Google`s Udi Manber Looks at Search - Search Matures
(Page 2 of 4 )
In interviews, Udi Manber noted several interesting points about the development of search. When some of the first search engines came out, they may have been very primitive by our current standards, but they looked pretty mature at the time. “My best analogy is that a 15-year-old thinks he’s very mature. A 19-year-old thinks he’s extremely mature,” Manber observed. But we still experienced certain frustrations. “Ten years ago, if you actually found an answer to some specific question, it was, ‘Hey, look at this, it’s so cool!’ It was an event,” he noted.
Now, of course, we expect to find what we’re looking for online. When we don’t find it, we assume that something is wrong. It’s a major challenge for Manber and his team, but that challenge has stimulated tremendous innovation in the field. He likens it to seeing science fiction become real every five years. “When the first search engine appeared in ‘94, compared with when I came out of academia in ‘99, compared with the way it was in 2003, compared with the way it is today -- every five years there have been just incredible advances. What we do now, we couldn’t have foreseen 10 years ago…People expect more from us,” he said.
In all that time, though, the goal of search engine scientists remains simple: give the searcher what they’re looking for. Even for Manber -- perhaps especially for Manber -- when he doesn’t find exactly what he needs when he does a search, it’s frustrating. And he and the other search engineers at Google seem to take it personally.
“When someone finds an example of something that doesn’t work that should work, we think, ‘How can that happen? How is it that we missed something?’” Manber explained. The cause could be anything from a weakness in the algorithm to something missing from the Internet itself, such as when a restaurant or other brick-and-mortar business leaves something important off of their web page.
Before explaining how Google goes about improving searches, and the areas into which they’re looking, Manber offered some excellent advice to users who want to improve the odds of finding what they need, and web sites hoping to improve their odds of being found. “The content provider should think about how users will look for their content, and the user should think about what words people use to write about their content.” If you’re searching for something, think about what you would expect to see in the actual page; don’t treat the search engine like a person to whom you are trying to explain what you need.
Next: Algorithm Adjustments >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
