The new products include Gadgets, a direct competitor to Apple’s widgets.
Google Inc. recently fired another salvo aimed at maintaining the lead in Internet search while making its software more accessible outside Web browsers in its ongoing duel with rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.
Google has thrown out a chilling warning to Microsoft with the latest version of its “Google Desktop product version 4,” offering features that cut deep into Microsoft’s territory.
At its annual press day here in the Googleplex, the search giant took the lid off Google Desktop version 4, Google Notebook, Google Trends and Google Co-op.
The major innovation in Google Desktop 4 is Google Gadgets, small applications that can live on users’ desktops or inside the Google Desktop environment. They are Google’s answer to Apple’s Dashboard widgets.
The new version of Google Desktop lets people use mini-interactive applications from within the product’s Sidebar without having to download software or open up a browser, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience.
The new tools makes it easier to share information through its online search engine and enabling users to download mini-applications, or "widgets," designed to become fixtures on a computer screen.
Before a few dozen journalists from around the world gathered for Google Press Day 2006, company executives offered a broad overview of the search giant’s future direction, reiterated its focus on search, and spoke of plans to open up. Ironically, the wireless network that Google had set up for guests was down at the time.
Like previous versions of its product, Google Desktop 4 has the ability to index everything on your computer’s hard disk from your Microsoft Office files to your instant message chats and Sunday picnic snapshots. And it allows you to retrieve them easily and quickly by a simple search. This is something Microsoft does not have.
However, with the latest version, you get a very intuitive and useful customizable sidebar that sits cleanly on your desktop, which allows you to display such things as news-feeds, your latest emails, a scratchpad, maps, weather forecasts, favorite web pages, a system monitor, a WiFi indicator and other little useful and not so useful applications that Google refers to simply as Gadgets.
In addition to the sidebar, there is what Google calls the desk-bar, which is a search box that sits inside the Windows taskbar and floating desk-bar, which is the same thing that can be dragged to sit anywhere on the desktop.
"We are committed to a much more transparent way of working with you all," CEO Eric Schmidt said.
For Google, transparency is important not just to appease the press, but, as Elliot Schrage, Google’s VP of global communications, put it, "to avoid confusing the marketplace." Google’s success depends increasingly on business partners working to extend the Google search platform into high-value markets, and it has to keep its partners informed.
Schmidt emphasized, however, that search remains Google’s primary focus. "Search is still central," he said, adding later, "We have a heavy, heavy investment in new search algorithms."
Mayer led a demonstration in which a song icon was dragged and dropped atop a media player, causing the song to start playing. Similarly, a video clip, titled "Laughing Babies," was dragged onto a player, launching a clip of a mother holding a gaggle of giggling babies.
The software also can be configured to automatically create a customized home page. "It has figured out that I’m a movie buff and that I use eBay and I travel a lot," said Mayer.
"Nothing like a biological clock right there in your Sidebar," Mayer joked.
Google Co-Op exemplifies the new openness Google is striving for: It lets users improve search results by syndicating their knowledge. Individuals or organizations can now label or categorize Web pages and make those labels available as a subscription. For subscribers, these labels and associated links get added to search queries when relevant.
For example, a doctor could contribute labels in his or her area of expertise to establish a group of pages that are particularly noteworthy. Patients could then subscribe to those labels and see links added to relevant queries that offer a categorized subset of results. Google’s answer to vertical, or category-specific, search engines is the wisdom of its users.
Google’s commitment to openness is also on display with Google Trends, which lets users’ access data about the popularity of search terms over time and then filters that data by city, region, or language.
Google Trends, available immediately on Google Labs, graphs the number of global searches on whatever term a Google user types into the search engine. It also correlates spikes and dips with particular news and offers a bar graph that shows what region, country and language had the most searches on that term.
"If you are an advertiser and you want to understand trends in different geographies," Google Trends can provide useful information, said Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management.
He led a demo search on "boxers, briefs" and concluded that "boxers are apparently a little more popular than briefs" and did a search on the names of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and said, "Larry’s traffic has clearly spiked."
Finally, Google Notebook, to be displayed as a small window in the right hand corner of a computer screen, which should be available next week, is a scratchpad application that lets users store and share URLs and other data copied from Web pages. Google describes it as "a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online." It is really more of a re-imagining of how browser bookmarks should work.
People can also grab text and pictures from Web sites and paste them into Google Notebook, as well as make the notebook full-screen size, drag and drop items to reorganize them, and e-mail the notebook to others. The program requires a plug-in and a Google account.
Google is also reinventing its internal processes to better manage its explosive growth. "The goal this year is to systemize everything at Google," Schmidt said. "That is the only way that we are going to deal with the scale we’re seeing."
Though he did not go into detail, Schmidt suggested that the company’s internal management processes needed to be streamlined to integrate new employees into the company more efficiently and to arrive at decisions about new products in a more–timely manner.
The whole idea is to be able to access and search for both offline and online information without having to leave the desktop visit your web browser. This undercuts the importance of the browser as the online search vehicle, which is what Google wants of course. Why would you want to launch a browser when you can search for or access all your favorite web pages from the desktop? Ironically this is not good news for Microsoft, which would rather users leave its desktop and visit its new IE 7 browser which has a default Windows Live Search box sitting in its tool bar.
As far as the Gadgets themselves are concerned, Google makes it obvious that it intends the list to grow. Thre are already applications that cut across Microsoft’s territory such as a media player, to do list and calendar. With the purchase of online word-processing startup Writely a few months ago, it’s fairly obvious that Google intends to add Gagdets that sit squarely in the Microsoft Office domain.
With the release of Google Desktop 4, the waters for Microsoft have once again become murky. Here it was getting set to attack Google in the search space using its browser dominance (which Google has challenged in legal forums), yet Google has now moved to lessen the importance of the browser in the scheme of things by moving the war to Microsoft’s home turf, the desktop.
For Apple and Microsoft, this has to be a troubling development: More and more of the programs they sell in their operating systems are being offered free by Google. Moreover, these programs are open and have APIs that developers can build on. And just as Amazon creates book recommendations based on user purchase history, Google plans to leverage its knowledge of its users to pitch programs that dovetail with their interests.
Both Google and Microsoft have been spending billions to top one another in a battle that is expected to escalate during the next few years as they battle for high-tech supremacy.
Google is playing catch up with its gadgets. A small startup called Konfabulator first introduced the widget concept for Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh in 2002. Yahoo embraced widgets last year when it bought Konfabulator for an undisclosed amount.
It is particularly noteworthy because collective intelligence is the basis for Google’s most successful technology, the PageRank algorithm that counts Web links as votes for Web page authority. This is a departure from the automated systems Google tends to prefer as a means of operating at scale.
"We are giving you the keys to Zeitgeist," Mayer said, referring to the list of top search terms known as Google Zeitgeist that Google publishes.
"I do believe the winner will be the fastest innovator who partners most broadly," said Schmidt, who added he still sees "limitless growth" opportunities for Google.
Questions from the journalists in attendance returned frequently to the subject of Google’s competitors, particularly Microsoft. Schmidt and other executives downplayed the dustup, insisting that Google was focused on innovation and the user experience, not what competitors were doing. "There is room for more than one winner," Schmidt said. "You are missing the broader play."
Never mind that Alan Eustace, SVP of engineering, observed that Google’s index of Web pages was three times larger than that of the competition. Or that Mayer asserted, "Our lead over the competition is as large as it has been over the past two years."
Asked about Google’s concerns about its place in the upcoming Microsoft Vista operating system, co-founder Sergey Brin said Google is paying attention to areas where Microsoft might abuse its power because "We just see the history of that company behaving anti-competitively."
But Google remains focused on the future. "We do not see any limit to this model continuing to grow," Schmidt said. "I’m sure there are limits, but we do not see them today."
Using Google’s gadgets requires installing the company’s desktop search software, which was introduced in 2004.
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