Bagel Belly Blog

Google

I got the opportunity to visit Google last week, when their new office in London held an open house party. The event was an interesting insight into the mind of the company, and was certainly food for thought.

The evening took the shape of an introduction to Google in general, followed up by a more detailed explanation of what Google plans to do from here. London is to become the centre of development for their mobile applications, predominantly because of the more significant mobile adoption in Europe vs. the US, and also because it's a great city to live in with a good research base.

The introduction to Google at large was the best bit of the evening in my opinion. I've had a fairly good idea of what Google do and how they do it, but hearing it from them really drove home some of the messages (such as commodity hardware instead of high-end servers to power their datacentres). Some new stuff that I didn't know about, too: I hadn't realised just quite how huge their revenues from advertising were, or how overwhelming their market share is in just about every market in the world.

The most amazing thing of all was the description of what they are doing with machine translation: approaching it from a statistical methodology rather than an algorithm-centric approach. Their saying here - a ton of data is worth an ounce of algorithm - summed it up nicely and really shows how we have to think about things differently in a world where getting hold of that data is often much easier than coming up with ways of intelligently processing it. Google expect to be as good as (if not better than) human translators within the next few years. Wow.

Back to the mobile thing. Let me say this up front: I was quite disappointed with the vision that Google enunciated for this. As far as I could tell, it boiled down to "everything we already do, but on a phone". Now to be fair, moving all those services on to a mobile platform is not going to be easy. But I didn't really get any sense of forward-thinking or new ideas, just a rehash to gain more market share.

Things like ambient or location-based initiatives were played down (maybe these are difficult things to tackle without being evil?). And there didn't seem to be any new or unique ideas there. Sure, leverage the massive index of web pages to bring value to how you handle mobile pages. Google local mobile is absolutely a killer app. Context-based searching is of course important. But nothing really made me go "wow" like the stuff they are working on desktop-side.

Ultimately, I did enjoy finding out what goes on at Google though, and talking to a few of the attendees was at least as interesting as hearing from Google themselves. I'm sure once the London office gets a team together they'll be able to get some cool ideas worked out. But I think the wow here has to be "wow, Google are far behind the market innovators in the mobile field". I look forward to them proving me wrong!