Google Stepping Beyond Search
Aug. 23–Google is moving beyond traditional Internet search into a pair of new services that put it more directly in competition with Microsoft and Yahoo.
The Mountain View company that has come to define Internet search is expected to announce a new communications product Wednesday — most likely an instant messaging service that would compete with offerings from America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN, according to analysts.
The development follows Monday’s introduction of a new version of the Google Desktop that delivers news headlines, blog updates, stock quotes, weather and photos directly to a person’s computer.
This “intelligent sidebar” learns as it goes. It monitors Web searches and Internet surfing habits to deliver more relevant information and put it on a small screen that sits on the computer desktop. Over time, a San Francisco 49ers fan will see news that reflect his or her interest in the football team.
“Google is trying to do proactive things that anticipate our information needs — which is, in my mind, the next step beyond search,” said Chris Sherman, editor of Search Engine Watch, an industry newsletter.
The Google Desktop incorporates earlier Google advances, such as the “Quick Find” feature that scours your hard drives for documents, applications and recently viewed Web pages. Start typing a few letters of the word, and results begin appearing and become refined with each keystroke.
It also extends the desktop notification feature Google developed for its Web-based Gmail service to Microsoft Outlook, so you are alerted to the subject and sender of your most recent e-mails. Search enhancements for the first time retrieve MSN Messenger Chats and Outlook data, such as contacts, appointments, tasks and notes.
“This goes back to Google’s mission, which is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Nikhil Bhatla, product manager for Google desktop.
The Google Desktop is part of a proliferation of Internet-connected applications that don’t require a Web browser to access.
The latest version of Apple Computer’s OS X operating system contains Dashboard, a program that provides access to more than a thousand compact applications, which it calls “widgets.” Yahoo recently acquired Pixoria, the company whose Konfabulator software offers widgets for Microsoft PCs as well as the Mac.
UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter sees Google as carrying on in that great Silicon Valley tradition — taking on Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash., software giant plans to offer desktop search and enhanced information retrieval as part of its next-generation operating system, Windows Vista.
The Google Desktop better positions the company to compete with Microsoft, which has exploited its control over the computer desktop to trump other Silicon Valley innovators, said Schachter, whose company has had an investment banking relationship with Google.
“It will allow you to access Web information, digital data, without going through a Microsoft,” said Schachter. “I think that’s where Google is headed with all this.”
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