SEO by the Sea

You’ve returned to your hotel room from a business meeting with a pocket full of business cards from people that you’ve met, and receipts from your business trip. One at a time, you place the cards and receipts on a desk in your room and snap pictures of them with the phone on your camera, and send the photos off to Google to be processed.

The cards and receipts are scanned, and organized for you in your documents archive, so that they can be searched for, and used in your contacts list, and in your expense report.

That example brushes the surface of possibilities of a document archiving, storage, and retrieval system of images of physical documents, described in a new patent application published by Google.

Other documents that could be used in this type of system might include doctors prescriptions, tickets, contracts, and more. Depending upon how the system is set up, just taking a picture might trigger the document archiving system.

Continue reading Google on Archiving and Retrieving Documents Using Your Camera Phone

A few years back, finding myself stranded on the side of the road with a broken down pickup truck and being over an hour’s drive from home, I convinced myself to finally get a mobile phone.

I didn’t necessarily want to have a phone hanging at my side all of the time, and I didn’t need it for work at that time. But it would have been useful in that emergency, and I wanted to start seeing what web sites looked like on a phone.

Search engines are also paying more attention to the smaller screens, and the more limited keyboards available to people who access the Web by phone. What influence do these constraints have upon the future of mobile search?

Studying Query Suggestions on Phones

Continue reading Phone Keyboards and Seachers Using Predictive Query Suggestions

Google is aiming at providing wireless internet access in unused television channels in the white space between channels 2 and 51 on TV sets that aren’t hooked up to satellite or cable services.

While many stations broadcast between these ranges in the US, most areas have gaps where there aren’t broadcasts carried on those channels.

Google filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission on March 21 – Authorized Ex Parte Contact – Unlicensed Operation in the TV Broadcast Bands (pdf) – presenting plans to use those gaps for wireless broadcasts in those TV bands to unlicensed personal and portable devices.

The access could be used for mobile devices, such as those that could be built to use Google’s open source Android platform.

The letter provides some details on the type of measures and technology that might be needed to enable the use of these unused airwaves.

Continue reading Google Granted Patent Can Filter Distortion in Unused TV White Spaces

Do you use MyYahoo as a portal page every time you access the Web? If you were away from your computer, and had a few minutes to spare, would you consider calling that page, and listening to it over the phone, to get your stock picks, or horoscope, or sports scores?

A newly granted patent from Microsoft describes a way of creating a personalized profile and phone system that can provide unique content tailored to you and your tastes, or allow you to access portal sites by phone such as MyYahoo.

The mix of Web and phone has the potential to provide some interesting and unique experiences beyond attempting to browse the Web on a small screen, or check email.

Microsoft’s patent enables a number of personalized approaches to using a telephone in a manner which interacts with information on the Web.

Continue reading Microsoft on Personalized Phone Portals

After lots of speculation about a Google Phone, or an operating system from Google, we see a patent application published at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and assigned to Google, that primarily focuses upon a user interface for displaying search results on the small screens of handheld devices, and which suggests the use of special shortcuts using the limited keyboards of many phones.

Some of the screenshots from the application appear to infer that this user interface may do more than provide search results, and the description from the application also hints that this user interface may interact with other other software from Google, such as a data processing system that “may be supplied by Google.”

But, the claims listed in the patent filing are limited to describing a user interface that focuses upon search.

Continue reading Google Patent Application on a User Interface for a Phone

A couple of months ago, the Wall Street Journal provided some speculation about a Google phone in an article titled Google Pushes Tailored Phones To Win Lucrative Ad Market.

It’s difficult to tell how much is speculation, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt has gone on record as saying that he believes that consumers will watch targeted ads in exchange for free cell phone service.

How exactly would targeted ads work on a cell phone? Would they check out whom you’re calling, and target ads based upon whether your calls go to the local cheap pizzeria for delivery instead of making reservations at very expensive eateries?

If you prefer to stay at 5 star hotels or at basic budget lodgings, how might the ads that you see on your phone differ? If most of the people you call have Italian last names, might pasta feature prominently in the targeted ads that you see?

Continue reading Second Thoughts on a GPhone: Privacy and Targeted Ads

How might a voice search engine learn new words that have been introduced into popular speech, such as “da shiznet,” and learn and understand different pronunciations of words, such as might be found in spoken language based upon regional differences?

A newly published patent filing from Google provides some hints.

Last April, Google was granted a patent on a Voice interface for a search engine. I wrote about it in Google voice search patent granted.

That earlier patent filing introduces a number of topics around speech recognition, and tells us about things like a language model, which could learn new words and different pronuciations.

Since then, we’ve actually seen a voice search from Google introduced at Goog 411

Continue reading Google Learning Speech Recognition for Voice Search from MTV?