Question time: which of your problems should Google solve?
Personalized advertisments are not enough. Google boss Eric Schmidt says, “Google is not at all done with your information problems. There are many, many examples of where it would be nice if Google had more of an ability to understand time and choices.”
So maybe we can make some recommendations before Google makes them for us. What problems would you like the company to solve?
More from the article:
The more a search engine can learn about a user’s surfing habits, the better it can predict their intent.
With more web history data, Google could offer users a “hyper-personal” experience, with results based on potentially years’ worth of pattern analysis of a user’s search history.
Speaking about the long-term aspirations for Google, Eric Schmidt, the firm’s chief executive, said one day the search engine could potentially answer questions such as “What shall I do tomorrow?” and “Which college should I go to?”.
Surely Schmidt knows it is a little disingenuous when he says, “The important principle, and I want to say this over and over again, is that this is opt-in, user choice.” What kind of choice would that be? What doors will close when I opt out of a grand scheme like that?
Anyways.. I would like Google to remedy my compulsion to watch the chipmunk video over and over. (And related to this, I could use a little help on my term papers, too.)
I would like Google to localize its applications in such a way that we can have world peace at last!
I would like to see further improvements in image search. The current search results are just plain sad.
And further improvements in time. I like their timeline experiment but results aren’t quite accurate yet (nor does the whole index seem to be implemented). A result for my name in timeline view shows results from 1400-2050. Extraordinary isn’t it? The result from 1400 is from Twan’s blog:
I’d rather have that result show up somewhere around… 2006 instead of 1400? Or not show up at all as the post is not directly linked to my name (it probably shows up because I am in Twan’s blogroll).
That kind of sucks to know that you won’t have an online presence after 2050. Then again, how clever of Google to go ahead and establish the fact..
71 or 72 is a kind of early death in the Netherlands nowadays, especially if you’re female. Fortunately Google gives me 43 more years to settle all my legal issues. I’ll share my will in a Google document with you all ;)