Google's Marissa Mayer Highlights Google's Heroes
Marissa Mayer is up next and she explains that she wants to reveal the heroes behind the scenes. She has some interesting stats to explain how they fuel the work carried out by their search engineers.

According to their Chef:

2300 lbs of chicken a month
1600 lbs of coffee beans a month
500 lbs of pasta
112 lbs of wheatgrass

Their Search Quality Czar, “Ben”, has been working on a number of things:

1. Better search ranking.
2. Better “onebox” results.
3. Improve search index quality despite rapid growth.

“Bwolen” is their Crawl Tech Lead and he has two interests:

1. Grow the Index beyond 8 billion pages.
2. Looks for fresher content and provide daily updates. This allows searchers to find information soon after it is published, thanks to the freshness factor.

“Matt” is the Spam Cowboy and Porn Cookie Guy (his picture looks curiously like Matt Cutts) and he makes sure that various surprises don’t happen to searchers. He is responsible for:

1. Safesearch.
2. Reduced spurious porn.
3. Reduced spam results.
4. Reaches out to webmasters to educate about best practices.

Mayer then highlights the user interface team and explains how difficult it has been for them to keep Google.com looking the same, despite more than 50 new product developments in the past few years.

She also gives kudos to Google search users. Yes, your behavior helps them to develop their search algorithm (surprise, surprise).
Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |