mexico earthquake. The old news at the top of the page, with the more recent material further on down. The point was made that this wasn't the most helpful place to put it, and Amit admitted that it could be better placed on the page.

We then looked at the Timeline option. The point was made from the audience (not me this time) that the tweets that were being shown were tweets, and retweets, and this was simply noise. Amit really didn't want to talk about that, other than to say "our job is to distil relevance". He also said that Google is the only search engine to integrate real time search onto the search page. 

Dream #5 The Holy Grail. What do words mean? Simple examples were GM - General Motors or food related? A better example was 'change' - convert, exchange, upgrade, adjust, switch and so on. We then discussed algorythms for a while. "We don't introduce subjective opinion". (This is of course absolute, total nonsense. Google creates algorythms to provide better results for people. They're constantly changing and tweaking these in order to improve them. This by necessity means a subjective opinion.) Amit gave examples of where Google does manipulate results, or remove results, which isn't quite the same thing - malware, legal content, pornography appearing in safe searches.

He also talked about the Google calculator, Google goggles, translate, trends, images and so on. There was a great question regarding the results page. Someone said 'if you're personalising results, why can't you personalise the fact that I don't want to see images?' I was gobsmacked at the reply which was essentially 'We at Google think that images are important, and you'll want to see the ones we give you, even if you don't think you will'. In other words 'Google knows best'. Amit's dream for the future was search without search - that your mobile phone knows when you have time, what you want to do and basically takes over your life. This is apparently a good thing.

Amit was very nice, very interesting, enthusiastic and engaging. Unfortunately almost everything that he said was so bland as to be valueless. I could have given the talk better and more effectively, and so could you. It was a complete waste of time. He completely ignored the fact that Google is, at a very fundamental level, broken. I got to ask a few questions but since we had to be out at 8pm sharp there wasn't much time. It was however, enlightening. So, my concerns, questions and so on:

If you do a search for cat and dog you get different results to cat AND dog. The same goes for fish or chips and fish OR chips, and with that example, we're talking a difference of about 500 MILLION results. I think it's unrealistic to expect people to realise this. Amit basically said that it's a hangover from the past, and that it's my fault for knowing what I'm doing. He ignored the fact that OR gives a better and more accurate result than the lower case version. He said 'people like you forget we're refering to estimates'. While the search biking italy and biking and italy gives the number of results, the position of the results changes. He wasn't really interested in the fact that if you use capitals with search syntax you get different results, so Site:.ac.uk isn't the same as site:.ac.uk It wasn't until I said that it was a basic flaw that he agreed. He also didn't say that he'd do anything about it. 

A search for "your site here" returns a site in second place which has no use of the words on the page, and no anchor text pointing to it that contains the phrase either. What's it doing there? No idea.

There's another basic syntax problem site:.ac.uk uses the fullstop in order to work properly, yet if you try and do that with filetype:.pdf (which would be consistent) it doesn't work.

This is another fun one. dog and cat and puppy and kitten and frog gives one result; 253,000, but if we then exclude frog as in dog and cat and puppy and kitten -frog to reduce the number of results it INCREASES to 340,000. This isn't a minor issue, it's got nothing to do with estimated numbers. If you exclude words you should get a smaller number, not a larger one. This is basic, yet Google doesn't seem to care, or brushes it off as 'you need to remember we're talking about estimates'.

I did ask a few other questions - why is Google so bad at social media, what about Google Me and Google Games, to which I got 'I just do search.' Which is fair enough, except that he was keen to talk about social search when refering to real time.

It was a great opportunity to have an interesting conversation with one of the Google search experts. Unfortunately it was bland, meaningless 'isn't Google wonderful' rubbish. Bitterly disappointing. 

Comments

[Girl in the Moon]

Thanks for this report, Phil. We so often here and say that Google isn't the answer to everything, and it's good to have a chance to think about why not. Interesting juxtaposition of problems in what they apparently see as 'minutiae' (i.e. inconsistencies in search syntax) and also the bigger picture, e.g. personalised searching.

From your report Google come across as arrogant, both regarding the question about excluding images from results, and also in the earlier point you made regarding searching for 'tea'. I can imagine that this enforced personalisation might often, by a sort of luck, seem better to users than a search without it, but surely that doesn't mean that users who want to use the tool with more subtlety shouldn't be able to do so?

[Chris Lang]

Google is great at social media, you just need to know where to look.

Wave was mis-marketed to Facebook users that have no use for anything better than a text box and a submit button. But this is what the typical person want's just look at Twitter.

Google Buzz in not a failure around here, in fact it is kicking the butt of FB and TT and every other social site we have ever used. And we have 60,000 social followers in all.

But my 800 followers on Buzz love me, they participate heavily and they profit from that, finding new relationships in our conversations.

Take a look at this thread, some of the top industry experts have helped build this thread.

http://www.google.com/buzz/chrislang/QQnC1zHF1ct/WordPress-Sites-Under-Hacking-Attack-In-the-last-3

You see, it's not Google that is bad at social sites, it is social users don't know how to use them for more than a 140 character post.

It took me a while to get back in the mindset that Google Buzz is like a forum of 10 years ago. These are conversations, threaded, all in one place, discussions, an exchange of ideas.

When you look at Buzz like that it is very powerful. You just have to look farther than posting your Tweets there.

Hope that helps your outlook. Most don't even know this is going on and that is why Buzz is called a failure.

[M Jones]

Interesting post. I noted your comment that Google retains our search history which effects our search profile, it does this by placing cookies and I expected that once cookies are cleared the information should be deleted, but this may not be the case.