The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

did her two new bosses. “Larry and Sergey simply yelled at me and Salar [Kamangar,
now in charge of Google’s ad business] until we made the kinds of decisions they
would have made,” she says.
Mayer grew up a mostly normal kid in Wausau, WI. Everything was nearby, which
usually meant a car ride away. “I remember when we were having a big argument
about making a baseball diamond across a couple of yards, and nobody knew the
exact dimensions: Was it 88 feet between bases, or 90? It would have taken half an
hour to get into the car, go to the library, find a book. . .so we just argued all afternoon.
It was 30 minutes then, versus 30 seconds now.”
As director of consumer Web products, Mayer is responsible for the basic consumerfacing
Google.com site, including search, news, images, Froogle and local/maps. But
she’s not overly focused on day-to-day things. Basic search still has room to grow,
she believes. “I think of all the searches I leave unsearched each day; I may do only
one out of ten that I think of. I may be more likely to think of them, but I’m also
more likely to do them, given my job,” she says. “For example, I’ll go home after a
dinner with Yukon potatoes and search to find out the difference between Yukon
Gold potatoes and regular potatoes. You just have to make it more convenient.”
It’s not just the hidden Web she has in mind, but the ability, say, to visually scan
someone’s badge at a conference and immediately see a bio – discreetly – on your
cell phone. We like that idea. . .now imagine it applied, for better or worse, to someone
you encounter randomly in a restaurant or at a bar.
Currently, Mayer sees the appeal of local and all the new services that are hot right
now, but she’s trying to get Google to think longer-term. She says, “You have to ask
yourself, ‘Will this happen in search someday?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s something
we’d better be working on.”
She cites one user study in which users were asked to do searches using keywords
about things that concerned them. One harried mother innocently typed in “discipline
teenage daughter” with results that will be unsurprising to anyone familiar
with the Web, but which failed to address the woman’s questions around homework
time, allowances and dress codes. Although Google has since mostly fixed that problem,
says Mayer, “We need to get better not at doing searches, but at providing the
answers people are looking for. There will be a day when ten HTML links regardless
of who you are is not the answer anymore.”
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