As I already posted here the Research Director of Google, Monika Henziger, visited us yesterday evening. The “lecture”/presentation was about the past, present and future of Web Search Engines. I was really surprised to find out that she’s indeed german, although she has spent the recent years (after aquiring her promotion at Princeton) in the US, nontheless she held the presentation in german, which was really easy on the ears – especially due to the fact that it’s always hard to following something after 5pm.

Duration: 60 minutes followed by 30min of questions

After explaining the basic stuff (reverse indexing, etc) she told us about load balancing and the way it’s handled with google (roughly). Then she presented some new (beta) studies/projects of google (personalized websearch and some others) and recommended to have a look at the Google Labs page for more information and invited everyone interested to get involved after graduation to contact her then (monika[at]google.com).

It was really interesting to see and hear someone from the actual it-working-world, although the basic parts of information/web retrieval were a little boring to me, as I’ve worked my way into the deeps of that last year when I had to do a presentation and paper about “Information Retrieval on the internet” (the german paper, 30pages, pdf-format can be found here (2.893 KB)).

Well, well…how fast can a year go by? Very fast. I almost cannot believe that one year has already passed again and that the project is coming to it’s end (official project deadline is this sunday, october 31st).

So how did we do?
Due to one thing and another (parallel project for the first half of this project, developers dropping out, general workload, etc) we won’t have the desired system up and running. This is a bugger, although I (and most of the developers) can say: we put up our best effort, it just wasn’t meant to be – always look on the bright side I guess ;-)

So what now?
As this week is the official end of the project, it seems that we’re finishing up in the “unofficial time” until the project presentation. Seeing that this is a uni project, this is quite common. Now we’re left with the hard job to

• analyse the whole system/concept
• document the functionality of everything that is up and running so far
• analyse what isn’t implemented yet and document how we intended to do it
• collect and archive all documents + the source code
• write a final report
• hand in final report
• prepare the presentation of the project
• present the project
• party a little that it’s over
• wait for the grade

What’s next?
After 1.5 years of nonstop (uni) project work it’s time to relax a little as I really feel “burned out”. So I decided to make this semester (which has already started on October 18th 2004) a more quite one – as I already participated in all the lectures that I want to write an exam about I guess I won’t visit any lectures. I will relax some weeks first (maybe 2-4, we’ll see), where relax will probably just mean that I won’t do anything related to the uni and that I will catch up with numerous other (private) projects and close out some To-Do point on my list. Here’s what comes to mind:

• Generate content and put up my new business site (I’ve already done the design and setup the framework (Mambo Server) – a snapshot can be found here. This will replace my current (old and crappy) site: dvserviceih.de
• Rebuild and reinstall first pc and install third pc – third pc you might ask, yup I’ve got three pcs at home (+ one laptop). It’s time to reinstall my first (or main) pc due to the fact that my Windows XP installation has reached it’s lifecycle (resulting in numerous explorer-crashes and the like). In the process I will replace one of the hdds with a bigger one (60GB -> 160GB) and will take that spare 60GB hdd to good use in my third pc (which was running knoppix from cd so far), where it will be home of a linux distribution (I’m still unsure what distro it will be, but I guess I’ll go for Debian 3.1).
• Work through pile of “old” customer requests, e.g. fixing some pcs etc
• etc
• Not to forget one major To-Do point: sleep long, have fun, play games, go out with friends,… ;-)

Then I will, at least try, to prepare me for the next exams (I intend to write at least 2 major ones this time, which will result in me having to learn stuff from up to 12 lectures) – longterm this time, not in adhoc last-minute round-the-clock sessions ;-)

Wow, the Director of Research from Google is visiting my university next week. It will go down on thurdays 28th october…I’m sure going to visit that session.

“The Past, Present, and Future of Web Search Engines”

Abstract:

Web search engines have emerged as one of the central applications on the internet. In fact, search has become one of the most important activities that people engage in on the Internet. Even beyond becoming the number one source of information, a growing number of businesses are depending on web search engines for customer acquisition.

In this talk I will brief review the history of web search engines: The first generation of web search engines used text-only retrieval techniques. Google revolutionized the field by deploying the PageRank technology – an eigenvector-based analysis of the hyperlink structure- to analyze the web in order to produce relevant results. Moving forward, our goal is to achieve a better understanding of a page with a view towards producing even more relevant results.

Google is powered by a large number of PCs. Using this infrastructure and striving to be as efficient as possible poses challenging systems problems but also various algorithmic challenges. I will discuss some of them in my talk.