News.com has posted a rare interview of Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
Google Fellow is reserved to recognize the most important engineers inside the Company. Amit Singhal is one of the engineers on the “search quality” team, which is in charge of making sure the search results returned Google is what the user wanted, not merely just what the user typed in the search box. Therefore it is a very hard problem to crack.
One of the interesting piece of information given in the interview was about how internal employees can also report search result problems in their so-called “Buganizer” system. One of those problems is whether to give more weight to content freshness when people search for something. Amit’s team proposed solution that will use the ‘hotness’ of the search term to determine whether to place more weight on freshness or history (age of content site).
Another interesting search problem is local search. This seems to be an area that is getting a lot of attention inside the Google’s quality team. because all big search engines currently are lacking badly in this area.