Google Satellite TV Search to Be Fueled By Android

Google and the Dish Network are implementing Google's Web search experience through a Google Android set-top box, where the users' search queries bring back both TV content and YouTube video content, an IDC analyst told eWEEK.

The Wall Street Journal said Google is testing its search software on TV set-top boxes, which as one of the modern replacements for the cable box enables content transmitted from the Internet. Google is testing this search service with a "very small number of the company's employees and their families," the Journal said.


Reynolds noted that while such a blend of TV and Web video content will become standard in the industry within five years, Google will not be able to graft the standard search experience they use on the Web onto the video world. sports, drama, news, etc.) and then with rich visual representation of results, like little clips of shows, perhaps, or at least an image that represents visually what the video will be about. Good metadata annotation of video objects will be the key to the success of the search experience, since the text around video content description can be sparse at best."


Reynolds said that unlike text search, in which Google makes users click out to pages and read them, no one wants to click out to videos and have to watch a few minutes to see if what they've found is "the one."


Richard Doherty, research director for the Envisioneering Group, told eWEEK he believes Google has at least three strategies for melding the TV with the Web. Second, he sees Chrome Operating System running on smart networked TVs and Tru2way boxes. Finally, Google will serve YouTube videos with embedded ad links.


If Google can get search and YouTube running on TVs well enough, there's good reason to believe Google could extend this approach to the rest of its Google Apps.


Users could well even log onto their Google Accounts through the TV remote or keyboard and access Gmail and other Web services through their televisions.


Getting Google search on TVs, then, may seem like a foregone conclusion at this point, but one well worth pondering for those keen on the convergence of the Internet with television.



Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra did not say when he expected the crossover in the so-called cost per click of its search ads to occur, during a webcast to analysts about the company's mobile business on Monday. But he said that mobile ad rates have increased "dramatically" in recent years.


And he noted that the number of Google searches on mobile phones have increased five-fold in the last two years.


"We hope and believe that there's even a chance that we could exceed desktop in the future," Gundotra said in reference to the cost per click of mobile ads.


Google, the world's No.1 Internet search engine with $23.7 billion in 2009 revenue, has stepped up its mobile efforts as consumers increasingly access the Web from smartphones like Apple Inc's iPhone.


In November, Google announced plans to acquire mobile advertising firm AdMob for $750 million, though the deal is currently facing regulatory review.


The mobile briefing comes as Google is in a standoff with China, the world's largest Internet market by users, over the future of its Internet search website in the country. Google has said it will no longer censor search results in China, a move that some analysts believe could mean the end of its Chinese language web site Google.cn.


Asked what the search situation might mean for Google's mobile plans in China, Google CFO Patrick Pichette said on the webcast on Monday that Android was an "open source" platform that's available to everybody and that the company thought China represented "another great market in which Android should flourish."

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