Customer Satisfaction and the Swiss Army Knife

A lot of blogs and newspapers discuss a rather boring news: "for the first time, Google has lost its crown to Yahoo as the highest-rated search and portal site in a key customer satisfaction survey", namely ACSI. The scores are so close that it's difficult to draw some conclusions (Yahoo: 79, Google: 78, MSN: 75, Ask.com: 75), but Google is the only one that lost some points.

So why aren't customers satisfied with Google? "The average consumer that goes to Google today doesn't see anything different than from three years ago," thinks Larry Freed, president of Foresee Results, and he's right. Google's sparse homepage continues to stand out from the rest of the crowd and it has a lot of admirers: it loads fast, it shows exactly what you want (a search box) and it's not intimidating.

But Google users have many opportunities to find out about Google products: from the new menu bar to the OneBox results, from the extended snippets to Google Toolbar, from the personalized homepage to the impressive press coverage Google gets. For example, you can discover Google Docs in many ways: you may see a link next to a Gmail attachment, receive an invitation to collaborate on a document, click on the link from Google's homepage or find an option in Google Toolbar. People should discover a product naturally.

Google's main problem is to make people realize that it's more than a search engine and that could be solved by packaging all its non-search services in Google Apps, integrating them and distributing them as a suite of online communication tools.

"Google falls by 4% from a year ago to a score of 78. Its year-to-date stock returns have been about market average - a far cry from the explosive growth after going public in 2004. Google also missed its most recent earnings forecast. For a company that has introduced so many new products and made so many changes, it may be surprising that its homepage has changed so little. It is almost the same as it was in the 1990s. Some users say it looks stale compared to Ask.com, which has a very different display of search results," says Professor Claes Fornell from the University of Michigan.

And here's a nice quote from a 2002 interview with Google's Marissa Mayer:
I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

Google's difficult task is to make people aware of the tools that are available in the Swiss Army Knife.

{ The image, which shows a Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, is licensed as Creative Commons by Martin. }

Dancing Around the World

Where the hell is Matt? The truth is that Matt is everywhere he wants to be. "For the past few years, video game designer Matt Harding has pursued an unlikely avocation as a worldwide wanderer. His videos of himself dancing (rather badly) at various exotic locales turned into the "Where the Hell Is Matt?" website and a hit video series on YouTube."

Here's his most popular video, from 2006:



... and a very interesting interview with Matt, in which he explains why he chose to travel around the world instead of spending 12 hours a day designing video games:


You can see the places he visited on a Google Map or in Google Earth and find more about him at WhereTheHellIsMatt.com.

Gmail, the Top Web Mail Service with the Least Amount of Free Storage

Now that Microsoft upgraded its horrifically-named Windows Live Hotmail from 2GB of storage to 5GB, Gmail is officially the major webmail service with the least amount of free storage. Here's a comparison between the top 4 mail services (*the green text reflects the storage for premium accounts that typically cost $20 a year).


Yahoo Mail
Windows Live Hotmail
AOL Mail
Gmail
Storage
"unlimited"
5GB (10GB)*
"unlimited"
2.8GB+ (8.8GB+)*
Maximum attachment size
10MB (20MB)*
10MB (20MB)*
16MB
20MB

Three years ago, when Gmail was launched, it offered 250 times more storage than Yahoo Mail and 500 times more storage than Hotmail.

"Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That's why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer." (from the press release)

The competing services quickly adjusted and increased their offerings. At that time, Gmail was invite-only so it couldn't capture too many users. Gmail started to be available to everyone in February, when Yahoo Mail and Hotmail already had many of Gmail features.

While Gmail still has unique features (conversations, labels, POP3, mail fetcher, unobtrusive ads, advanced search, attachment preview), it's difficult to understand why Google intentionally lost the battle of mail storage, after starting it three years ago. Maybe 2.8 GB is enough for most people or maybe the storage space isn't a distinctive feature anymore.

In a Wall Street Journal article about Yahoo's "unlimited" storage, "one Yahoo executive conceded that a main reason for the move to no limits was to eliminate the perception that Gmail still offered more storage, even though Yahoo had long since caught up."


So all these announcements about "unlimited" storage are just some marketing schemes (there's no such thing as unlimited storage). As very few people use more than 1 GB of mail storage, any webmail provider could easily replace 1 GB or 2 GB with infinite storage. But Google decided to stop playing this game and to let others implement the "Infinity+1 storage plan" (explanation: Gmail's homepage on April 1st, 2005).

The Building Blocks of Google Browser

Google doesn't intend to develop a browser: they'll just integrate the most important features of a browser in Google Toolbar, which is already available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Instead of marketing a new browser, Google only has to make deals with hardware and software companies like Dell, Sun, Adobe and bundle its small plug-in. While Google Toolbar's most important role is to make it easier to search using Google and to increase user's loyalty, it's also a simple way to promote new products and to facilitate the transition to storing data online.

Bookmarks - if you store your bookmarks online, they're fully searchable and available from any computer connected to the Internet. That's the idea behind Google Bookmarks.


History - your browser keeps the pages you visit for a small number of days and you can only search their titles. Google Web History stores all your Google searches and all the pages you visit from any computer. You get personalized search results, recommendations and a searchable database of your online activity.

Address bar - you no longer have to remember URLs. Browse by Name lets you enter the name of a company, an organization, a product or a service and go straight to its homepage. If the query is not navigational (there's no perfect answer), Google will send you to the search results page. Some people say this is an even better idea than AOL keywords.


Cookies, passwords - in addition to sessions, bookmarks and local history. This isn't yet a Google Toolbar feature, but Google Browser Sync could be integrated in the next versions. Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that synchronizes your browser settings across your computers and makes the transition between two computers seamless.

Opening files - if you have Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, you can read documents from your browser. Google Toolbar for Firefox has a feature that lets you open documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs.


Any browser could be a Google Browser if you would just log in to your Google Account and all your settings would follow you: your bookmarks, the most recent visited pages, the passwords for all the other accounts, your plug-ins and their settings. And as more and more web applications become decent replacements for software, Google Browser slowly morphs into a web desktop - let's call it Google Operating System.

Embedding Google Maps

While made online mapping more accessible and easy to integrate with your data, it's still not trivial to include a simple map in your site. You could make a screenshot, but your map wouldn't be interactive, or you could use Google Maps API, but that's too complicated if you don't know JavaScript.

Fortunately, there are sites that solve this problem and provide you some code you can paste in your site. Map Generator is very easy to use: enter the address, the type of map (street-level, satellite or hybrid), its dimensions and you could build a map like this:


My Maps Plus lets you embed personalized Google Maps by entering the address of the KML file generated by Google Maps. This way, you can showcase more than one location.

According to APCMAG, Google Maps will launch next week an option to easily embed maps. "First up, if you know how to embed a YouTube video in your blog, you'll be able to embed Google Maps in your website, Google promises. It'll be as simple as cutting and pasting a bit of HTML code into your website, just like a YouTube video. The embedded maps have the full functionality of Google Maps -- they provide satellite view, map view or hybrid view, and users can click and drag the maps around." They'll probably look the iframe included above and you'll see them in a lot of pages that provide contact information.

{ via Mashable }

Google Health Prototype


New York Times reports that Google's plans for a service that puts you in control of your health information start to take shape. This service could help you make more informed decisions about your health, get personalized recommendations from specialists and share this information with other people.
A prototype of Google Health, which the company has shown to health professionals and advisers, embodies the consumer-centered philosophy. The welcome page reads, "At Google, we feel patients should be in charge of their health information, and they should be able to grant their healthcare providers, family members, or whomever they choose, access to this information. Google Health was developed to meet this need."

A presentation of screen images from the prototype - which two people who received it showed to a reporter - then has 17 other Web pages including a "health profile" for medications, conditions and allergies; a personalized "health guide" for suggested treatments, drug interactions and diet and exercise regimens; pages for sharing information, receiving reminder messages to get prescription refills or visit a doctor, and pages to access directories for nearby physicians and specialists.



More about Google Health straight from the horse's mouth:

* Health care information matters - "Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient's needs."

* How do you know you're getting the best care possible? - "There is a lot of material out there about drugs, diseases, procedures and treatments. How do you know what is trustworthy and what isn't? Search is great at finding us places with relevant information, but it is hard to know which links are reliable and which are less so."

* Is there a doctor in the family? - "We have been talking to many medical experts to understand what the best guidelines are, and how we can determine which ones apply in different circumstances. If such guidelines were more available to patients, they might be able to, by inputting information such as age, gender or medications, learn about recommended screening tests and other preventive measures, or about harmful drug interactions."

* Some screenshots of the prototype.

{ The first screenshot is licensed as Creative Commons by Philipp Lenssen. The second image, where you can see Adam Bosworth (VP at Google and Google Health's architect), is licensed as Creative Commons by AlphachimpStudio. }

The History of Your Book Searches

Google Web History is more useful starting from today because it has support for a new Google service: Book Search. All your queries, all the books you've opened and a list of the pages you've read are available, sorted chronologically. You can also search the books, but only the title is searchable, which is rather weird.

Web History is a service that lets you "view and search across web pages you've visited in the past". The standard version only logs your Google queries and the associated search results you click on, but if you enable web history, Google can track all the pages you visit. This makes your web history persistent (browsers usually keep your history for about 7 days), fully searchable and always available.

Google Earth, a Personal Journey

When you open Google Earth, there's no guide that suggests you where to go. You only have a search box and an entire planet to discover.

In an interesting paper titled "Google's Geospatial Organizing Principle" [PDF], Michael Jones from Google describes the philosophy behind Google Earth and Google Maps, two products that try to find the answer to an important question: "where?".
Whitehead saw education as a cyclical process of stages - romance, precision, and generalization - with a reverent emphasis on romance, the emotional involvement on the part of the learner that initiates rewarding educational experiences. Just as children play with building blocks in simple wonder for years before noting patterns in their gravity- and friction-driven behavior and decades before learning an engineers appreciation for stress and strain, Whiteheads romance is the play and wonder in our initial steps toward precisions deeper understanding and generalizations broader insights.

Leveraging the role in learning played by interest and curiosity, our user experience is meant to enhance the romance of unguided personal exploration, thereby enticing users toward a journey of understanding.

Our ultimate expression of the roles of romance and context in answering where? is Google Earth, a network-based browser for searching and displaying information in situ. It lets users navigate a geospatial Web of places in a planetary application metaphor with where and when as the organizing principles.

The vision for Google Earth inverts the roles of Web browser as application and map as content, resulting in an experience where the planet itself is the browser. Three-dimensional navigation lets users fly and swoop down to the Earth, where they search by looking, clicking, and typing. (...)

Our geospatial products create an information landscape spanning global and human scales using visual context, direct manipulation, and Alfred North Whitehead's insights to advance Google's mission. We trust the sense of place to entice romance, facilitate precision, and encourage generalization as users search and explore our maps and globes.

{ via Google Earth Blog }

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