I continue to be impressed by how Google's PR team finds ways to keep its story fresh. Right now, the team has to be focused on diverting attention from the fact that it's only truly successful business is selling search-based advertising. Right now, no one can touch them but it's important for the company to have a track record of success in many areas before a competitor can.
Miguel Helft's story in today's New York Times on the power of Google's translation software is another example of keeping the company in the news for reasons other than search advertising.
Google’s efforts to expand beyond searching the Web have met with mixed success. Its digital books project has been hung up in court, and the introduction of its social network, Buzz, raised privacy fears. The pattern suggests that it can sometimes misstep when it tries to challenge business traditions and cultural conventions.
But Google’s quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems.
I've had clients that would want to throw out this entire article because of that first paragraph - but the reality is that this is a best-case scenario for dealing with an authoritative news source like The New York Times that rarely runs commercials, even for Google.
Even while acknowledging the flaws in the launch of Buzz, the story goes right back to showcasing Google's technological genius, a great result.
And, if you happen to mono-lingual like I, it's an interesting story of how technology is breaking down barriers that used to take years of study to overcome.
The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world’s largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation.
That's cool - but someone at Google's PR department had to notice, piece together the implications from the engineering department, identify the academics to provide as third-party endorsement sources and package it to sell it to Helft.
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