User Intent Quotes

A weapon isn't good or bad, depends on the person who uses it.

Knowledge is a tool, and like all tools, its impact is in the hands of the user.

A gun can be dangerous. But a gun can protect you, you can hunt for food with it - you know, the tool itself is a tool. The intention of the party using the tool is a part of the process, right? You know: the knife cuts the steak, stabs the person, saves somebody from danger, cuts somebody out of a car.

Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.

Search occupies this wonderful moment in a user's day where it doesn't even really break along demographics, right?

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

The biggest thing about Pinterest is that people are there saving ideas for their personal lives. Not to rile up other people or make a big statement.

Just so everyone knows, we're not a photo-sharing company. I don't see photos on 'Instagram' as art. They're much more about communication.

In the U.S., search engines are king. That is because everyone already knows what they are looking for. Brands have been around for a long time.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

Every day in America, about 25,000 people buy a quarter-inch drill. But nobody in America wants a quarter-inch drill. What they want are holes.

When you think about normal advertising, it's just like, hey, here's a car and, you know, we don't know if you're looking for a car or not. So Google promised that mental state, and then were able to prove that delivering the message at the exact right moment would make someone click on something. So they pioneered the idea that advertising could be profitable on the internet, that a specific, very micromental state could be targeted. And they established the primacy of the click, which has haunted us ever since.

My prediction is that in the same way that Google is an intent revealing service that can be monetized that way, I would think that if I were at Twitter, I would focus on the search aspect of Twitter, because people are revealing intents when they do a search.