Faculty Host: Thu D. Nguyen

Abstract:

Google faces two large technical challenges: ensuring that our search results are as relevant as possible, and serving hundreds of millions of queries in a fraction of a second at a reasonable cost. To solve the first problem, we perform an offline matrix computation to produce PageRank, a query independent measure of page reputation, and combine it with more traditional query-specific scoring. To solve the distributed computing problem, we use tens of thousands of commodity PCs and highly fault-tolerant software. I will discuss some details of these solutions, and also share some interesting statistical tidbits about search and the web.

Speaker Bio:

Craig Nevill-Manning is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, and Director of the New York Engineering center in Manhattan. He is responsible for the research behind Froogle and web definitions. Prior to his three years at Google, Dr. Nevill-Manning was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University.