All Eyes on Google

MULTIMEDIA. Google has an Image Search function with almost a billion pictures. Microsoft researchers in China are going full blast to create software that searches through pictures--possibly identifying faces and locations. Meanwhile, a Washington, D.C., start-up called StreamSage has created breakthrough technology that searches audio and video broadcasts by analyzing speech. And AOL, whose search strategy is to build features on top of Google technology, recently bought an audio-video search operation called Singingfish.

PERSONALIZATION. A search engine that knows you're a sports-car buff is more likely to give you auto sites when you query the word Jaguar. Google here is at a disadvantage compared with places like Yahoo and Amazon, which know a lot about their customers.

LOCALIZATION. Last week Google introduced its local search, which produces a map when you type in a category (say, "restaurants") and a ZIP code. But again, Yahoo and MSN have loads of information about where its users live. The breakthrough here might come in a marriage of search engines and cell phones.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. "The ultimate goal is to have a computer that has the kind of semantic knowledge that a reference librarian has," says Google technology director Craig Silverstein. But truly smart search engines are probably decades away.

Google's plan to keep up in these areas is to unleash its brain power in two ways. First, its engineers try to whittle down a rolling list of the Top 100 tasks, determined by Brin, Page and other top execs. Then, as dictated by Google's self-professed "bottom-up" management style, those wizards are permitted to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects of their choosing. Often these ideas wind up becoming part of the Google collection of features, as was the case for the popular Google News. Another breakout project was Orkut, a social-networking service designed by a young engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten. "My dream is to connect all Internet users so they can all relate to each other," he says.

Typical Google big-think. But skeptics are saying that Google's increasingly varied roster of services shows that the company is losing focus. And that its bottom-up style causes chronic disorganization. CEO Schmidt isn't worried. "I believe the disorganization is a feature," he says. "The culture of companies is set early, and if you changed it, you'd lose all of the great things. This model has worked very well for us."