Busy week for Google

It's been quite a week for Google, a company known for keeping its name squarely in the news through unrelenting innovation. Google pioneered the idea of a "lab" to offer consumers a chance to experiment along with them. It is constantly trying new things, some as ambitious as Wave and others much smaller like Google Fast Flip. But this week was a big one, even for a company that keeps itself directly in the spotlight the way that Google does, as it came out with several major announcements. Let's take a look at some of these:

Google Goggles

Perhaps my favorite was Google Goggles, a brand new program designed for Android phone users that lets you take a picture of an object such as a landmark, book, painting or a business card using the phone's built-in camera. The program analyzes the data and then presents a set of results based on the analysis. What makes this so innovative is that it gives you a way to get information about something when you have little or no other context.

If you're staring at a monument and you have no idea what it's about, you could ask a local (if you know the language) or flip through your guide book, but even if you have a mobile phone with you, with Internet access, if you don't have enough information, you have no real way of finding details. By providing a means of visually analyzing a picture and returning a set of results, Google is entering new search technology territory, one which is highly innovative. Keep in mind these are early days for this technology, so it's probably hit or miss right now. But if they can pull this off, it will differentiate them in a big way from competitors trying to gain ground on them.

Real time search

Google also announced they would be incorporating Facebook and Twitter results into the search results stream, a step that should break the barrier between social networking tool and search engine. In other words instead of looking in the Facebook tool online, you can now generate results as part of the normal stream of search results, but how this will work and whether it will be desirable remains to be seen.

Users who want to work in one place may find this useful, but others might find it crowded. I hope they provide filters to turn off features like this if the results are cluttering the stream with unnecessary information. In addition, it makes me wonder--from a business perspective--how Google will parse ad revenue with Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, with Bing entering the real-time fray, Google had to come up with an answer.

Living stories

As though these announcements weren't enough, Google also announced "Living Stories," a collaboration with the New York Times and Washington Post in which they present news stories on a single page with the latest news, related links, background and so forth; all in one convenient place. Click to see something and it greys out indicting you've already seen it when you return to the page. View some background stories from a longer piece of news (such as the war in Iraq) and it collapses so you don't have it cluttering your pages. There are content filters to let you see just information about sub-stories within the major stories if such a break-down is required.

This is an interesting approach to news presentation, and it makes the news organization and Google more complete partners, but again it makes me wonder from a business perspective how they would share revenue in such an arrangement. But it's creative and innovative and it provides a way for newspapers and Google to work closely together to benefit each party. I look forward to seeing how this works out.

Believe it or not, I haven't even covered everything including the controversial location-based search--controversial because presumably Google knows where you are. According to PC Magazine, Google executives claim they have launched an impressive 33 search features in the last 67 days. Do you think they're feeling the heat from Bing a little and want to show the world, they still matter? Whatever the reason, Google is continuing to innovate and that's good for searchers everywhere. - Ron

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