Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Interview With Google's Director of Research

Posted by Hemos on from the excellent-interivew dept.

Cialti writes "Salon has a very interesting article with Monika Henziger, Google's Director of Research, about their search technology and where they're going with it. "

7 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Masturbation Techniques by ergo98 · · Score: 5

    Google absolutely blows away the competition, however it is humorous seeing entries in my log file related to people looking for masturbation tips (from the beginner level "How To" style queries, to full blown searches for advanced techniques). The page in question is entitled "Hey Jerk : Get Off My Computer!" (and relates to pop-up ad windows) and I'm, uh, proud to see that it ranks #2 for searches for "jerk off technique" (I've had dozens of related hits appearing). While it is humorous seeing searching going a little off-track, I am very curious how many consumers know that each link you follow passes on where you came from, so for instance I see log entries like

    200x-xx-xx xx:xx:xx xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx GET /rants/jerk/index.htm 200 5986 334 270 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+98;+Dig Ext) http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=jerk+off&b=21& hc=0&hs=5
    -or-
    200x-xx-xx xx:xx:xx xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx GET /rants/jerk/index.htm 200 5986 437 1292 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+98;+Dig Ext;+sureseeker.com) http://www.google.com/search?q=guys+who+jerk+off

  2. Re:Yeah Suckah! by htmlboy · · Score: 5

    Google gave a talk for ACM here last semester (got a t-shirt, woohoo!). The speaker described how they're used. They have thousands of linux boxes, and they're used to store websites (to be searched and cached copies) and to do searching on the pages they have (I think that's how it went). I got the impression that linux is used because it's free (important with thousands of licenses), it's reliable, and they found it a good platform for the searching backend software.

    an interesting side note: they found that when one of the linux boxes stops working, it's more cost effective to replace it than to fix the problem (hardware, at least). google throws out a lot of good hardware because of that. the lecture hall was begging for a student donation program of some sort when the google guy mentioned that :)

    chris

  3. Send messages to the staff! by dead_penguin · · Score: 5

    With the giant display of scrolling queries (filtered, though) they have in their lobby, I think it's time to start sending little messages to the Google staff using searches.

    "Help, I'm stuck in here!!" is an obvious classic to try. If enough of us do it, it might even get noticed...

    "Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done".

    --

    It's only software!
  4. Smarter Searches by Louis+Savain · · Score: 4

    Monika Henziger: You can try to return documents that are specifically on this topic. We're developing more sophisticated techniques to return documents that might not mention the query words, but are [still relevant to] the topic. We're getting away from just pure word matches and getting more into topics.

    This is interesting. I wonder if there might be a way for the engine to have a two way back-and-forth "conversation" with the user. IOW, if the engine interprets the query to have several possible meanings, a few multiple choice questions might clarify the meaning and narrow the search parameters. I think this could be more helpful than doing a blind guess of the user's intention.

  5. Prepositions need love too by zpengo · · Score: 4
    A recent development in Google technology left me very dismayed -- They started ignoring "common words."

    This makes sense on a general level, but when you try searching for a phrase embedded in quotation marks, it's frustrating to have Google decide which parts of a literal string to search for and which to ignore. If I had wanted it to ignore parts of it, I wouldn't have indicated that it was a literal phrase, dangnabbit!

    It is possible to include words that you typed in the search phrase, but you have to add an Altavista-style '+' before it.

    For example, searching for: "Hail to the chief" would ignore to and the. In order to actually search for the phrase (which I indicated that I wanted to do by surrounding it in quotation marks), I would have to type "Hail +to +the chief". Hardly user-friendly.

    Oh, well.

    --


    Got Rhinos?
  6. Here is the real google info... by jwater · · Score: 5
    Here at Slashdot it seems like people only can complain about a service. Most of the posts are rants without understanding of the dynamics below them.

    I think we all could use more understanding of the topic. A link to the paper that started it all here.

    1. When was the last time that "to" or any other preposition helped the average query. Your Grandmother does not know that this word is meaningles 99.9% of the time, so google ties to improve their relevancy.

    2. Google has not sold out. Their ads are the most simple in the industry. They give access to users like you and me at reasonable rate. Who wants to wait for 345x123 pixel banner ads anyways.

    3. Have you noticed the spelling feature? Google will correct your spelling. This is a function of the tons of bigrams that they have stored.

    4. Here is a link to more papers [Warning: Technical] here.

  7. Re:[ot]Google's data structure? by blamanj · · Score: 5

    Probably they use a trie or the related Patricia tree. These are very space efficient and relatively fast.