03/18/2009 1:00 pm
POV
Google 'Legend' Marissa Mayer Tells Lesley Stahl What's Next
Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, joins Lesley Stahl to discuss her company's future, revenue, privacy ... and the creation of the perfect cupcake. Read on ...
Marissa Mayer © AP
LESLEY: Welcome, Marissa Mayer. Thank you for joining us at wowOwow. You are vice president of Google, a person who Charlie Rose called “a legend already” on his program this month. And you’re what — how old are you?
MARISSA: I’m 33.
LESLEY: And you’re a legend. Wow. Well, Marissa, you and I have known each other since 2005, when I did a story on Google for "60 Minutes"
and interviewed you because, among other things, you oversee Google
Search. I don’t know if you knew this at the time, but you gave me my
very first lesson on how to search.
MARISSA: Did I really? I do remember using Google Maps and finding nearby pharmacies.
LESLEY: No, you showed me the home page and what to do and all of that. Marissa, you’re also responsible for new products, or as Business Week
said, your job is to help Google out-think your rivals. So let me ask
you about a brand-new product that was just introduced called Google
Voice. According to what’s been in the newspapers, it’s a phone service
– which is free – and could be the death note of the phone companies.
So, what is Google Voice and is it the end of phone companies?
MARISSA: Well, I think with all new products, especially ones
that try and question the norm and seem disruptive, there’s always a
little bit of fear and it’s always a little bit overblown. I don’t
think it’s going to be the end of the phone companies. I do think that
Google Voice is a really interesting product that’s got a great piece
of technology behind it. One of the key features of Google Voice for me
is that when people call and leave you a voice mail, Google Voice
transcribes it and sends it to you via e-mail, which is really nice. So
if you’re at work and it’s not a great time to take a phone call, you
still get your messages and you can actually reply via e-mail to that
person.
LESLEY: Oh, I like that.
MARISSA: So, yes, it’s really nice. And the core piece of
technology behind that is speech to text. We now have speech models
that are good enough that, with different voices, different accents,
different intonations, we can produce a transcript of that voice mail –
which is really very nice for users in terms of everyday convenience.
But it also points to some of what we can achieve with technology,
because when you think about using that same technology, say, on
videos, for the purposes of search – in terms of being able to search
by voice from your phone – there are a lot of things that we can do
with that. And we have set applications that explore that already. But
I imagine that we will be able to take the technology and weave it even
more deeply into what we do.
LESLEY: And is it available? Can I get it right now, today? Is it in beta?
MARISSA: My understanding is that we’re currently in a limited
beta. So the service is being offered to subscribers of Grand Central,
which is a company that we acquired a few years ago.
LESLEY: Ah, OK. Well let me ask you about another thing
that Google introduced last week: something where you get ads based on
your personal interests. It’s centered on what they call “behavioral
targeting,” where one gets an ad based on places which they had
clicked. In other words you would be tracking my moves online, watching
the places I visit. It sounds to me like this is the kind of thing that
Facebook got in trouble for and had to stop doing. Is it that kind of thing?
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I saw this woman on Charlie Rose last week, and boy, what an impressive girl ! Wow. And to work for Google !!! Next to Apple, the coolest place on earth.
I would love to erase 30 years from my life and jump into her skin !
Thanks for a great interview Leslie.
ps. please interview Michael Pollan ;-)
"Google’s been very focused on very relevant ads all along. We actually take textual ads and target them to a particular piece of content. So the small text ads you see running on the side, Ads by Google, are irrelevant to what you’re reading."
I think "irrelevant" was supposed to be "relevant".
I’d like to hear her thoughts on bringing VOIP through Google as well. I’m getting rather annoyed with trying to find a decent one. Either they don’t back their product, or they want to charge a monthly fee. I’d like to find one that is set to a year contract.
Google, Yahoo, etc…all spider through Open Directory Project (IE: Dmoz.org).
A nice Meta search engine is Copernic.com (now you know how they find more of their contents at). Keep in mind though, there is no firewall for it. But if you can’t find it in Google or the other search engines, you might be able to locate it there.
Hi I have a short comment about privacy and google. They have been
tracking me a few years now. They pulled all my private poetry from
my history. And I saw it go right off the screen including my password.
I hope they enjoyed them. It took me 4 years to write them under severe circumstances. Mood Swings Very high and very low.
You have hellava nerve My sweat and tears were on each and every one.
A legend at 33 already? Wow. Obviously I am severely behind the curve. I didn’t know her.