So here I am at SMX-London. The first session of the first day is the keynote speech given by Mario Quieroz, the vice president of products, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Google. Uh oh, there’s an issue with the sound system, the right hand side speaker isn’t working, which would of course be the side that I’m sitting at. I’m going to have to strain to hear.

The first question asked by Chris Sherman, the moderator, was how Google goes about adapting their products for different locations. Mario talked about them wanting to open their software centers around the world so that they could take advantage of the talent pool outside of the US. They currently have 12 development centers in the US.

Data acquisition is an issue in different countries as they obviously require different source data

12 developers in Zurich have responsibility for adapting Google Maps to different locales.

Google Israel is the base for Google Trends.

London has a large development center for Mobile. TV advertising development work is done both in the US and UK offices.

Google is not moving away from being a search company “Search quality is ultimately the most important thing” to them.

The next question was related to corporate culture, and the transition from a small company in a small geographic area to a large worldwide corporation.

Handling diverse cultures is more art than science. There is a balance between building a generic product, and one for each country / region. Its impossible to create custom products for each country. However, some countries do require a special focus i.e. Russia, Israel, Poland (Eastern Europe), so when that need is identified, they’ll put an office in there.

The next question was on the rollout of Universal Search: How do they decide how and what to blend?

The rollout has started in Europe with Images & Maps. As for what they decide to blend, it really depends on the usage.

How does he feel about Facebook as competition?

Google was working on OpenSocial before Facebook opened up their APIs. Observing what happened with Facebook allowed Google to make some changes to OpenSocial before it launched.

iGoogle is one of their most popular and fastest growing properties, allowing users to customize their user experience.

Mobile? What should we be doing to prepare ourselves?
Expect mobile phones to become more open for people to create more beneficial applications. He doesn’t know where it’s going to go (hard to predict), but by opening it up it allows outside creativity to push it into new and exciting areas.

What’s the role of personalized search, and how is that impacted by privacy concerns?
It’s very important, and its success depends on protecting user privacy.

What are the bet Market Opportunities outside of the Western world?
Eastern Europe and Africa are places to look at. There are over 300 million potential internet users in the arabic world, less than 1% of the internet is in arabic, Google has an office in Nairobi to try to figure out how to get more access to people in Kenya, etc.

What’s his favorite Google product?
Mario likes geo-products such as Google Earth, but his favorite product is docs and spreadsheets (not trying to compete with msoft, but he says it’s makes work so easy for him, with the geo-spread teams that he works with). He loves Adsense, not just for the money it brings in to the company. He also likes gmail’s new capability to open a doc attachment as a Google doc.

Which search engine would you use if Google vanished? He still has a Yahoo mail account, but hasn’t done too many searches on other engines for a while, when he does it’s usually just for customer experience / comparison.

The only question from the floor was from Danny Sullivan - How do you handle cross boundary laws, especially censorship? A blog post went out today on this very topic. They’ll adhere to the laws of the countries they are in, but sometimes they’ll try to discuss with appropriate people how certain laws should be interpreted.

Filed under: Education and Training on Friday, November 16th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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