Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

NEW SEARCH INTERFACES

What new search interfaces can we expect to see? Many of them exist already. Shazam is an iPhone application (now with more than 100 million users)3 that enables the iPhone owner to hold the phone up to a speaker so that Shazam can “listen” to music and identify it. The Urbanspoon4 iPhone application has a slot machine interface. Simply shake the iPhone and the application detects your location and spins up restaurant locations (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 Urbanspoon iPhone Application

Source: Urbanspoon

Google Maps now lets you search indoors (such as within an airport, shopping mall, or store).5

And take a look at Siri, released with the iPhone 4S. Simply speak to your phone when you want something. Mark Rolston of frog design noted that it doesn’t take much to think about combining voice technology, like the kind Apple has in Siri, with the kind of processing power we have now to create a computer that uses any available surface (a wall, a mirror, etc.) as a screen. “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them.”6

Jason Hiner wrote on ZDNet in November 2011:7

The revolutionary piece of Siri is what it does in Internet search. It’s early and Siri is still imperfect, but there are moments when Siri drastically streamlines the search process ...