Must read article about Google
03/08/10 16:54 Filed in: search
From Wired magazine:
Want to know how Google is about to change your life?
Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday
morning. It is here, at the Mountain View,
California,
headquarters
of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a
room filled with three dozen engineers, product
managers, and executives figure out how to make their
search engine even smarter. This year, Google will
introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled
algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering
just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly
Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting
the results you get when you use Google’s search
engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p
printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even
“capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share
its name with this conference room.
Udi
Manber,
Google’s head of search since 2006, leads the
proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are
introduced, along with the results of months of
testing in various countries and multiple languages.
A screen displays side-by-side results of sample
queries before and after the change. Following one
example — a search for “guitar center wah-wah” —
Manber cries out, “I did that
search!”
There's a lot more to the article, and it's a must-read!
There's a lot more to the article, and it's a must-read!