LeWeb08-Google's Mayer tips Local Search as key opportunity for 2009

PARIS-Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product & User Experience at Google, gave an insightful view on various challenges facing both Google and its competitors in terms of Search.

Marissa pointed out that there is still some way to go to improve search (harking back to a previous interview she had given where she had stated that 90% of the work on search has been completed but that the last 10% was the tricky part).

One area where Google is looking to improve its game is in personalised search, with the recent launch of the Google Search Wiki seeking to test the waters in this area.

Another area, is search through devices other than the PC, notably through a mobile phone and, linked to this,voice-activated search.

Loic le Meur asked Marissa whether she thought any improvements in video search were in the pipeline. She answered that improvements are imminent in detecting voice within video and searching on this. However, graphic recognition (e.g.of a face in a video) is still a few years away partly due to YouTube's success and the proliferation of video content on the web.

Finally, and critically for companies in the LBS space, Marissa stated that "local search is one of the big opportunities in 2009".

LeWeb 08 Paris-Prologue and Photos

PARIS-LeWeb08 managed to pull off a great event in a time of economic uncertainty, and despite the heavy atmosphere associated with the global financial system, it offered rays of hope as well as advice on how to weather the storm.

Many industry heavy hitters, from Marissa Mayer at Google to Marc Simoncini of Meetic, Maurice Levy of Publicis and Martin Varsavsky, serial entrepreneur, gave their take on future plans and opportunities in the market.

Marc Simoncini gave a very entertaining talk on different dating habits he had to consider when launching his service in different countries in Europe.
For example, in Italy, women were not overt in their dating habits as they normally 'had to ask permission from their brother to date' while in Sweden, the Meetic offer of free membership for women was met with a 'why should it be free for us' reaction.

New Resources for Developers

We're back in action after a Thanksgiving break filled with turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. Now it's the holiday season (at least, here in the U.S.) and we're filled with good will toward developers. Today I wanted to talk about a couple things we just finished polishing up.

First, the Android 1.0 SDK, release 2 is now available. Like the previous 1.0_r1 release, this new 1.0_r2 build creates applications that are compatible with Android 1.0 devices, such as the T-Mobile G1. This new release fixes a few bugs. In 1.0_r1, it was possible for developers to write technically-illegal code by using the Java Reflection APIs to access private or protected fields and methods. 1.0_r2 fixes that problem by enforcing private/protected visibility of items accessed via Reflection. Meanwhile, the class android.R.styleable was included in 1.0_r1 primarily for documentation purposes as a way for developers to look up the style attributes available to them to use. However, actually referring to that class via source code would result in applications that might break when run on future versions of the Android platform, so 1.0_r2 corrects the oversight and removes access to the class from the android.jar file. (The class remains in the documentation for reference purposes, though.)

Both of these problems are obscure "future-proofing" issues, and I'd be quite surprised if they actually caused problems for anyone, but now they're fixed. 1.0_r2 also includes a few other smaller changes; check out the release notes for all the details.

Second, many of you have asked if developer devices will be available. We've worked with our partners to create a program for developers to purchase devices that enable them to test and debug applications more easily.

I think these new tools will be quite helpful to developers, and I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with Android, next.