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[ NNSquad ] Thoughts on Google's Voice/Images/Instant Pages search announcements today


Thoughts on Google's Voice/Images/Instant Pages search announcements today
http://j.mp/ikGJLJ

  - - -

As per requests, some brief thoughts on Google's announcements 
today -- related to voice search, search by image, and "instant" page
loading.

Knocking down barriers to knowledge:
http://j.mp/mCAYc5  (Official Google Blog)

Voice Search in Google Chrome: Great stuff.  I don't have access to
the official version yet, but I've been using various similar
approaches via browser extensions for some time.  Given the high
quality of Google's back-end voice recognition system, I expect this
to be extremely useful in broad deployment.

Search by Image: This appears to be essentially a desktop deployment of "Google
Goggles" with additional input mechanisms.  Goggles isn't perfect, but can be
very useful, and is always fun.  I've been asked specifically about facial
recognition in this context.  Given Google's prior statements on this issue,
and the way Goggles works, I would not expect to see Search by Image to be
the launching platform for facial recognition capabilities at this time.

Instant Pages: This expansion on Instant Search prerenders search
results pages that Google anticipates you are especially likely to
select, so that the pages can appear immediately (currently in the dev
versions of the Chrome browser).  

A number of persons have asked me to compare the current Google
"instant pages" approach with earlier matters surrounding prefetching
of pages from search results -- issues that have come up in the past.

The primary controversies at that time were bandwidth usage, possible
distortion of server statistics (for pages prefetched but not
actually viewed), and implications for forensic analysis of user
systems and server logs by law enforcement (again, did an actual
person view a page, or was it only prefetched?)

There are some significant differences in Google's new approach
(actually based on a Chromium development path that has been in
progress for quite some time):

Chrome Prerendering:
http://j.mp/lOPLOP  (Chromium Projects)

For example, Google's prerendering approach will reportedly download
all resources associated with a page, not only (for example) the main
HTML as in some older prefetch implementations.  Obviously, since this
could have significant bandwidth implications, it is important that
Google's "relevance" decisions regarding when it makes sense to
prerender a page be as accurate as possible.

Also, the current development approach provides an API that servers can
use to determine if a page is in view vs. only prerendered:

Visibility API:
http://j.mp/kxVcFM  (W3C)

I do not currently know if it is possible to determine whether any
given GET in a server log was the result of an actual user click
vs. a prerendering prefetch, at least without invoking such an
API mechanism.

Google says that they are taking a conservative approach to prerendering
decisions, only invoking this feature when there is high confidence
that a particular choice is likely to be clicked.  This should yield
considerably fewer "wasted" page downloads compared with past
"unintelligent" prefetch mechanisms implemented by some browsers.

Perhaps even more importantly, over the years it appears that law
enforcement has become considerably more attuned to the fact that
there are various ways for Web page text and images to appear in user
PC caches (and in related server logs) without the user having
actually purposely chosen to view those materials.  So many of the
forensically-related risks associated with prefetch/prerendering
mechanisms would seem to be of considerably less concern than in the
past.  The broader deployment of such systems will likely serve
to further emphasize this reality over time.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org
Founder:
 - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
 - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
 - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein 
Google Buzz: http://j.mp/laurenbuzz 
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com