Le Web: Q & A with Google VP Marissa Mayer on the future of search

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience is on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris. I’m live-blogging as we go:
Michael Arrington asks about the search announcements earlier this week (namely Google Goggles, local search and real-time search).
Mayer: We think of it as four main components. Modalities — how do you search? Most people now type in search queries, but we think people will talk to their phone and they’ll take a photos. The other piece is media — as the web has gotten even more and more rich, we’ve gone from text to a very rich web with video, blogs, books, product search and now real-time. Bringing all that together really enriches the result section. Then the other two components have to do with language, translations and personalization. We think the searches in the future will be better because they understand you, who your friends are and where you are.
Michael Arrington asks about Google Goggles (the image search the company launched earlier this week).
Mayer: With Google Goggles, they’re looking at image recognition. Sometimes location doesn’t help. The example that Vic use earlier this week was with a wine label and it picked it up and gave tips on its flavors. As image recognition gets further along, so will the type of indexing you’re talking about.
It seems like voice-to-text, looking at a audio stream and turning it into words is farther along. There’s good progress being made both in academia and at Google. Google Goggles is the first example of something that’s available for consumers.
Arrington asks about the rumored phone Google is launching.
Mayer: I don’t comment on speculation.
Arrington asks about the volume of mobile searches.
Mayer doesn’t reveal exact figures but says its growing.
Arrington asks about Chrome and Chrome OS.
Mayer: There are tens of millions of Chrome users and we’re excited about its growth.
Arrington: We all understand the dire situation of the print media in general. What I want to talk about is how do we fix this. Eric Schmidt talked about this in the WSJ last week. Can you talk about how you see the future of news?
Mayer: We’ve thought a lot about this. We really think about engagement — how do you increase the engagement of users online with news? If we invented news as a delivery vehicle — how does it get delivered on the web. If we reinvented it from scratch, it would look very different from what we’ve had. We released a prototype yesterday with the New York Times and the Washington Post called Living Stories. For a long time, news has been the print article on the web page. But what if that story was alive? You could come back to it, add to it, and get alerts on it? I basically think whenever a media changes over to a new delivery vehicle, it puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. It happened with iTunes with the album moving to the song. It happened with YouTube with long-form standards of video to short-form. Now it’s happening with news. People can come in and read one story from the source and then move on. That’s the atomic unit.
Certainly, some readers will follow brands more attentively. If you follow that line of thinking, a lot of things need to change. If you look at Wikipedia, it will beat a lot of news articles on search placement. They’ll have one page. And then newspapers will have hundreds of articles that are competing with each other. If you have one URL, it can really rise up. If you look at engagement and a lot of factors — 1) Personalization and 2) What to do next.
In a newspaper you have a lot of columns and your eyes jump around. If you look at the bottom of an article, where the most engaged reader will reach, there’s nothing there — no ads, nothing to do. And of course, the reader will go somewhere else to be entertained.
On Amazon, you buy something, they suggest what you can buy next. On Facebook,