The search giant is throwing its power and data at problems specific to mobile phones
In early 2008, in the early days of the iPhone era, Google engineers began noticing something unusual in the search engine’s logs. Owners of these phones were doing a huge number of Web searches.
But there was a problem: searching on a phone was less than ideal. It was hard to type on small screens. And most irritating for Google, which brags about its speed on every page of search results, was that Web pages were slow to load on phones.
So, Google started a project it code-named Grand Prix. In six weeks, engineers revamped mobile searching and hatched plans for new ways to search on the go, by talking or taking photos instead of typing.
The stakes were high. Mobile phones could be a huge new market for Google. Or they could provide an opening for a competitor to pounce, or obviate the need for a search engine altogether. If people on phones could go straight to apps for information, why Google anything?
Today, Google says mobile searches are growing as quickly as Web searches were at the same stage in the company’s early days, and they are up sixfold in the last two years. Google has a market share of 97 per cent for mobile searches, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use.
Now that it dominates the field, Google is throwing its burly computing power and heaps of data at new problems specific to mobile phones — like translating phone calls on the fly and recognising photos of things like plants and items of clothing.
“I feel like a parent the second time around feels,” said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search. “You saw your first child grow at an amazing pace, and here we are with our second child, mobile, growing at the same pace and showing the same signs.”
Google has been slow to seize some newer Web business opportunities, such as social networking. Investors have criticised it for dragging its feet when it comes to figuring out how to make money in new fields.
But mobile is an exception. Last year, Eric E. Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, said Google’s philosophy was “mobile first,” meaning it would build products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs.
“This is the place that Google is betting its future on,” said Karim Temsamani, Google’s head of mobile advertising, a role created in September. Still, Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly enough to create new mobile products or ads.
“They’ve done a really good job of positioning themselves so they can’t get boxed out of the market,” Gillis said. “Now they just need to deliver some innovation. Let’s wring some revenue out of this platform.”
Google said in October 2010 that mobile ads were on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in the coming year. But because mobile ads generally sell for less than half the price of Web ads, Gillis said, “there’s just not a lot of profit left over.” Though Google makes Android software for phones, it does not make money from it directly because it gives it away to phone makers.
Still, the company’s approach to the mobile market is classic Google: take problems that computer scientists have been working on for decades, throw huge amounts of data and computing power at them and assume that if the resulting product is useful to people, it will make money.
People can now snap photos of landmarks to search for them using Google Goggles, speak to their phones using voice search and, on Android phones, translate spoken conversations between English and Spanish.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
