Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Google analyst day

Google had their analyst day today. Long but worthwhile.

It's interesting to see how Google describes themselves (slide #6) and their competitive advantages (slide #7). Eric Schmidt (CEO) and Sergey Brin (co-founder) see continued innovation at Google as being critical to their success, talking at length about their people, how much time they devote to experimentation (slide #12), and how they set up their environment to encourage creativity.

Eric talked about their model for advertising, how auctioning the ad space ensures a fair and competitive price for advertisers, that their advertising engine gets its success from showing fewer but higher quality and more relevant ads, and how Google seeks the long tail (slide #10) of small businesses as advertisers.

Larry Page (co-founder) did a demo of some of Google's new products, including Google Maps (which really is amazing) and Keyhole.

Eric mentioned "end-user personalization" briefly which he described as "a Google that, sort of, knows you, knows more about you." In response to a question, he elaborated by saying:
    There are many things we can learn about a person without having them give us a name and a password. And we can use those to provide better results.
It is clear that Google sees personalization as critical to future improvements in relevance.

No comments: