“Google is working on a service that finds information before a user has even started looking for it. Forget Google Instant, this is about pre-emptively pushing data at users before they know they need it, said Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of geographic and local services, who was speaking at the LeWeb internet conference in Paris this week. Mayer said Google is looking at what she called “contextual discovery” as a way to evolve search - pushing information out to people before they've started to look for it, based on factors such as their web browsing history or current location. Mayer sees this push or pre-emptive search as a complement to traditional web browsing, perhaps living in a panel on a web browser offering users another way to discover relevant or timely data. She said social recommendations will be a key part of this next generation of search - the company launched a Social Search feature in 2009 - while location-enabled mobile devices offer even more scope for Google to “figure out what the next most useful piece of information is” and push it out to the user. “If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up,” she said.” - × × ×