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08.09.06
SES 2006: Google, Yahoo & MSN Research Laboratories
 By
Mike Banks Valentine
The Research Laboratories session at SES San Jose 2006 brought representatives
from the top 3 engines to talk about how projects emerge from their labs to become
actual search tools.
Each offered a different perspective and each seemed to have a differing emphasis on moving from ideas to products.
First up was Peter Norvig, Research Director at Google, who began by asking, "What comes out of research?" He suggested that most of the tools emerging from Google labs are developed in a "Bottom up fashion ... We have a bunch of engineers trying things out and some of them bubble up to the top." He gave several examples and revealed that one of the most popular publisher tools, Adsense, came out of looking for a way to monetize Gmail, the free webmail product.
He showed an example of factual search, "What is the population of Japan?" The answer of a Google search on that query produces a direct answer as the first result on the page. 127,417,244. Followed by the source link and more possible sources displayed below. Clear fact based questions can be drawn from authoritative sources, continually updated and displayed as "One Box" searches.
He discussed Machine "Statistical machine translation" based on a model of English documents online compared to model of other languages such as news stories done in differing languages as a source for reliable quality for statistical comparisons. Norvig proudly displayed results of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) competition for this type of translation shows Google coming out on top. They do it by looking at same text in different languages using online info without anyone actually speaking the languages.
Moving to more challenging computational and algorithmic research projects, Norvig
discussed work being done on image processing in an attempt at "face localization"
to determine from group photos, where a photo was taken. Identification of people
on the web can't be done so easily. The best they've reliably achieved is to determine
if a face is that of a male or a female.
In what appeared to be an unintentional segue' Norvig had mentioned the image
processing in his presentation and was followed by Bradley Horowitz, VP product
strategy for Yahoo. Horowitz had studied Computer vision and imaging before his
involvement in search and claims that the science had progressed incremetally
over years. He found an improvement when he first viewed Yahoo's Flickr image
tagging for determining photo content, "to avoid the heavy lifting of image processing
algorithms. "People plus algorithms are greater than algorithms. This lead to
emphasizing "Authority of Trust" of social search relying more on users than algo's.
He sees engines finding ways to re-Introduce "content and metadata" as reliable
sources of classification.
Read
the Full Article
About the Author:
Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of in-house content managers as well as contract SEO for advertising agencies, web development companies and marketing firms.
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