Virginia Nussey had an interesting interview with Matt Cutts on The Future of Search. Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam Team and an all-around authority on Google guidelines and practices.
He had a deal to say about spam but the most intriguing section was on Mobile Search.
2009 will be a big year for mobile.
Yes, another big year for mobile — but for real this time! It’s not that the last several big years for mobile were hoaxes, but rather that we’ve been building to this point for a while now, and the time is finally upon us. The Pew Internet Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center, released The Future of the Internet III report this week and the verdict is in.
By 2020 (and maybe even before that), mobile devices will be the primary connection tool to the Internet. This is a prediction that has rightly scared a few people who realize that this could blur the line between work time and personal time even further. Matt’s concerns lie elsewhere though, focusing on how to make search useful on a small screen and on things like the progress of speech to text, machine translation and face recognition technologies.
Speech technology is the natural way to interact with a small cell phone. For many, the use of keyboards with incredibly small keys is at the least awkward and in some cases impossible. There are many challenges in using the rich signals that come from a voice but it must be the eventual winner. Matt Cutts alluded to this, and I am certain this will prove to be the eventual solution.
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Matt Cutts is a man with a big ambition and I’m observing the changes of the Google in 2009 with interest.
It should be very interesting to see how this all works out. I agree that voice activation has to be a huge factor, as it is time consuming and difficult to do that much on a cell phone keyboard. That being said, I saw a report on CNN quite a while ago that said internet use on cell phones has already overtaken computers in Japan.
For me, using Internet with a mobile phone can be useful at certain times, especially when I am on the run. But in normal conditions, I still prefer a PC compared to a mobile. Nevertheless, it is a very interesting progress.
I’m not sure that mobile will ever take over top position from the actual pc, but I do believe there are definitely enough people to start configuring all web sites for the mobile users.
I tend to agree that the future of mobile is voice/ How can you index a voice site? I bet google is working on it.