Google's new search mantra: "Did you know?"

September 7, 2010 | Matthew Lynley

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the future of search was blazing-fast, “autonomous” searching that constantly provides users with results. He made the comments at a keynote speech at the German IFA home electronics event in Berlin Tuesday.

But autonomous search isn’t really search as we think of it — a user querying a massive database to get a result. Schmidt likened it to telling a user what he or she didn’t know, but was probably interested in seeing. Google already sees more than a billion searches cross their servers daily, and providing an automated process that is constantly providing search data can only boost those numbers.

That means more potential ad revenue from Google’s advertisements running with searches. Advertising made up about 96 percent of Google’s revenue in the first six months of 2010, according to company financials. Try as it might to diversify away from that revenue stream, for now, search-linked advertising is Google’s highly lucrative trick.

The company brought in $6.8 billion for the quarter ending June 30. Improving that by even a small percentage could bring a huge payout for Google.

For now, old-fashioned search is growing quickly on mobile. Google said about 33 percent of mobile searches related to users’ location, and mobile search grew by 50 percent, and searches on Google’s Android mobile operating system tripled, in the first half of 2010. But tech pundits theorize that users will increasingly use task-specific apps to find what they need rather than perform general searches.

The autonomous approach faces risks, from provoking a privacy backlash to draining users’ batteries through constant queries. But the biggest risk is that mobile users will drift away from Google, which has become all but synonymous with search on computers.

[Photo: dannysullivan]

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Tags: advertising, AdWords, Android, automated search, automatic search, autonomous search, Flash, Froyo, Google Search, search, SEO

About the Author, Matthew Lynley

Matthew Lynley is VentureBeat's GreenBeat writer. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francisco, Calif. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.

https://www.webhostinglogic.com/services/domain-name-registration.html WebHosting Guru

Contrary to what the tech pundits are saying, google search will stay. Only a handful are using mobile searches and if there are, it usually uses apps to search for a specific item and that is what is google is doing for their search. The trend now is on mobile but soon it will be on TV. TV and desktop are almost the same.
http://twitter.com/Ulmaxes Sam Spence

“Schmidt likened it to telling a user what he or she didn’t know, but was probably interested in seeing.”Maybe I'm reading into this too much…but that sure sounds like a solid step towards tearing away yet another aspect of the human-computer interaction. Say in ten years, you hardly even check the news or weather or your hobbies anymore- a search engine who's been following you for years knows exactly what you should like and be interested in. That's putting a HUGE amount of power in the hands of an automated group of equations. I know we've already given over a lot to automation, but it's something to think about at least.