If you want a well-informed perspective on where web search has been and where it’s going, Udi Manber can give it to you. Currently serving as Google’s vice president in charge of search quality, he recently granted a couple of interviews that offered, among other things, a rare insider’s look at one search engine’s approach to delivering answers.
Manber came to Google in 2006 with an impressive resume. His past positions include stints as a computer science professor at the University of Arizona, a senior vice president at Amazon and Yahoo’s chief scientist. In the 15 or so years he has worked on search, he has seen attitudes toward it change tremendously. As he explained, “When I started in academia and I said I’m working on search, they looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean you’re working on search? Did you lose something?’”
Back in the early 1990s, the search field was divided by topic -- chemical search, legal search, medical search, and so on. And only professionals did search; you would tell someone what you wanted to find, and they would find it for you. Some of the earliest “search engines” were more like directories of information rather than something into which you could put a term and hope to get an answer that gave you what you were looking for.
As the Internet grew, and search engines improved, that changed. Manber understood that the information revolution touted in the 1990s meant that “it’s not enough to store the information and move it around, you have to find it…The ability to find things among huge amounts of information is the key factor.”
Back in the early days of search, however, this need wasn’t obvious to everyone -- and even today, it isn’t as common as you might think. Manber says that one of the perks of his position at Google is that “I don’t have to tell anybody around here that search is important, and that’s a very nice luxury to have.”
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