Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

Okay, not really. But that was my initial reaction to this quote, extracted from a Q&A session with Google’s founder and indicating he wanted a search engine to "understand everything."

One of the things I liked in the video was Larry’s statement that they have been successful at "scaling innovation." He goes on to talk about some of the failures they’ve had prior to their big successes. This reminded me of a post at Church of the Customer about Intuit’s culture of rewarding experimentation whether the experiment was successful or not.

The message is: try it and see.

Some additional quotes and my reation: 

"How do we get people to the right place as quickly as possible?" ~Larry

Right on!

"You have to believe that at some point, search goes down." ~interviewer

Errr, no, I don’t. Actually, I suspect that the exact opposite will happen for the forseeable future.

"As an advertiser, you would always choose a more targeted ad over an untargeted ad." ~Eric

Not sure about the adverb "always," but just because I generally have a knee-jerk reaction to absolutes (except when I use them myself).

"In most advertising, you pay whether the person consumes the product or not. But in our case, you only are charged if the person clicks on the ad. We have a lot of famous stories of people who tried ads that nobody ever clicked on and that’s because the ads sucked. And they never had to pay for their error." ~Eric

That sure makes trying things and seeing what works a lot more palatable. Lower barriers to entry are great, especially for smaller businesses.

"I think [the most content growth is] going to be user-generated. The explosion in the number of blogs, for example… if you look at user communities, I’m thinking of MySpace as an example, they’re all exploding because people have a lot to say. And there’s a lot of reasons to think that Google’s index will have more and more user-generated [content]." ~Eric

I love this. It does mean, however, that I may want to use something Amazon-like when I am looking to purchase a sprocket rather than seeing what people have to say about their own sprockets and sprocket-support experiences.

There was some discussion of Google’s "China decision." I recommend you watch it.

And they are expecting a lot of the future growth rate in mobile device search.