How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable

If Google is to achieve its stated mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible,” says Jon Wiley, lead user experience designer for Google search, it must find out about people’s hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And he says experience sampling -- bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not -- is the best way to do it.

“Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it’s getting us better information that we really haven’t had in the past,” he says. Wiley’s research may take Google in new directions. “One of the patterns that stands out is the multitude of devices that people have in their lives,” he says. Just as mobile devices made it possible for Google to discover unmet needs for information through the study, they could also be used to meet those needs in the future.