Abstract:

The technology of search has seen dramatic improvements over the last 20
years.   I built my first search engine in 1991, and at that time search was
essentially unknown and irrelevant to most people.  When I started, I had to
convince people that search was an important area (I was asked "what do you
mean you are working on search?  Did you lose something?").  Today, there is
no question that search is one of the most important applications of
computing.  It makes both business and pleasure much better and much easier.
I will highlight some of this progress, tell stories from behind the scenes,
show some recent developments, and discuss my view of where we can go from
here.

About the speaker

Udi Manber is a vice president of engineering at Google, where he has been
since 2006.  He started working on search in 1989 with the invention of
Suffix Arrays (with Gene Myers), and then went on to design several search
engines and other web tools while being a professor of Computer Science at
the University of Arizona.  He left academia in 1998 and has run the search
groups at Yahoo, Amazon, and Google.