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The Next Step In Search
May 16, 2007
Continuing our live notes from the Googleplex on Google’s Searchology event, 11 am Pacific time, Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience, and Udi Manber, VP Engineering, are up next talking about the next step in the evolution of search:
Udi talks first, he joined Google 15 months ago, but has been working on search for 18 years, he is head of search quality efforts.
“Search is hard, very hard, scale and diversity are huge, really huge, 20 to 25 per cent of the queries we see today we will have never seen before.
"We understand context – ‘b&b AB’ means bed and breakfasts in Alberta and we know that, with Ramstein AB, AB means airbase, for ‘types of dogs’ we will also insert better ‘breeds of dogs’ query results. If you search for ‘Why is search so hard?’ – the results are pretty bad, so there is still room for improvement.
"One of our main efforts over the last year was to improve our quality for languages all over the world. Location results also improved and made more relevant – Cote d’Or results in Australia gives you sites relevant to the chocolate brand. In Belgium, where the chocolate is made, you get the chocolate and the French region results. In France, you just get the French region.
"Cross Language Information Retrieval – allowing everyone to find any document in any language and translate it on the fly, we have been working on that for quite some time and we will be ready to launch very soon a way for you to directly search and get results like this for 12 languages. You will do the search, we will translate to English, do the search and translate the results back to you in your language. [An example Arabic to English is shown]
Udi winds up by juggling some apples and oranges to applause to illustrate something about how to order information. Not really any meat in this event so far, but Marissa Mayer is up next….
