Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Search evaluation at Google

Let me introduce myself. I'm Scott Huffman, an engineering director responsible for leading search evaluation, working with a talented team of statisticians and software engineers. I've been here since 2005, and have been working on search in one form or another for the past fourteen years or so.

When I'm interviewing folks interested in joining the search evaluation team, I often use this scenario to describe what we do: Imagine a Google ranking engineer bursts into your office. "I have a great idea for improving our search results!" she exclaims. "It's simple: Whenever a page's title starts with the letter T, move it up in the results three slots." This engineer comes armed with several example search queries where, lo and behold, this idea actually improves the results significantly.

Official Google Blog: Search evaluation at Google

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