Google Downplays Microsoft Battle

At its annual Press Day Wednesday, Google introduced three new services while attempting to kill the popular story in the media that it is involved in a fierce winner-take-all battle with Microsoft. Instead, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that there would never be a single victor.

Schmidt said that having a single search engine would stagnate innovation. Competition, on the other hand, would support growth as well as advertising prices, and he added that there was room in the industry for more than one strategy.

Others downplayed Google's battle with Microsoft. While saying the Redmond giant has a history of "not playing fair," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said his company was just too busy with its own products and services to watch what Microsoft was doing. Fellow co-founder Larry Page added that they wanted to focus on innovation instead.

Executives introduced three new services as an example of their continuing work in search. Google Co-Op, the first of these, would allow the search giant to enter into the "social search" arena. By using special code, individuals and organizations could label pages to appear in topic areas that would then appear when searches are performed on those subjects.

Another service, called Google Trends, would be an extension of the Zeitgeist that is regularly published by the company.

"[It would allow] you to sort through several years of Google search queries from around the world to get a general idea of everything from user preferences on ice-cream flavors to the relative popularity of politicians in their respective cities or countries," search and user experience vice president Marissa Mayer said.

Google explained this could be especially useful for advertisers. Before selecting keywords to place their ads on, these companies could look at trends based on various keywords.

Finally, Google Notebook would act almost like Microsoft Office's Clipboard application, allowing the user to save text, images and links from pages they search through, and save them to an online notebook. The user could then share the notebook with others.

Additionally, the company has introduced Google Desktop 4, with improved "gadgets" and adds tools like a media player and Google Calendar. Desktop along with Trends are now available, with Notebook coming next week. Co-Op was referred to as a "work in progress" by executives.

"Our new products offer a pretty wide range of services and capabilities, but they have one thing in common: They all enhance and improve the search experience for our users," Mayer said.