Sorry to those of you who missed out, though there can’t have been too many since the big room at Fenwick & West’s conference center was packed. Udi Manber is VP Engineering at Google, responsible as he put it for the quality of search results.
Udi’s presentation was titled Here’s what I say, now give me what I need and he did talk about how his team approaches that problem as well as the shear scale of delivering good results to millions of people daily in less than 100ms.
He gave some examples of how the Search Quality group analyzes what you and me type in that little text box, and how after 20 years of exploring search he’s come to understand that in many cases we simply don’t put in a good query. The meaning of good here is unambiguous and having sufficient context. An example of his for this was the search “how many calories in a pound?” We look at it and see the most likely explanation is related to diet, so about 3,000; the algorithms, though, assumed it was a request for mass to energy conversion and gave 9,000 trillion (i.e., E=MC2).
Manber also looked at the other side of the problem, which is that there isn’t always enough information to give a good result. That example query was “Top 20 Names in Peru” and while there was a page that at first glance gave a good answer, and was the first result shown by Google, the page was not the right one. But Google, as he pointed out, doesn’t do much in the way of content creation (hosting on Blog*Spot and YouTube is not creation) and can only show what’s out there.
All in all, lots of good information and not the least because the audience asked some interesting questions. Thanks Udi!
Next month is another great speaker (thanks Tanya), Charlie Kirschner of AIPAC (Americn-Israeli Political Action Committee), who’ll give us a look at how the omelettes get made in Washington. Join us on April 8 if you can.
BillSaysThis 