Live blog: Keynote: Imagination, Immediacy and Innovation... plus a little glimpse under the hood at Google

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search and User Experience

First off we get a montage of artist themes for iGoogle. Why is it interesting for developers? Because it was built on top of the iGoogle API.

Google have been focussing on "the ordinary and the everyday", e.g. iGoogle. Gadgets are a new form of distribution and a new way to reach people. What are the most used app on the web? Social networking, blogs, news, search, homepages and mail.

Occram's Razor for design: the simplest design is probably right. Why is the Gogole homepage so simple? "We didn't have a webmaster and I don't do HTML" - Sergey. When they tested the design, the users didn't do anything for minutes. They asked why - "I'm waiting for the rest of it". In 99 this style of website was unheard of.

When you do a query today, you hit around 700 servers. Andrew has videoed the details about what happens here with the Google infrastructure, so I refer you to that! Suffice to say that the point is that the users don't need to know the complexity of doing a search query, just the be presented with the easiest interface, validating Occram's Razor for logic.

Google run bucket tests on tiny differences, and through metrics and stats they can say which one is a better user experience. The example is the whitespace under the logo on the search results page. Metrics are interesting, using "user happiness" through repeat searches, etc. Turning design into a science.

"If I had asked people for what they had wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford

One experiment saw a 20% fall in searches when the latency doubled. Similarly, in Google maps, when they decreased the page size from 110K to around 60K, they had a 30% increase. YouTube shows users uploaded videos straight away, whereas Google Video makes people wait 24-48 hours, which is one reason that YouTube is more successful, with a steeper learning curve.

With search the feedback loop is quick, so people learn quickly, going from novice to expert in only a month or so. It's important to understand the learning curve and to make the experience great for new users and experts, not catering to either to the detriment of the other.

Its incredible to think about the sped of advancement. Mobile phones, for example, in the last 10 years.

Cross language information retrieval is a big thing for google. The end game is to make searching independent of language, and they're starting to get there with Google Language search.

"A healthy disrespect for the impossible." - Larry Page. Search is an impossible problem to solve perfectly, but you can keep improving. Disambiguation is a great example - does dr mean doctor, drive or Dominican Republic? Google Health is another example of an impossible problem, but even by approximately solving it you can make a huge difference in people's lives. Google Book Search too. It's important not to get caught up in the difficulty - divide and conquer.

"Be scrappy, revel in constraints."

An interesting constraint is translation of Google. They tried to use a professional services firm, but this failed. They ended up using user volunteers to help translate Google, through a link on the preferences page... They now have 250K translators! There is an easter egg on the translate - the language "Bork bork bork!", as spoken by the Muppets' Swedish chef. They have over a million page views in this language every day!

Google brainstorm ridiculous problems to help the creative juices keep flowing. For example, "Should web build a suspension bridge between two buildings?" Such brainstorms brought around Street View, and Book Search. The imagination is a muscle, and this, and the 20% time exercises it, and keeps Google healthy.

"Do not let the urgent drown out the important."

Google does read your emails about features and problems! They listen to this feedback, as well as the automated feedback.