10 Google Products To Look Out For In 2011

Clint Boulton eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved,

As we embark on a new year, eWEEK looks ahead to what 2011 could hold for the search giant Google

In 2010, the search engine (can we even call Google just a search engine any more?) moved wholly into mobile with Android taking off on smartphones from Samsung, Motorola, HTC and LG to challenge Apple’s iPhone. Google also launched a social conversation service called Buzz that showed a bit of how the company thinks about social networking. But we want to see more, which is supposed to come in the form of Google +1. So where should Google focus its efforts in 2011?

It’s clear the company should focus on three technology sectors in 2011: mobile, search and social. Google faces increased competition from Apple, Microsoft, RIM and others in the mobile computing market. Getting Android on more tablets will be important to counter the rise of the iPad.

Google also needs to keep boosting its purview over search and other property traffic from Facebook, which is sucking up more of users’ time as the network speeds toward 600 million users worldwide. For a glimpse of what 2011 could hold for the search giant, here’s eWEEK’s top 10 list of Google predictions:

Google +1

Google Me. Emerald Sea, Emerald City. Google +1, as Google’s social network initiative is currently called, is supposed to be the big challenger to Facebook. Instead, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google is building layers of social tools throughout Google’s web services. We’ve been talking about it since summer 2011. Now we want to see it.

Contextual Discovery

Serendipitous Search. Autonomous Search. Contextual Discovery is Google geolocal chief Marissa Mayer’s latest term for search that targets mobile phone users on the go. Mayer (left) said at Le Web: “Take a user’s location as a piece of context for finding what they want without them actually searching for anything. We have a couple of things we’re experimenting with, but it will be out in the next year.” Privacy must be included.

Google Fibre

We’ve been greatly anticipating this launch since Google unveiled its project in February 2010. Google Fibre is Google’s bid to launch a blazingly fast 1Gbps mesh network in a community or several communities to test for free. Ideally, this will help Google build new, fast and better applications for the web. A successful deployment could be a goldmine for Google and communities. Given the importance of this endeavour, Google has delayed its choice of community until 2011.

Chrome OS

Yes, Chrome OS has been released to open source since 2009. And yes, Google launched a pilot programme for the web operating system last month with the release of thousands of Cr-48 test machines. But the company missed its 2010 holiday deadline for shipping official Chrome OS machines. Those are forthcoming from Samsung and Acer in 2011. We can’t wait to see how they do in a market rapidly being saturated by tablets such as Apple’s iPad and Google Android tablets.