• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 13, 2009

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Google Evangelist Vint Cerf could see his dream of creating an interplanetary network, an extension of the Internet, become reality by the end of this year. Last October, NASA offered Cerf and colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) an opportunity to upload the protocol to a spacecraft in orbit.

The group, which designed the protocol after discovering that ordinary Internet TCP rules would not work, also has uploaded the standard to the International Space Station. They needed a protocol that would handle the long transmission delay between planets or spacecrafts. In August, the group uploaded the protocols to the same spacecraft, which NASA plans to rename, Cerf told conference attendees at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West on Wednesday.

The project to create an interplanetary network had been a dream for about a dozen years. "People thought I was joking," he said. "I really wasn't. I was honestly fascinated by the possibility of creating a richer network environment for space exploration with point-to-point radio waves."

By this time next year, Google will have interplanetary network--a three-node protocol in place that links Earth, a NASA spacecraft and the International Space Station. Cerf hopes NASA and other space organizations around the world will adopt the same protocol. Making the three-node system interoperable will enable space organizations worldwide to share information and recall important documents and data used in prior missions.

The concept of sharing information has been Google's mantra from the start. Collectively, the company has done well to make text search fairly accurate, but Cerf admits that the Mountain View, Calif. company still has a way to go to improve search for videos, images and audio files.

The problem, Cerf said, stems from not knowing searchers' true intent. Google doesn't understand the semantics of what searchers seek. One intern at Google said something that has stuck with him to this day. "We navigate people to documents, but we should navigate them to answers," Cerf said. That's because Google doesn't know the question motivating the search. It only knows the answers contained in the search terms.

Despite the fact that Google might not have video search down to a science, it hasn't stopped consumers from searching on and uploading videos to YouTube. Calling YouTube "an example of the Web phenomenon," Cerf said people are uploading about 15 hours of video per minute, up from 12 hours last week--making it clear the technology had touched a nerve.

Cerf suggests giving YouTube users control of the ads they see. Google has learned that people don't treat advertising on the Internet as annoying if they choose the information they want to see by clicking on the link. Google gave control of advertising back to consumers--so why not do the same for videos on PCs and mobile, he said.

The ability to watch videos on mobile creates an "information window that you can carry around with you." It allows people to get information in real-time. "More people will have that opportunity with mobile devices."

Cerf said Google will remain focused on information--delivering and storing it for people, stressing the need to preserve history or the fears of losing it.