Q&A with Google’s Udi Manber

Popular Mechanics this past week posted an interesting interview with Udi Manber, Google’s Vice President of Engineering. He offers some interesting insight into what goes on behind the scenes at Google to make sure search is up to speed.

Highlights include:

• “Our goal is very simple: We want to return to the user the answer that they need.”
• “…at the bottom of many pages, you’ll see query refinements. These are suggestions from us about what your next query should be.”
• “Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm.”
• “At Google we do not manually change results.”
• “…one feature we launched recently is something called CLIR. It stands for Cross Language Information Retrieval.”
• “When we decide to launch something, we have a weekly meeting where all those things come together and we look at all the evaluations and we make decisions—revenues and any effects on ads do not come into those meetings.”