Google Searchology 2009 Event: Rich Snippets, Google Squared, Google Sky Map
On Tuesday, the 12th of May, Google held an event at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, and key speakers at said event included VP of Search Engineering, Udi Manber, and VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer. This article takes a closer look at what Google announced at the Searchology 2009 event.
One of the things that Google announced at Searchology is “rich snippets.” Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer, explain: "Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results. Experiments on Google have shown that people find this additional data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from a webpage, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.”
One other feature announced at the event is Google Squared. “Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs,” explained Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager.
An application for the Android OS was also launched at the Searchology 2009 event – called Google Sky Map for Android, the app is supposedly meant to put the stars in your pocket. “Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it,” explained Software Engineer, John Taylor.
One of the things that Google announced at Searchology is “rich snippets.” Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer, explain: "Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results. Experiments on Google have shown that people find this additional data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from a webpage, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.”
One other feature announced at the event is Google Squared. “Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs,” explained Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager.
An application for the Android OS was also launched at the Searchology 2009 event – called Google Sky Map for Android, the app is supposedly meant to put the stars in your pocket. “Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it,” explained Software Engineer, John Taylor.
