Main Feed - RSS 2.0
Google Vice President of Engineering, Udi Manber gave a short outline of challenges Google faces in a 15 minute presentation at the Supernova 2007 conference. Billed as a conference examining “…the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy”, Supernova looks to be as much a conceptual show as it is a technical one.
Sean Ammirati from Read/WriteWeb was at the event and gives a good rundown of what Google’s VP of Engineering had to say. According to a post at the Read/WriteWeb blog, Manber explained a range of issues that keep his staff working late at night.
First of all, imagine dealing scalability and compatibility issues with something as large as Google’s networks.
As a network of sites, indexes, services, directories, advertisers and users, Google is absurdly enormous. Chances are, very few, if any, know exactly how big it really is. Imagine trying to match information from literally billions of sources written in thousands of human and machine languages together through an increasingly narrowing funnel until you boil them into a coherent set of search results on a user’s monitor. Now try doing it with uniformity and style.