How Larry Page Thinks About Search
Google's SVP of the search division, Alan Eustace, stuck around to answer a few questions after today's Google Inside Search event, and he gave some new insights into the way CEO Larry Page thinks about search. — Here are some long term goals:
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Larry Page's April 2011 reorganization put him in direct command of a slimmed-down product leadership, his search chief Alan Eustace is out explaining what that command structure means for the product itself: long-term goals set by the CEO, executed through the search division.
The framing lands alongside yesterday's Inside Search announcements — search-by-picture and voice-based mobile search, plus My Places in Maps — which give Eustace's 'long term' talk something concrete to stand on: search is being rebuilt around inputs beyond the typed query. It echoes a pattern going back years; a 2005 conversation with Page already cast him as thinking in decades about search rather than release cycles.
First-order effects
- Search product decisions now route through Page via Eustace, so the multimodal features shipped at Inside Search (image and voice queries on mobile) are best read as the first outputs of the new structure rather than isolated launches.
Second-order effects
- Rival engines have to match input modality, not just result quality — once Google accepts pictures and speech as queries, a competitor still text-only looks behind on the interface, not just the index.
Third-order effects
- If Page's stated long-term goals hold, the unit of competition shifts from ranking web pages toward answering queries drawn from any input — pulling search economics away from the classic link-list model.
The trend: Search is moving from a text-query box toward multimodal answers, with strategy set directly by the CEO rather than delegated.