Google shares secrets on search methodology [12/19/2007]

It's not all just algorithms at Google. In a revealing interview in MIT's Technology Review, Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, unwraps some of the secrets surrounding the company's search methodology.

In a blog post at The New York Times, reporter Saul Hansell said the interview confirmed a long-held belief that Google employs thousands of researchers on a part-time basis to refine its search results.

"After I wrote about Google's search technology earlier this year, I got an email from an engineer at another search engine telling me not to believe Google when it said its search results were simply the product of fancy formulas," Hansell wrote. "Google, he said, has human beings helping to pick the best sites for many queries."

In the interview, Norvig is quoted as saying, "Another way we do it [improve the quality of search results] is to randomly select specific queries and hire people to say how good our results are."

Over at TechCrunch, Erik Schonfeld read the Google tea leaves to mean that the company wasn't planning anything on the natural language search front, instead opting to stick with keywords. However, Norvig did say that Google uses natural search on the back end to generate better results.

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Answering the question of where Google search would be in five years, Norvig said, "You'll see integration of our various properties. We used to put the onus on the user and ask them if they wanted web search or image search or video search. Now we're trying to solve that for them and serve up the results in a way that makes sense."

Source: www.imediaconnection.com
12/19/2007

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