Google Bets On Socially-Enhanced Search

As controversy swirls around smartphones that track and record users’ whereabouts and Internet search engines that analyze the person doing the surfing, Carter Maslan toils to make Google a better mind reader and smarter roadmap.

Maslan, product management director of local search at Google Inc., arrived at the $29 billion search engine behemoth in 2007 after a stint as Microsoft Corp.’s director of technical evangelism. It’s his job to organize Google information and searches around the businesses and locations that inhabit the Internet. For training, he holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University.

Google was in the news this spring as word came that its Android phone operating system could track and record the location of cell phone users and send that information along to Google servers. In May, a company executive appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law to testify on the issue.

Meanwhile, critics such as Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, have raised questions about a strategy used by search engines like Google to figure out what users might want to read, then deliver it to them high in the search results. The tactic effectively filters what information people are given -- often without their knowledge -- tending to harden ingrained opinions rather than open people to other viewpoints, critics say.

Still, as Internet information and mobile traffic explodes, such technology can help people simplify the search process and find the things they want more quickly. In a recent conversation with NetNewsCheck, Maslan talked about his role at the epicenter of this fast evolving landscape.

An edited transcript:

Talk about Google’s emphasis on location in the search process.

A lot of the motivation for our efforts in local search is that people are naturally looking for local information in addition to Web pages …. When we would sample the [Google] queries, we found that roughly 20% of them [done on desktops a year ago] were looking for places. On mobile, we’ve actually noticed that as many as 40% of the queries [are looking for places]. So an effort to organize the world’s information around places is a key part of making search much better.

For the past four years, we’ve been working on doing that. In order to describe places, you need to know where they are on the planet. We spent a lot of effort just getting the base imagery for the whole planet in place. Once you’ve got that, you need to be able to describe where a place is. How do you translate 100 Main Street to a particular latitude and longitude? And then the next round of effort after that was looking at how you identify references to places, because people refer to things in different ways. It might be ‘Joe’s Barbeque’ versus ‘Joe’s Barbeque Restaurant’ versus ‘Joe’s of Austin,’ and all of those references are the same place. And then finally, there’s learning how to interpret queries correctly. If you say ‘Shalimar’ you might mean a city in Florida if you’re on the East Coast or you may mean a restaurant in San Francisco if you’re walking around a restaurant area.

Those were the core foundation layers that we built up over time. Now we’ve got a lot of our effort in making the search results great for people as they walk around in the world. You’re on the mobile phone and you and your phone are kind of a query just walking around, because you’re saying a lot just by where you are and what time of day it is, what day of the week it is.

So we want to get really smart about the results personalized for you, based on the places you’ve liked before and … places that you’ve rated. A lot of our effort now is making the results smarter and smarter, particularly for you personally.

Which brings us to a new Google feature that allows users to rate restaurants, hotels and other locations; share their ratings with friends; and, in theory, benefit from Google suggestions based on their earlier likes. Has that attracted many users?

We’ve had over 3 million ratings already just since it’s been available [in November] on Android, iPhones, desktops and things. People are using it. The more you use it, the better your search results get. In terms of users, we’re on a continual push to show the value of having a signed-in user experience [signing in on Google is required, for example, to see ratings from your friends]. If you like Google, you’ll like it even better if you’re signed in because we’re able to give you better search results based on the things that you’ve rated in the past.