Googling for Answers About Web 2.0

For some reason, my request for a face-​​to-​​face inter­view with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was unsuc­cessful. Apparently, I needed to ask in 1996 to get an appoint­ment any time soon. Nonetheless, the Google people were keen to answer my ques­tions about the business. On the less positive side, I had to do the whole thing by email and the answers need to be attrib­uted to a ‘Google spokes­person’. As I’ve said before, I think email inter­views are less than sat­is­factory. Being a big company, they have to be pretty cir­cum­spect and so some of the answers are a bit bland, to say the least. Nonetheless, thought I’d share a portion of what they provided. Thank you, Oliver at Google UK, for co-​​ordinating this.

How do you define Web 2.0, if indeed you consider it worthy of a definition?

Here at Google we have no single defin­i­tion of web 2.0. For us, the devel­op­ment of our services rests on keeping creative and innov­ative, main­taining our focus on improving user exper­i­ence, and our goal to organise the world’s inform­a­tion and make it uni­ver­sally access­ible and useful.

Two commonly used indic­ators of Web 2.0 are “the web as platform” and “the wisdom of crowds”. How is Google cur­rently imple­menting these? A third element that tends to be cited is “the web as a social exper­i­ence”. Are you active in this space?

Our overall view is “Don’t bet against the Internet”. What’s exciting today is that tech­no­lo­gies like AJAX are making it possible for browser-​​based applic­a­tions to have the rich func­tion­ality that used to only be possible with desktop-​​based applications.

A big objec­tion to web applic­a­tions is trust. How might this be overcome?

Google is com­mitted to pro­tecting our users’ privacy. We recog­nise that our con­tinued success is based on earning — and keeping — our users’ trust. Unlike a credit card company or mobile phone operator, our users can switch to a com­peting search provider with the click of a mouse. All our work at Google is guided by clear privacy principles.

At Google:

- We build privacy pro­tec­tions into our products from the ground up;

- None of our products use any personal data unless fully dis­closed in a privacy policy;

- We always ask people actively to opt-​​in to services that use sens­itive data;

- We write our privacy policies in simple clear language so that users can easily under­stand them — they are not the usual legal jargon; and

- We allow people to use most of our services anonym­ously, and we even tell them how they can disable our cookies that they have been sent.

In addition, Google will take legal action to protect its users’ privacy. In 2005 the US Government asked us to provide two months worth of users’ search queries and billions of web addresses (URLs) as part of its effort to defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 federal law that seeks to ban Internet sites from dis­playing content deemed ”harmful to minors”. The US Supreme Court ruled that the law couldn’t be enforced unless the Government could prove that less intrusive measures (such as Internet fil­tering) had proven inadequate.

Google chal­lenged these demands. As Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel, has explained:

While privacy was not the most sig­ni­ficant legal issue in this case (because the Government wasn’t asking for per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able inform­a­tion), privacy was perhaps the most sig­ni­ficant to our users. As we noted in our briefing to the court, we believe that if the Government was per­mitted to require Google to hand over search queries that could have under­mined con­fid­ence that our users have in our ability to keep their inform­a­tion private. (Google Blog, 17th March 2006).

A US judge largely ruled in our favor — forcing the Government to exclude all search queries from its demand and to limit the number of URLs to just 50,000. We believe that this was a real victory for privacy, and for our users.

How does AJAX help Google deliver a better service/​experience?

With AJAX, web sites can be more dynamic and inter­active, and the user inter­face can be more responsive. For example, AJAX tech­no­lo­gies are behind the drag­gable maps on Google Maps. Likewise, AJAX tech­no­lo­gies are behind Google Suggest, letting us display query sug­ges­tions from Google’s legions of servers in real time as the user types. These types of inter­active features are enabled by AJAX, and they have let Google develop novel and innov­ative inter­faces that improve our ability to deliver inform­a­tion to our users.

So-​​called “mashups” using the Google Maps API (in par­tic­ular) are causing a lot of excite­ment. Why do you think this is the case? Any favour­ites there? Is this the future? (i.e. will the trend towards open APIs become dominant? why?)

Mapping has tra­di­tion­ally been a very expensive and complex tech­no­logy. With the Google Maps API, web developers can incor­porate maps into their web pages for free and with very little pro­gram­ming exper­i­ence. Because the API is so access­ible, web developers whose web sites had geo­graphic data quickly adopted Google Maps to make their web sites more inter­active, attractive, and useful for their users. We are really excited to see such wide adoption from such a wide range of web sites. There is such a variety of sites that use the Google Maps API, everyone on the team has their own favourite. We even do our own mash-​​ups some­times, such as our integ­ra­tion of the stages of the Tour de France 2006 into Google Earth, which you can read about here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/tour-de-france-goes-3d-with-google.html

Google’s business model is gen­er­ally to provide free services and monetize those services with targeted advert­ising. Open APIs like the Google Maps API are very com­pat­ible with this business model, and we hope to open up more of our com­puting infra­struc­ture to developers in the future.

One driver (IMHO) of Web 2.0 is a demand for authentic, word-​​of-​​mouth rela­tion­ships and refer­rals. Is web searching going out of fashion any time soon?

While it is dif­fi­cult to spec­u­late about future trends, we feel that providing relevant answers to search queries is some­thing that users want and value, and we continue to devote the majority of our time to devel­oping and improving upon our search services.

It’s important to remember that today only around 10 to 15% of the world’s inform­a­tion is avail­able online. The more inform­a­tion that comes online, the more important search will become.

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• Seeking Answers
• Don’t Be Evil
• Betting on Search