ResourceBlog Article: An Interview with Google's VP of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer

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Tuesday, 10th November 2009

An Interview with Google's VP of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer

From the Interview:

An edited transcript of the the conversation between Juan Carlos Perez (from IDG News Service) and Marrisa Mayer is included in the article.

Here is just one exchange:

IDGNS: At the user interface level, Google gets criticized by its competitors constantly for what they pejoratively disdain as Google's "10 blue links" results page. They say Google is old school, that its paradigm of search is inefficient and inconvenient. How do you respond to that kind of criticism?

Mayer: I'd point to the fact that Universal Search was really a watershed moment in this. You get diagrams, pictures, blogs, local information, books, news, all stitched into your search engine. While many of our competitors are still busy building small, vertical search engines where you have to remember they have them, we're busy doing a very difficult computer science problem: How do you stitch all of these disparate mediums together into one coherent set of answers, and how do you synthesize all of that? We're doing all of that because it's better for users: Here's the tool and it gives me what I want, regardless of what format it came in.

We have two, three, five changes every week that are visible to the end-user in the user interface. We don't [publicize] the ranking changes. We are making changes to our ranking algorithm at the rate of two per day. Interestingly, some of our competitors haven't made any changes to their ranking function for quite some time. Search needs to evolve: the user interface, the ranking function. It's a process of making lots of small changes all the time and to constantly make things better.

Other topics include:

+ What Would the Perfect Search Engine Look Like

+ Semantic Serarch

+ Google's Universal Search

Source; Computerworld / IDG News Service

See Also: Does Marissa Mayer’s “Perfect Search Engine” Already Exist In Siri? (via SEL)
Based on Mayer's response to the interview question about the "perfect search engine," Greg Sterling says that the Mayer may have "unknowingly" described the SIRI. What's a SIRI?

Sterling calls the Siri, a “virtual personal assistant” that uses artificial intelligence to determine user intent and then match data or applications that can fulfill that intent. The company will launch its iPhone application soon and already has a deal with a “tier one” US mobile carrier. He also shares his views (Sterling has seen the Siri in action) and points to this NY Times article. A must read.

Category:

Search News (ResourceShelf)

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