Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Search quality, continued
Posted on: August 3, 2008
A few weeks back Udi Manber introduced the search quality group, and the previous posts in this series talked about the ranking of documents. While the ranking of web documents forms the core of what makes search at Google work so well, your search experience consists of much more than that. In this post, I’ll describe the principles that guide our development of the overall search experience and how they are applied to the key aspects of search. I will also describe how we make sure we are on the right track through rigorous experimentation. And the next post in this series will describe some of the experiments currently underway.
Let me introduce myself. I’m Ben Gomes, and I’ve been working on search at Google since 1999, mostly on search quality. I’ve had the good fortune to contribute to most aspects of the search engine, from crawling the web to ranking. More recently, I’ve been responsible for the engineering of the interface for search and search features.
A common reaction from friends when I say that I now work on Google’s search user interface is “What do you do? It never changes.” Then they look at me suspiciously and tell me not to mess with a good thing. Google is fine just the way it is — a plain, fast, simple web page. That’s great, but how hard can that be?”
To help answer that question, let me start with our main goal in web search: to get you to the web pages you want as quickly as possible. Search is not an end in itself; it is merely a conduit. This goal may seem obvious, but it makes a search engine radically different from most other sites on the web, which measure their success by how long their users stay. We measure our web search success partly by how quickly you leave (happily, we hope!). There are several principles we use in getting you to the information you need as quickly as possible:
- A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit.
- Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user’s point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better.
- Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries. Consider the problem of spell correction in Chinese, where user queries are often not broken up into words or Hebrew/Arabic, where text is written right to left (interestingly, this is believed to be an example of first-mover disadvantage — when chiseling on stone, it is easier to hold the hammer in your right hand!).
- Data driven decisions – experiment, experiment, experiment. We try to verify that we’ve done the right thing by running experiments. Designs that may seem promising may end up testing poorly.
There are inherent tensions here. For instance, showing you more text (or images) for every result may enable you to better pick out the best result. But a result page that has too much information takes longer to download and longer to visually process. So every piece of information that we add to the result page has to be carefully considered to ensure that the benefit to the user outweighs the cost of dealing with that additional information. This is true of every part of the search experience, from typing in a query, to scanning results, to further exploration.
Having formulated your query correctly, the next task is to pick a page from the result list. For each result, we present the title and url, and a brief two line snippet. Pages that don’t have a proper title are often ignored by users. One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don’t specify an HTML title — yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To “see” that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant. This makes it far more likely that you will not ignore a page for want of a good title.
We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page. The changes range from the subtle — we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results — to more obvious. Here’s an example screenshot where the user searched for “arod” and you can see that Alex and Rodriguez are bolded in the search result snippet, based on our analysis that you might plausibly be referring to him:
As a more obvious example, we now extract and show you the byline date from pages that have one. These byline dates are expressed in a myriad formats which we extract and present uniformly, so that you can scan them easily:
For one of the most common types of user needs, navigational queries — where you type in the name of a web site you know — we have introduced shortcuts (we refer to them as sitelinks). These sitelinks allow you to get to the key parts of the site and illustrate many of the same principles alluded to above; they are a simple addition to the top search result that adds a small amount of extra text to the page.
For instance, the home page of Hewlett-Packard has almost 60 links, in a two-level menu system. Our algorithms, using a combination of different signals, pick the top ones among these that we think you are most likely to want to visit.
What if you did not find what you were looking for among the top results? In that case, you probably need to try another query. We help you in this process by providing a set of query refinements at the bottom of the results page — even if they don’t give you the query that you need, they provide hints for different (likely more successful) directions in which you could refine your query. By placing the query refinements at the bottom of the page, the refinements don’t distract users, but are there to help if the rest of the search results didn’t serve a user’s information need.
I’ve described several key aspects of the search experience, including where we have made many changes over time — some subtle, some more obvious. In making these changes to the search experience, how do we know we’ve succeeded, that we’ve not messed it up? We constantly evaluate our changes by sharing them with you! We launch proposed changes to a tiny fraction of our users and evaluate whether it seems to be helping or hurting their search experience. There are many metrics we use to determine if we’ve succeeded or failed. The process of measuring these improvements is a science in itself, with many potential pitfalls. Our experimental methodology allows us to explore a range of possibilities and launch the ones that work the best. For every feature that we launch, we have frequently run a large number of experiments that did not see the light of day.
So let me answer the question I started with: We’re actually constantly changing Google’s result page and have been doing so for a long time. And no, we won’t mess with a good thing. You won’t let us.
In the next post in this series, I’ll talk about some of the experiments we are running, and what we hope to learn from them.
MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) – A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.
Cuil Inc (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.
The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.
“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.
“The time may be right for a challenger,” Sullivan says, but adds quickly: “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.”
Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.
Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM’s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc’s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia’s Brambles Ltd Continued…
Microsoft launches advertisements on mobiles in battle with Google – Times Online
Posted on: May 23, 2008
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Microsoft has opened a new front in the battle with Google, the search engine group, in the increasingly ferocious struggle for control of the online services market.
The software giant has said that users of its popular e-mail and instant messaging tools on mobile phones will display advertisements for the first time. Those using Windows Live on phones will also see ads.
Mobile telephony is regarded as an increasingly important component of the digital advertising market as new devices, such as Apple’s iPhone, improve the use of web-based services.
While it represents a small part of spending on digital advertising, it has significant potential because of the ability for advertising to be coupled with location using GPS.
Microsoft bought ScreenTonic, an advertising platform, which was an early leader in delivering advertisements to mobile phones, for an undisclosed sum last year.
Microsoft, whose share of the search market has slipped as Google’s has grown, is trying to recover the initiative in the online advertising market, which is expected to double in size to $80 billion by 2010.
Google has built a $20 billion (£10.2 billion)-a-year business from online advertising, mostly from sponsored links next to search results. It began testing a mobile version of its search-based advertising service in 2006.
Mobile advertising spending in Western Europe is expected to rise from $1 billion in 2007 to $1.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer, the research firm.
Microsoft launches advertisements on mobiles in battle with Google – Times Online
Posted on: May 23, 2008
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Microsoft has opened a new front in the battle with Google, the search engine group, in the increasingly ferocious struggle for control of the online services market.
The software giant has said that users of its popular e-mail and instant messaging tools on mobile phones will display advertisements for the first time. Those using Windows Live on phones will also see ads.
Mobile telephony is regarded as an increasingly important component of the digital advertising market as new devices, such as Apple’s iPhone, improve the use of web-based services.
While it represents a small part of spending on digital advertising, it has significant potential because of the ability for advertising to be coupled with location using GPS.
Microsoft bought ScreenTonic, an advertising platform, which was an early leader in delivering advertisements to mobile phones, for an undisclosed sum last year.
Microsoft, whose share of the search market has slipped as Google’s has grown, is trying to recover the initiative in the online advertising market, which is expected to double in size to $80 billion by 2010.
Google has built a $20 billion (£10.2 billion)-a-year business from online advertising, mostly from sponsored links next to search results. It began testing a mobile version of its search-based advertising service in 2006.
Mobile advertising spending in Western Europe is expected to rise from $1 billion in 2007 to $1.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer, the research firm.
Not everything Google touches turns to gold. These are some of Google’s biggest nonstarter Web services, software programs, and business moves.
Google Incorporated is arguably the most successful Internet company today. But Google didn’t get to where it is without takings risks–some of which have failed spectacularly.
For example, remember the Google Accelerator, which was supposed to speed up Web surfing? (A dubious claim, but least it was free.) But you had to pay to get a Google Answer, and eventually people stopped asking. Google Video did so well that the company finally gave up and shelled out big bucks to buy YouTube. If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.
Some Google flops lasted no more than a day and then vanished without a trace. Other Google efforts have been left to languish like a neglected orphan inside Google’s labyrinth of Web services. Still other dogs were released as betas nearly five years ago and are still trapped in Google Labs with apparently little hope of escaping the test tube.
Our list of Google’s lead balloons is by no means exhaustive; if you have other candidates, by all means, point them out in our comments section below.
Artwork: Chip Taylor
Google begins blurring faces in Street View | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 14, 2008
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Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.
(Credit: Google)
BURLINGAME, Calif.–Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant’s all-seeing digital camera eye.
The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google’s image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.
Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.
Dealing with privacy–both legal requirements and social norms–is hard but necessary, Hanke said.
“It’s a legitimate issue,” he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, “It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out.”
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Live Mesh, which will be demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West later Wednesday, is a platform. That’s what Amit Mital, Live Mesh general manager, calls his company’s new data and management service.
‘Tis the season of platforms. Facebook has one. So does Bebo and MySpace. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) too has a platform, as does Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), not to mention Sun’s Java.
The platforms differ in terms of scope and capabilities, but they’re all at heart places to run software.
Currently, there are a lot more places to run software than there used to be, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones and other devices, and the simultaneous standardization that’s required for such devices to interact with the Internet.
So it is that much of the buzz about platforms at Web 2.0 has to do with defining platforms: their relation to the Web, their capabilities, and their boundaries.
Microsoft’s Live Mesh, in its current preview form, represents an effort to define the Windows operating system as a platform that spans PCs, the Internet, and Windows-capable devices. At its heart, it is a data synchronization service, but it is also a bid to define Microsoft as the source of cloud computing.
Indeed, Microsoft claims to have ambitions beyond the wedding of Windows and the Internet. “[O]ur vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this,” says Mital in a blog post. “In the near future, we’ll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we’ll build upon that foundation.”
Microsoft, it seems, is embracing software as a service, rather than as a reason to commit to Windows. It remains to be seen however whether Windows users will occupy positions of privilege on Microsoft’s evolving platform.
Mital characterized the debut of Live Mesh as “the beginning of an ongoing dialog with you that spawns lots of new ideas and opportunities.”
It’s official: the guys who founded Google are grown up.
That was the pronouncement Thursday from Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, who was hired in 2001 to provide mature, traditional business savvy to the Internet search company founded by whiz kids Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“The boys have grown up,” Schmidt told a news conference ahead of the wildly successful company’s annual meeting.
Now billionaires, the two who formed the company, which has the motto “Don’t Be Evil,” were seen as “brilliant young founders,” Schmidt said.
“They now function in the company as the senior executives with the kind of skills and experience –“
“– We wish he had five years ago,” Page said, finishing Schmidt’s thought.
Page, 35, and Brin, who was born in the Soviet Union 34 years ago, made history in their 20s when they set up the Google search engine.
“Now we don’t have to have the same kind of arguments,” said Schmidt, who at 53 qualifies as an old man by the standards of the youthful Google campus.
“In fact, they really are running the companies that they founded at the scale and with the insights that you would expect of people who are no longer young founders but are mature business leaders,” he offered.
Brin and Page ranked as number 32 and 33 on Forbes’ 2008 list of billionaires, with more than $18 billion each, but Thursday they downplayed the effects of overwhelming wealth.
“I don’t think at a certain scale it matters, but I do have a pretty good toy budget now,” Brin said when asked about how vast wealth had changed his life. “I just got a new monitor.”
Page mentioned an even more modest benefit: “I don’t have to do laundry.”
To which Schmidt, who favors a more traditional coat and tie to the founders’ more casual dress, replied: “I think the clothes are pretty much the same.”
Brin wore a black pullover shirt. Page wore a black jacket over a gray pullover shirt.
“Those aspects of their personalities have not changed,” Schmidt said. “They care a lot about the principles of the company. They don’t care a lot about the other things.”
NO MORE ALL-NIGHTERS
Both Page and Brin got married over the past year but closely guard their personal lives. At the news conference, both said their work lives had certainly changed.
“One thing is that we have 10 or 20,000 people to help us,” Brin said. “Certainly I am not pulling all-nighters all the time like we were when we were in the garage, when we were only three or four people doing everything.”
Google faces human rights votes
Posted on: May 10, 2008
It cannot be easy to be the company that set out with the motto: “don’t be evil”.
Especially not now.
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Google – whose shares currently trade at almost $600 (£300), more than $100 above its level a year ago – is facing two shareholder motions at its annual general meeting on Thursday.
Both insist the company needs to do more to fight censorship and support human rights.
The top three executives at Google control about two-thirds of the voting shares, so neither motion will get a majority.
But that is not the point of the exercise, according to Amnesty International, which will be proposing the first motion at the meeting.
“A lot of shareholders vote and don’t attend the meeting but they may pay attention to what happens,” says Amy O’Meara, director of business and human rights at Amnesty International USA.
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 We see technology companies continue to have very vague policies around human rights and frequent violations of their own policies  Jack Ucciferri, Harrington Investments
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“We’re really looking at it as an opportunity to have an audience to hear what we think about these issues right now and to impress on Google that they really need to move much faster on these issues.”
The internet censorship motion originally came from the New York City Comptroller, which looks after the pensions of city employees.
It calls on Google to “use all legal means to resist censorship” and to make it clearer to users if it has “acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access”.
Google in China
Most of the criticism relates to Google’s Chinese language service Google.cn, which was launched in April 2006.
The company argued that it was better to agree to the Chinese government’s censorship rules than to refuse to service Chinese customers altogether.
Google believes the motion ignores what it has done for online freedom
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Since then, companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have got together with Amnesty and other organisations and experts to form a multi stakeholder initiative on internet and human rights.
But Amnesty says that much more needs to be done.
“There are often national laws or opportunities within the law in China to stand up against requests by officials to do this kind of censorship and the companies like Google have just complied very easily,” Ms O’Meara says.
“They haven’t even tried from what we can tell.”
Google’s defence
Google is opposing the motion, on the grounds that its operations in China are already improving transparency and helping Chinese people access information.
It argues that adopting the proposal would hurt its users and business because it would have to close down Google.cn.
In the past year, it has also been trying to persuade US trade officials to treat censorship like any other barrier to trade.
A similar resolution at last year’s shareholders’ meeting received 3.8% of shareholder votes.
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Google has denied there is a brain drain of talent at the firm following the departure of its communications boss to social network Facebook.
Elliot Schrage’s departure as head of global communications and public affairs is the latest in a string of senior Google staff to have quit.
Google spokesman Matt Furman said: “Elliot was a valued member of the Google team and we wish him well.”
He added: “We have a deep management pool at Google.”
The Mountain View company says it gets 1,300 resumes every day. That adds up to nearly a half a million a year from people who want to come and work at the Googleplex HQ, famed for its free gourmet lunches and on site massages.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly sees its latest recruit as something of a coup, telling staff in an email: “Hey everyone. I am writing to you from India to share the really good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team.”
“This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while.”
“Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.”
Exodus
In the last few months those that have jumped ship to Facebook from Google include leading executives such as Sheryl Sandberg, who is now the network’s chief operating officer, following time as vice president of global sales at Google.
Is the Google campus losing its allure?
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Other hires from Google to Facebook include Ben Ling who is now director of platform product marketing and Ethan Beard, a former director of social media and now director of business development.
Gideon Yu was previously the chief financial officer (CFO) at YouTube who left shortly after Google acquired it in 2006 and has moved to Facebook to become its CFO.
Facebook has even managed to poach a Google executive chef, Josef Desimone.
A host of other senior engineers and managers have also left in recent months. Some have gone on to start up their own companies or join other early stage ventures such as Zillow, FriendFeed, Twitter and Xobni.
Such defections are being seen by some recruiters in a partially negative light.
John Pulsipher, president of Silicon Valley recruitment firm Wollborg/Michelson, told BBC News: “It does of course not look very good for Google.”
He added: “But for a start up company it’s great. They are always going to be attracted to the big names that helped take a start up like Google to the top.
“They are seen as stars given where they came from. They are like artists who have had a hit song and are also expected to have a hit song the next time out.”
The Google of yesterday
So why has Google lost something of its cachet among the technorati workforce?
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Facebook is hot just now but everybody knows that hot can get cold John Pulsipher, Silicon Valley recruiter
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Some commentators have noted that it is no longer the firm it once was.
Far from being a search engine firm with idealistic goals to ‘do no evil’, it has morphed into a behemoth that rivals other large tech companies.
It now has 16,800 employees worldwide. And the opportunities to strike it rich have diminished. Google’s stock option package is not as tempting as it once was now that shares are trading close to $600.
Perhaps more importantly for some, Google no longer has that “anything goes” approach that most start ups possess.
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