Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 25 May 2008 11:28
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Manber says that his latest post is “part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past”, and part of an effort to “periodically tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news, and engage in conversations” – and that more blog posts will follow.
Manber’s group works on “core ranking”, something he says is very hard, “much harder than most people realize”.
He explains that Google needs to do all it does in a few milliseconds, a monumental task indeed, but one that Google has excelled at.
Manber explains: “One reason for this is that languages are inherently ambiguous, and documents do not follow any set of rules. There are really no standards for how to convey information, so we need to be able to understand all web pages, written by anyone, for any reason. And that's just half of the problem. We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents. Not to mention that different people have different needs.”
Pagerank is still an important part of the Google search ecosystem, the one developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s famous fonders – but that is now part of a much larger search system.
Manber tells us that “Other parts [of the system] include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).”
There’s also a team that works on improving the user experience, which is the utmost goal of all, with all new ideas, algorithms and every Google does being tested thoroughly.
Google also makes significant changes to the algorithms – the Pagerank algorithm had significant changes in January, while another Google goal is to always make things simple were possible. Google has previously said “do no evil”. We can add “simple is good” to that list – if it isn’t already there.
What else has Google been up to? Please read on to page 3.
