Googling for more content in the Middle East and Africa

Marissa Mayer joined Google in June 1999 when the company had only 20 employees and was just nine months old. Now, Mayer says each cafeteria lines at its offices contain as many people as the company employed at the beginning. She attributes this growth to Google's ability to travel across the globe and integrate local cultures with its own. Emirates Business caught up with Mayer, the internet giant's Vice-President, Search Products and User Experience, on her first visit to the Middle East to learn about her perspectives on search and its future.


What are your first impressions of the Middle East and especially Dubai? How important do you think search is in this region?

I have been impressed with the liveliness, growth and culture in the region. We have all seen pictures of Dubai that have set a particular impression in our mind. From a search perspective, the main challenges we face are with Arabic as a language. We have worked on the language as the penetration of internet users is high in the Arab world – it stands at 10 per cent. This is a sizeable number and another important aspect for Google is the amount of content in the Middle East and Africa region. As we get more content, search becomes more valuable and at least one per cent of the web is in Arabic. Google wants to create more content in search which is why we launched products like Google Knol and Blogger. We have encouraged translation-based search which is now popular.

It seems Google has achieved everything possible in the area of search. What direction do you think the company will take from here?

When I was interviewed by Google I was asked to list three important things required to make Google better, but I could think of only two. Now, being inside the company, I know there are thousands of things to do. Google is investing in the relevance of its search engine to understand how to find better results, to understand signals on the web and enhance the work of our search quality engineers. There is a lot to do in search as it is essential to create advertising and opportunities for new businesses as they become digital. It is important to help people transact online, find e-commerce opportunities and also grow business. The main challenges I see in the next 20 or 30 years is that there will be profound changes. Search is like science in the 15th century when new discoveries happened every day. It's the same with search. The type of media search will go through an explosion in the form of images, video, news, books and local information coming online. This has to be stitched together to give the best search page.

What do you think are Google's main achievements, especially in product development?

Over the years Google has proved to be innovative and we have designed for end-users. A great product can create opportunities for Google and other businesses. Google search brought the best product to market when nobody else was doing it. When our company was starting out they went to different portals to sell their great search technology but those companies refused to acknowledge the technology. They said our product was 85 per cent as good as the next competitor's. Google always believed the internet would get bigger and search would gain relevance. At that point the web was organised in Yahoo-style categories but now you need to have search capabilities as content grows. So the general trend is around innovation focusing on consumer problems and the readiness to adopt technology.

With the immense diffusion of multimedia phones, how does Google intend to benefit from the adoption of such new technology in the Middle East and North Africa?

More and more mobile phones support web access. As the browsers on mobile phones get better and more mobile network operators offer flat-rate data plans we'll see use of the mobile web continue to accelerate. Google introduced its first search engine for mobiles in 2000 and in the years since we've adapted many of our other products to work well on mobile. A lot of people choose to use Google's products on their PCs and we hope that people will find our mobile products meet their needs on the go.

In your opinion, what are the chances of mobile phones competing with the mainstream web in the field of marketing and advertising?

The mobile device is fast becoming the world's gateway to information. Today there are more mobile devices than PCs and TVs combined. An ad-supported model for mobile content makes sense because it can enhance the mobile experience – relevant ads will help people find what they are looking for quickly when they are searching or browsing mobile content. As with all things we do we start with the user so we are focused on ensuring a positive user experience. If we can help provide incentives for publishers to make compelling mobile content and provide broad reach for advertisers, we think we can monetise mobile search and content.


PROFILE: Marissa Mayer, Vice-President, Search Products and User Experience, Google

Mayer leads her company's product management efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs and more.

She joined Google in 1999 as its first female engineer and led the user interface and web server teams. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google's search interface, internationalising the site to include more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com.

Mayer has taught introductory computer programming classes at California's Stanford University, which recognised her with the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award.

Prior to Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab in Switzerland and at SRI International in California. She received a BSc in symbolic systems and an MS in computer science from Stanford. For both degrees she specialised in artificial intelligence.

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