Marissa Mayer Talks About the Future of Search, Moving Beyond Text Search

While the Le Web conference in Paris was focused on startups, there were a lot of big names talking and making announcements as well. Google was represented at the highest level with VP of Search and User Experience Marissa Mayer discussing some of the new products from Google, as well as some future plans in an interview with TechCrunch's Mike Arrington.

The interview starts off with a look at Google's most recent products which all seem to be pointing to its plans beyond the text search. It recently launched Google Goggles, its experimental approach to visual search which allows users to take a picture of an object and get more information on it automatically from Google using a variety of technologies with the focus being on OCR (optical character recognition) and image recognition. Mayer said that visual search was still very much in the early days and that the technologies had to get significantly better before it became a viable alternative for the mainstream.

She added that voice recognition technologies were much further along. Google Voice search also got updated recently and the tool is becoming a viable option, especially on mobile devices. This is even more important now that mobile search is seeing a huge growth in usage spurred by the increasingly powerful mobile devices. Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled in a year at Google. Mobile searches make up about five percent of all the searches the search engine is seeing at the moment.

She also shared some thoughts on Chrome and Chrome OS, not exactly her area of interest, saying that Google wants to focus on the user experience and on pure speed, two things the company holds close to heart and which do show when using Chrome as well. She called Chrome OS an “anti operating system” and said that, even though it would be a while before it got out there and onto devices, things were moving ahead.