I’m not going to do a full live-blog, because it’s going to be well-covered by:
- Danny Sullivan
- Jason Kinkaid
- Kara Swisher
among others. You can also register and watch the event as a webcast.

Search by Voice

Marissa Mayer did a brief intro, then brought up Vic Gundotra. Vic is going to show a series of mobile demos emphasizing that phones have senses (ears, voice, eyes) via their sensors. He showed the progress on Google’s mobile app by doing “pictures of barack obama at g8 summit” as a voice query and it nailed it. Then Vic did the query for [mcdonalds in beijing]–and it nailed it. Announcement: support for Google Voice in Japanese. In 2010, many more languages will be supported. Vic showed a demo of “talk in English, run voice recognition, translate into Spanish, then do voice synthesis in Spanish.” So basically a Babel fish. )

Location

Vic showed customized suggest in Mobile. With a location of Boston, Massachusetts, [re] gives [red sox], [red sox schedule], and [restaurant week boston] as suggestions. In San Francisco, [re] suggests [rei] instead. Demos are coming fast and furious now. Vic just demoed “products in stock near me” on a mobile phone. Now Vic is demoing “Near me now” at search pagethat tells you interesting stuff. I know this neighborhood and it nailed the nearby businesses. A new version of Google Mobile Maps for Android is coming out today and if you long-press on a map, it will offer to show you stuff near you (businesses, the Computer History Museum, etc.).

Search by Sight

Vic is announcing Google Goggles. You can take pictures of physical landmarks, bottles of wine, CD covers, bar codes, a bunch of different things. It looks like it tries to recognize (do OCR) on text in images. Vic took a picture of a landmark from Japan and it told the name of the shrine.

Marissa is back up and introduces Amit Singhal.

Amit is talking about how information used to spread. In old days, people would ask their elders “Are these berries safe to eat?” The childen who listened to their elders would grow up to be grandparents themselves. ) The printing press changed the communication from one-to-one to one-to-many. The web brings it to many-to-many. Google is announcing real-time search today. Amit is emphasizing that relevance matters a bunch.

Woohoo, my tweet about real-time search showed up in the results. )

Excerpted from:
Blogging the Google Search event, December 2009

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