the reflexions insider

Google is full of really smart people working on really hard problems. This is nothing new. Indeed the image of brilliant young engineers working on game-changing new products has come to define the company’s identity. What’s surprising to me is Google’s relative lack of significant innovation in recent years on its bread-and-butter product: search. Recent rumblings indicate that this may start to change.

The company is understandably hesitant to tinker with its core product, which some analysts estimate generates over 90% of its total revenue, especially given its most recent quarter which exceeded even the most optimistic expectations (in a recession, no less). But the sands are shifitng, and the sheer size of Google means it will be hard-pressed to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors who are starting to get attention, like Powerset and Twitter.

A recent article at Google Watch suggests that Google sees its future in the semantic web, a collection of standards and technologies that seek to deliver more meaning and structure to the web’s content but have largely languished due to a lack of widespread adoption. From the article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is recently quoted as saying:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in the phrase? We’ve made a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

This move signals a recognition by Google that the web is fast evolving from the collection-of-linked-documents model on which its search system has been based since 1998, to a full-fledged communications platform that demands a meaningful, context-driven, and up-to-the-second search index.

Google’s revolutionary luster has grown tarnished by an aging paradigm which desperately needs to adapt to a changing web.

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