Day 2 Key note

Keynote speech by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search products and User Experience.

A glimpse under the hood @ Google

This keynote is focused on how google evolved, what search products are built and how Google handles the User Experience.

Marissa started by introducing how and why Google invited hundreds of artists and designers to design iGoogle interface. Google believes that a fraction of its users wants more than the minimalistic look of Google homepage.

Sergai created the Google home page. When Marissa asked him why he chose the minimalistic look on the home page, Sergai's answer was first, we don't have a web master and second, I dont do HTML. Its amazing the way it started and remained the same all these years supporting the founders vision. When Google first tested their home page with students from Stanford, students kept waiting for > 40s staring at the screen. Marissa asked them - "are you waiting for
something?". Then the tester replied that they are "waiting for the rest of the page to load".
Marissa revealed the complexity behind the simple home page. She believes there is no need for the end user to know what goes behind the search box.

Basically every search query is greeted by a loadbalancer which will send the query to one of the many data centers. Mixers get involved before hitting 300-400 backend search servers. Again Mixer gets involved where Ad Servers and other components get mixed up. Then the process goes thru' Google Web Servers for HTML content. This entire process goes through 700-1000 servers brining back millions of hits in a fraction of second. This is the complexity Google wants to hide from the end users.

Split A/B testing.Google conducts A/B testing to understand how users react to different designs. This testing is done in production and matrics are gathered in realtime.
Matrics could be RPM, number of hits etc. Based on the trends, Google decides on which design makes sense. Marissa gave couple of examples on the type of tests they conducted. She showed 3 versions of Google Search results, all the three looks almost same, except the white space between Google icon and the beginning of the search results. Amazingly, couple of pixels makes quite a difference in how users react to the search results. Google found that the version
with less white space is liked by many users. THis is backed by the serach results users actually clicked on. Similarly, Google tested Google Ads background color - blue vs. yellow. It found that Yellow makes sence for the ads.

There was a research conducted on the number of results should be displayed on the first page, 20? 30? 40? Google found that more search results on the page
actually generated less search querries. (The more you search, the more money Google makes.. makes sense).

Learning curve on Searching.Gogle found that over a period of time, users got educated on how to search, what to search for and how to talk to search engine to get better results.
Think 10 years out.Google believes every company should think 10 years down the line and think of how their applications, business models will evolve; and be prepared for.

Google 411:There is no reason behind this application and no relavancy to search, but at the cre of this application is the speech recognition and text to speech. Google believes this is not a 100% best solution (like any of its applications), but this application demonstrates that it could be used for video search and other media searches; and could bring more inforation to the user. Car search is something that is mentioned couple of times.

Google Language Informational SearchThis is a great story. Google spend lots of energy in building the multiple language search. Outsourced to translators, but that turned out to be a lengthy process and very unproductive...when one of Marissa's friend could produce his web page in 50 different languages. The secret is his friend used his fans to translate it for him. Google followed same approach and requested all its users to contribute to the translation. As a result, more than quarter million people contributed to tranlasting search results into 110 languages. Now Google has 140 domains.

Easter Eggs on Google

Marissa, during her grad days used an app on Linux that echos anything typed in Chef language. She used this program to convert 400+ strings and it is one of the language choices on Google Preferences. Its called Bork, bork, bork language.

Healthy disrespect for the impossible.
Marissa believes that solving search problem is impossible...but they will keep working towards it. Getting something close to 90-95% could make quite a
difference.

Google Health:This application is created to help users store the medical records in one place. Again, this is an impossible task, which Google clearly acknowledged.

20% of time:This is a culture Google employed in the company. All Google employees spend 20% of their time in doing what they like to do. Amazing work was produced with
this 20% of time rule - 50% of the Google features are produced in this time. Gmail is another example.

Overall Keynote was fantastic, lot of interesting insights into how Google operates and keeps the innovation going in the organization - still marching towards the founders vision and goals.