One of the highlights for PAN at this year's Search Engine Strategies San Jose, Ca show was to be able to sit in with journalists during an invite-only press conference as they quizzed Google CEO Eric Schmidt after his talk with Danny Sullivan.
A couple of dozen reporters crammed themselves into a small conference room for an hour with him to discuss everything from Google's stance on Net Neutrality, the company's $900 million deal with MySpace,
Google's stance on retaining search queries in the face of AOL's accidental release of its users' queries and other topics. What was interesting to watch was how *little* Google's internal PR team interfered with the process; had they not been lining the whole wall at the back of the room you might have missed them entirely. It was good to see the PR corps not insert themselves at every turn. Judging by how Schmidt handled his audience, the PR crew doesn't need to. Each reporter had a direct, one-on-one interaction with Mr. Schmidt and that goes a long way toward developing great relationships.
Of course, Schmidt is very adept at handling the press on his own. He possesses the key skill of being an intense listener; if a reporter asked a vague or poorly worded question Eric would take all the time necessary to understand exactly the premise of the reporter's question in order to generate a comprehensive, accurate response that left little room for creative interpretation by the reporter. Being succinct is key for Mr. Schmidt. Some CEOs have an innate ability for this and some need to be trained to think this way. Watching Mr. Schmidt take questions by heavyweights at the AP, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and many, many others left no question that he's in the former category.
Both the talk with Danny Sullivan and the press conference circled back to a central theme: Search has become a fundamental part of our lives and is only going to become more so as broadband connections become ubiquitous. During the talk with Danny Sullivan, Mr. Schmidt offered some interesting insights on what his company means to the way we live our lives. And like it or not, Google has become a big part of our lives. That may sound like a bold statement but there's truth to it.
At one point during the public discussion, Danny asked which of Google's products was Schmidt's favorite. He answered that Google Search is the one he uses the most, and offered the following anecdote (which I'm paraphrasing) to illustrate how much his company has become a part of its users' lives.
Every day we're bombarded with information, he said, and we're constantly challenged to verify the "truth" value of this data to make sense of our world. We're challenged to answer questions to which we've never been privy to the answers; offered information from friends or co-workers which may or may not be true; and constantly pressed to add value to whatever activity it is we're currently engaged in with more information. Google, and other search engines are tools which now help us verify information--to know what may or may not be true. Schmidt called it "a nice way to live our lives" and went to lengths to describe all the ways Google is working on to help make searches as precise as possible. Are we ever going to see "perfect search?" asked one attendee, "Not in our lifetime" replied Schmidt. Although Google's primary day-to-day mission is to get as close to perfect answers as technology will allow.
"A nice way to live our lives" is consistent with Google's primary mission: to organize all of the worlds data and make it available to anyone who needs it. All of the products Google produces such as Google Earth, Desktop, Directory, Alerts, Blog Search, etc. etc are not intended to make money, he said. New products are brought to market only if they will enhance and make easier the lives of Google's users.
One attendee asked if Google's retention of every user's search terms didn't put the company in a position to violate privacy. Mr. Schmidt answered by saying the company was committed to preserving trust, vowed not to violate it and then circled back to his assertion that Google is making life easier by using this information to create products like "Certified by Google" which is still in beta.
Certified by Google, according to how Mr. Schmidt described the service, will be like an online wallet. Google will have your credit card information on file as well as a means to verify your identity (he didn't elaborate on the latter part). Users will be able to click on one of Google's contextual ads while surfing and with one click, purchase a product---Mr. Schmidt described this as an increase in the "velocity" of a user's online purchasing power. It goes without saying this will be a boon to advertisers as well.
Which begs the question of how to better target ads. An attendee asked if Google's algorithmic search would ever be able to understand a user's intent (answer was 'no') but by knowing what that user searches for regularly, the system does a good job of learning what that particular user might like to see. Schmidt went on to talk a little about Google Co-op, its attempt at incorporating social search into results, but it was clear to the audience that search based on algorithms would remain Google's bread and butter. It will be interesting to see how--or if--Google reconciles the differences in each of these approaches to search.
