Thursday, April 17, 2008

20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber

Popular Mechanics has a great interview with Google's Udi Manber that gives a peak into that powerful entity we call "search" and speaks to the current trends, the future of search, etc.

I heard Manber speak at a Kelsey Conference a few years back - he was in charge of Amazon's A9 search product when it was trying to change the search universe -- and he was a great speaker. Well, no surprise, he's a great interview too. I'm working on that talk for the SNA newspapers about basics of search engine optimization, so my mind is full of search engine stuff these days, and I like that Manber lifted my vision above the mundane with quotes such as this, when asked how search has changed:

"I like to say that it’s almost science fiction 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. Today we’re finding a lot more information, and the questions are getting a lot harder."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Amy, that was a great article. I didn't know about CLIR - changing from one language to another automatically. That's terrific search stuff! I never thought I'd find good search marketing material from Popular Mechanics. thanks for bringing this to our attention.