Interview Text Marissa Mayer – English Transcript

22. January, Monday 11:31:12 in Munich

Well there are a couple important things to remember – …so well we would like to have more services to our subscription base and also ahem some product based sales like our Google search appliance and we have a few small thriving businesses in this way.

The advertising revenue itself that comprises 90 percent of the revenue that Google generates is in fact very diverse. So it comes of lot of different industries – it´s you know very diverse from small businesses, large businesses and all over the world. And so well – typically the reason people be concerned with 99 percent of revenue coming from one source is because (you are) vulnerable – to say it downshift – but – when you look at how diverse the different forms of revenue are for Google ahh – it´s something that you know well we think about it or let´s concerned about it because its hard to imagine that a global downswing that will affect all of those industries simultaneously.

Well I think that we do have a strategy. We think a lot of what our strategy should be. Thats sort also be done like study for creativity. So when we have engineers who have compelling ideas that they have managed to develeop into a demonstration that is something that we are eager to launch on at Google Labs or launch in a beta forms –
So we are willing to give it a try – thats like a lot of the products that we develop come from very strategic position.

So for example with Google Maps we realized that there is one and big need for better mapping online, but too we saw that a lot of people were ending up using our competitor is because Google didnt offer maps. So that is a product that we choose to develop from a very strategic point of view.

Ahhem well we don´t talk about future products (and) I dont like to Adwords(?) saying never. Unclear: –> Theres nothing (ingnissing ) in the plans for us right now. < -- ca 1:36 We think a lot about how search can augment an operating system in the form of something like Google Desktop and I think that some of the funcionality Google Desktop provides to people with on there computer is really important and phenaomenal and something that ultimatly may be considered part of an OS. Its not something that… you know we are not developing the whole low OS ourself - so we just think about how search could help making an operating system work better for people. ah - so Google - ggg the Gmail and Google Calendar work together now. So well we´re still working on rolling out better functionality internationally - there´s very clever things that´s happens. So for example when I did an email from ehh Se... - a friend that says lets go and see a movie at seven o´clock on friday - interesting enough we actually have a program that can run over my email and extracts that on the right hand side of my gmail I see a link that says. would you like to add "movie" at 7 pm on friday to your calendar? and if I click that link it goes ahead and it puts it right on my calendar on friday night. So we do have (mason) mass - aggregation and tie ends across products that way. Some of that features are a little bit harder to internationalize but it´s something we are working on. We aren´t generating profiles. We think that our trust with our users is incredibly important. People use Google and they trust us with their searches and they trust us with their information because they think that we are trustworthy. And its very important for us to have to value that trust and put in place very solid practices that protect user privacy. And that is something we think a lot about. Ah and so we have our privacy policy in place. It talks about exactly how we will not use personal information. Thats right. We don´t cross correlate information across services and that´s governed by our privacy policy. Oooo weeelll - I think it´s important to concentrate on the fact that Google is a user (pause) ... generated phenomenon. Right? The fact that we have as many searches as we have is because users have choosen to use Google. And they have choosen to provide a lot of information to Google in the form of web pages and their email and so and so forth. And so its really very user driven. Usually in a monoply type situation there ist something you know there is a little bit more controlled or confined as opposed to people just choosing the best product. Soo - you know we personally you know think that our goal should be the focus on this and user needs and fill this really well behave it in a ethical manner in a way that we conduct ourself in business and with regard to our users and that ultimatly the user should choose...how their... (?) web services are are they slacked (stacked?) and how the data is used… I think that there are some places where the two product lines overlap but our goals are very different. So when you look at say for example Google Docs or Google Spreadheets we think its very important for people to have a way of easily maintaining and collaborating on documents online and well there may be some (????) reason that there are both documents or both spreadsheets. You look at the type of functionality that the Google products provide is really a lot more about collaboration easy editing, easy publishing and our interest in that is that we think if its easy for people to publish information they bring more information to the web and when they bring more information to the web there ist more content that we can index. That else ultimatly helps us bring much better searches to end users. So thats the goal. We think that by providing tools like docs and Spreadsheets we can ultimatly provide better search and you know thats the emphasis. AI Ah - what we certainly have is some people at Google who are very interested in artificial intelligence and what can be done with know a vastery of computers and if really can get all the human knowledge online serachable then there are a pretty phenomenal things you can do. Ah - you know thats said every person even with my background in artificial intelligence people have all different opinions on whats possible and is that really intelligence per se. But I do think we are gonna have some very smart computers that do some pretty amazing things in the future. Ah - I think that we have a few applications that attempt to learn in the abstract and now they have very formal applications so for example the Google spellchecker trying to understand by could it learn how to spell words better and use some very sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to try and provide this digital mean feature which appears on the top of the page. It did a really phenomenal job learning how to spell but you know it´s not true intelligence its really looks at patterns of people typing querys and how they correct it an occurences on web pages so and so forth. And the other you know again there ist sort of general AI research at Google. The other artifact thats part of it is the way that we can contextually target Adsense. So the Adsense as you sometime see appearing a lot alongside of content on the web uses a very sophisticated algorithm that takes the txt on the page and tries to understand on a metalevel what is the page about. And so that ... you know there is a basic AI research happening at Google that ultimaly provided a technology that became really good at contextually targeted advertizing. So know i would say .... no... are we ... are we ah ... so doing general AI research? Yes! Are we also putting a lot more resource and funding in the spellchecker and into Adsense targeting? Absolutly! So in particular we are investing heavily in those two pieces of artificial intelligence application and we are also looking at the broader research question. Censorship Censorship ist always a sensitive issue and there are generally two philosophies here is one of engagement and there is one of estrangement. Do you choose to not enter a market in the hopes of effecting change or do you enter the market in the hopes of effecting change. And in China we felt it was important to provide Google services to chinese users and if we are going to conduct business in China we obvisously have to comply local laws and local requests. But you note that that isn´t unique to China thats true of all countries all over the world. We have to comply with local law and so -well- we generally trying in censor as little as possibly we do need to censor then as required by the local goverments. YouTube Well I think that when you look at Google Video and YouTube there is a huge user generated phenomenon that we are seeing happening. People feel really empowered to create their own videos and upload them and there is a real distribution channel working there where people see videos and share them with their friends and family. Ah - so I think and I also think that YouTube and Google Video represent a great place for media to distribute their content. So I don´t really view these two platforms as competitive with general media. I view this is a new channel for them to distribute their content. Does that make sense? We aren´t in generating videos ourselfs instead (?) we are helping users, television networks, movie studios distribute their content to users. Well I think of it as you know Google Video and YouTube represent a new channel. Its a new way of distributing video content. Ahem and I don´t really view it necessarily as a rivalry as much as it´s about users picking their delivery mechanism. Do they want to watch it on television, do they want to watch it online and you know YouTube and Google Video represent excellent choices for how to watch video online and they do have a large breath (breite?) of content. Well I think one thing that became clear to us is that if you look at the usage of the YouTube site itself but also of video all over the web more and more is what you see is when you see a video on a website is a YouTube player hosted on that website ah and so we really looked at YouTube and said .. this is ... YouTube the site is phenomenal. What they really build is a platform where almost all video that plays on the web is a YouTube hosted video. So for example Google ahh for ... you know the bargain for us is to say ... well if we want to do advertising in video format and we want to have a place to place those ads YouTube is obviously a company that we are going to have to do a deal with or we would have to aquire in order to do that experimentation. So our hope is generally to provide high quality video ads online and we think that the YouTube platform that they have build all across the web represents a phenomenal oportunity to do that. So we are doing a lot of scanning right now for the GoogleBook search project. And I think it´s a phenomenal project that can really change how people find information. I think searching web pages is great and there is a lot of wonderful information in there. But there is also a lot of great information in books. Really high quality answers that we are with this type(?) we are able to offer in (?) type search. Ah... and people who wonder well what happens to books and that... mourn that media. I think the answer is people allways read books. Everyone loves pick up a book and walk out to playing or walk out to the beach or read a book to a child. Physical books are going to disappear. What we are gonna see is that people are gonna access the information inside of books a lot more fequently because you wont have the overhead of going to the library and do hours of research in order to find a qoute or for a quick fact. You will be able to do that online. So I think at anything the book search usage that you will see will be purely incremental and additive onto physical book use. [tags]google, Marissa Mayer, Elektrischer Reporter, AI[/tags]