Abstract:

Search is one of the most critical applications used on the Internet, but it
also poses many interesting challenges in Computer Science.  Providing
high-quality Web search requires understanding across a wide range of
Computer Science disciplines.  Such challenges include building large,
scalable distributed systems as well as work in areas such as information
retrieval, machine learning, and user interface design to make these systems
effective at sifting, organizing, and presenting relevant information to the
user.  In this talk we will describe some of the challenges in these areas,
discuss a few of the interesting applications related to search that Google
has developed over the past few years, and highlight some of the
behind-the-scenes pieces of infrastructure that we've built in order to
operate Google's services.  Along the way, we'll share some interesting
observations derived from Google's web data and say a few words about the
life of an engineer at Google.