Business Week ran a lengthly series on Google Search in which Silicon Valley bureau chief Rob Hof interviewed CEO Eric Schmidt and the major heads of search technology.
The main article was Can Google Stay on Top of the Web? (Oct 1)
Below are the four interviews with the company's search gurus plus one with CEO Eric Schmidt.
Matt Cutts: How Google Deals With Web Spam, Rob Hof, Business Week (October 04)
This interview with Google's Matt Cutts tells us more about how Google search departments work together: ranking, spam control, and ads. It's all part of their mission to deliver quality results.
Evaluting search results:
+ "we’ve built up a lot of evaluation metrics"
Understanding search intent:
+ "We try to do a lot so we can understand queries better. Some people will mistype queries, so we try to do a real good spell-check system. A lot of people will type in synonyms, like "automobile" instead of "cars" when the name of the business is Cars R Us. So we try to take the query as a suggestion."
+ "We used to require an absolute perfect match, but over time we’ve gotten better at spelling, morphology, synonyms, all these sorts of things like stemming, where somebody types in “runners” and maybe they meant “runner,” or “running.”"
Delivering freshness:
+ "But in general, Google is fresher. Google is not only fresher but more comprehensive. Those are three key things: freshness; comprehensiveness (you want to crawl as much of the Web as possible); and relevance (core ranking and Web spam). And you want the user experience to be really clean."
Detecting hackers
+ "We write detectors. We’ve written classifiers—an algorithm, a heuristic that essentially takes a bunch of signals and tries to say yes, this site has been hacked or no, it hasn’t, and at what level of the directory and things like that."
Other articles in this series on Google search:
Google's Udi Manber: Search Is About People, Not Just Data
Udi Manher is VP of technology for search.
Excerpts:
Q: Can you give me a sense of the types of methods you use to improve search?A: Humans are involved, formulas are involved, experiments are involved. We often do A/B tests, give one set of people an algorithm, give another set of people another set of algorithms and see how they behave. We measure lots of things, not just clicks.
Q: So you have to determine what does change and focus on indexing that?
A: We have to determine from the query whether it can benefit from something in real-time. Like “history of the Renaissance.” It’s possible that somebody on Twitter just mentioned that. But a) it’s not that likely and b) it’s probably not what you want. You want the best article on the Renaissance. So time is not as important on that kind of query.
But search for “earthquake” and time is much more important. Or a particular celebrity that had news in the last five minutes. So we have to change the algorithm based on the query. We do that now.
Google Search Guru Singhal: We Will Try Outlandish Ideas
Amit Singhal looks after ranking algorithms. His team ran 6,000 experiments last year which led to roughly 500 changes in how search works.
Google's Scott Huffman: Many More Search Features Coming
Scott Huffman's team evaluates the effects of every proposed change to Google. Last year there were 6,000 experiments.
"Huffman explained in detail how Google runs all those experiments—which include the use of hundreds of human evaluators in addition to Google’s massive computer infrastructure."
Google uses people and statistical analysis of clicks to evaluate the results. It especially works on relevance for a country or locale.
Excerpts:
Q: What does the evaluation unit do?A: We try to measure every possible which way we can think of how good is Google, how good are our search results, how well are they serving our users. And we break that down all kinds of ways—by 100 locales [country plus language pairs], by different genres (product queries, health queries, local queries, long queries, queries that don’t happen very often, queries that are very popular) times how are we doing on those in France and Switzerland and other places
Q: Can you give me a sense for how you approach evaluation?
A: We use two main kinds of evaluation data. One kind is we have human evaluators all over the world for whom we have a workflow system. They come to it and are fed things to evaluate. A typical thing is: Here is a query, you’re speaking French in Switzerland, here’s a URL, tell us on some kind of scale or some set of flags and description how good of a URL is that for that query.
The other data source we use is live experimentation with our users. A typical example where we use that more is for user interface changes to search. It’s hard to guess what people’s reaction will be to any particular UI change.
Q: How are personalized search results evaluated—any differently?
A ... Another thing that we spend a lot of time on is at the country level. Many countries speak English, but when I type in, say “bank,” I want pretty different answers if I’m in the U.S. vs. the U.K. vs. India vs. Australia. And today Google gives you very different answers for those. It also applies inside the country—in Dallas and Atlanta, you’ll get different results for “First Baptist Church.” Those kind tend to be a little trickier for us.
How Google Plans to Stay Ahead in Search
"CEO Eric Schmidt discusses how Google is handling challenges from Microsoft and upstarts Twitter and Facebook—and why search remains its priority "
Q You said recently that you worry about where growth for a large company such as Google comes next. Where will that growth come from, and what does that say about what Google will be in five to 10 years?Posted by Gwen at October 6, 2009 02:11 PMA We are first and foremost a search company. Of course, search changes. Location will become more important, for example. As long as we can be first to invent the new solutions to search, we'll be fine. We're still investing a lot in search and search quality. In our case, growth will come from businesses we're already in.