Le Web 08: Marissa Mayer

The WiFi problems continue at LeWeb, so liveblogging is hard-to-impossible. However, I have a load of notes, and I’ll try to get them online before the Techcrunch party tonight.

However, Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience at Google, said a few blog-worthy things that are rapidly bloggable:

• Chrome is out of beta
• Searchwiki “on” is likely to remain the default option. It’s more about personalisation than another part of PageRank, but if tens of thousands of people downrank a result…
• Video search is a challenge. Two likely routes: speech to text and face recognition. Speech to text is more advanced, and we might see it next year
• Time-based searching is another thing we’re likely to see in the default search next year.

I got the impression that a lot of the hard-core webby types skipped this session, which was a shame. This was the least product pitch presentation I’ve seen Mayer give, thanks to some intelligent questioning from Mike Arrington.