Google's Schmidt: Autonomous, Fast Search Is ‘Our New Definition’
In a big-picture keynote at Berlin's IFA home electronics event, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt said Google's new guiding principle is in serving users automatic search results, all the time, super-quick...
Context & Ripple Effects
The keynote extends a thread Google has been pulling since at least 2007, when it framed its mission as organising your daily life rather than merely indexing the web: what Schmidt laid out at IFA is the operational version of that ambition — search that serves results automatically, continuously, and fast, with no query required.
The Berlin stage matters beyond the slogan. At the same event Google confirmed its Web-to-TV service launches in the United States this autumn, with worldwide expansion planned the following year, putting the autonomous-search vision into the living room. An animated kinetic logo on Google's homepage fueled speculation about a major search announcement the next day, though that remains unconfirmed. It also came days after Schmidt defended Google's competition practices on September 3, insisting its success rests on product quality rather than locking in users or advertisers.
First-order effects
- Google's product direction shifts from answering typed queries to anticipating them — the company's stated definition of success becomes speed and autonomy of results, not result quality after a search.
- The Web-to-TV commitment gives Google a concrete near-term deliverable: a US launch this autumn and a worldwide rollout targeted for 2011.
Second-order effects
- Consumer-electronics makers gathered at IFA become the distribution layer for Google's living-room ambitions, turning TV manufacturers into partners whose hardware determines whether autonomous search reaches the couch.
- If results arrive without a query, the economics of being found change for publishers and advertisers alike: visibility starts depending on Google's inference about intent rather than on keyword matching.
Third-order effects
- Search migrating from a pull model to an ambient, always-on one points toward value concentrating in whoever controls context across devices — phones, TVs, and eventually other screens — deepening the dominance questions Schmidt was already fielding publicly this week.
The trend: Search is moving from a tool users operate to a service that anticipates them, with Google pushing that shift from the browser onto every screen in the home.