Google’s Udi Manber: Search Is About People, Not Just Data
Posted on October 1, 2009 |
Udi Manber, Google's vice-president of technology for core search, joined the company almost four years ago after stints running Amazon.com’s A9 search project and serving as chief scientist at Yahoo. He, like some other leaders on the search quality team, has 20 years of experience in search going back into academia—meaning before the World Wide Web, when it was known as information retrieval.
I talked with Manber on two occasions in recent weeks for my story on Google’s search operation, which appears in the latest issue of BusinessWeek. Customarily stingy with details about Google’s inner workings, to thwart competitors, Manber nonetheless provided a lot of insight into how Google’s core search quality team does its magic. And while he sounds quite confident about Google’s prospects—at first, I wondered, maybe too confident?—it’s also clear that he realizes the threat always looming for any technology company in the form of some unexpected breakthrough from an upstart. After all, Google was one of those upstarts not so very long ago.
This transcript, like the others to come over the next several days, is fairly long. I opted to leave in as much as possible to provide more details for people who are really interested in the inner workings.
