Google: A Computer Scientist's Playground

Google faces two large technical challenges: ensuring that our search results are as relevant as possible, and serving hundreds of millions of queries in a fraction of a second at a reasonable cost. To solve the first problem, we perform an offline matrix computation to produce PageRank, a query independent measure of page reputation, and combine it with more traditional query-specific scoring. To solve the distributed computing problem, we use tens of thousands of commodity PCs and highly fault-tolerant software. I will discuss some details of these solutions, and also share some interesting statistical tidbits about search and the web. Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning is a Senior Staff Research Scientist and New York Engineering Director at Google. While at Google, he has led the development team for Froogle, a product search engine. Prior to his four years at Google, Dr. Nevill-Manning was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He has 41 academic publications, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Waikato University, New Zealand.