DM SIG – A Tour of a Modern Search Engine 5/24/2010
Location:
eBay, Inc.
2065 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, CA 95125
Check in with reception in the main lobby of the “community” building – Directions Arial Map.
Date: Monday May 24th, 2010; 6:30 pm Notice: NEW MEETING day of Month for 2010 – the fourth Monday of each month!
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year. Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.
Speakers: Hugh Williams, Ph. D. Vice President of Buyer Experience Engineering at eBay
Title: “A Tour of a Modern Search Engine”
Hugh Williams
Search engines are ubiquitous tools for modern life. In this talk, Hugh Williams explains the architecture of a modern search engine, and discusses how search engines provide search over tens of billions of documents in less than a second to millions of users. He discusses how they rank documents, use large data sets to inform their ranking algorithms, and measure their relevance. He also discusses his role in search at eBay, and explains the unique challenges of working on the world’s most famous real-time search engine.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Hugh Williams has spent the past sixteen years researching and developing search engines and web services. He is presently the Vice President of Buyer Experience Engineering at eBay Inc., where his responsibilities include eBay’s search engine. In the past he managed a large R&D team at Microsoft’s Bing, and was a tenured professor in Australia. He has published 99 works, mostly in the field of Information Retrieval, and including two books: “Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL” and “Learning Mysql” for O’Reilly Media Inc. He holds 2 US patents and has 25 patents pending. He has a PhD from RMIT University in Australia. His personal interests include baseball, bobbleheads, and cycling.
SEE ALSO:
Dr. HughWilliams Presentation Slides
Dr. Hugh Williams recommends:
Spink and Xu, “Selected results from a large study of Web searching: the Excite study”, Information Research 6(1), October 2000
Scholer, Williams, Yiannis, and Zobel, “Compression of inverted indexes for fast query evaluation”, In Proc. of the ACM-SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2002.
Broder, “A taxonomy of web search”, SIGIR Forum 36(2), 2002.
Jansen and Spink, “How are we searching the World Wide Web? A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs.”, Inf. Process. Manage. 42(1), 2006.
AGENDA
6:30 – 7:00 networking and snacks
7:00 – 7:10 announcements of future meetings, jobs offered, and speaker introduction
7:10 – 9:00 speakers presentation along with Q&A
This seminar looks *very* promising! And it is not alone, as other scheduled ones are also excellent. A pity not to be there… Is there the posibility to attend via a Webinar or similar? Will it be recorded?
Thanks a lot!
Where is the posted slides used in the presentation? It contains many good pointers to different research area.
Thank you for giving such a good survey on the technologies and techniques used in a modern search engine.