Google trotted out the execs and treated the press to famous Google catering. What did the press really see that was news? Not much.

Google emphasized that they think the search game is in the early stages. They did mention that they are experimenting with video ads, and spoke a bit about demographics. But this is stuff they mostly covered in their talk with analysts after quarterly earnings a couple of weeks ago.

Eventually they announced 4 'products' - Google Trends, Desktop version 4, Google Notebook and Google Co-op.

People like Paul Kedrosky have been urging them not to keep creating little incomplete products but rather to polish the stuff that's already out there and I'd say they basically ignored his pleas.

However, the products they did announce are rather meager and a little bit strange.

You have to go read Philipp's breakdown of Google Co-op, suffice to say it's not really a mainstream product - unless you're the first spammer who figures out how to game Co-op for your benefit. It's similar in purpose to Google Base. Google needs people to send them more data so they can categorize it better.
Upshot: For Geeks only

Google Trends is a cute little graphing tool that shows how much relative traffic various search terms get.
Upshot: It's a toy

And Google Desktop 4 is basically contains copies of Yahoo's Konfabulator widgets for your desktop
Upshot: Incredibly me-too.

Google Notebook was announced but not released, so let's reserve judgement.

Overall, a rather boring media day, and very underwhelming product-wise.

So I wonder if Kedrosky's happy after all? They didn't really announce anything major - is that good or bad?

¶ 5/11/2006