The Past, Present and Future of Web Information Retrieval

Mehran Sahami

Google

Time: 3:45-5:00 p.m.

Date: October 23, 2003

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 aredepending on web search engines for customer acquisition. 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, Google's goal is to better allow users to obtain relevant information through the deployment of a variety of technological advances in information analysis, understanding, and retrieval. This presentation will describe some of the main challenges encountered in web information retrieval, some of the current techniques used, and will offer an overview of the search engine of the future. We will discuss how foundational issues in information retrieval, large scale systems building, and artificial intelligence technologies all play an important role in building a successful search engine

Biography

Mehran Sahami is a Senior Research Scientist at Google and is also a Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. At Google, Mehran conducts research in machine learning technologies to help improve information access. At Stanford, he teaches classes in Programming Methodology and Discrete Mathematics. Prior to his current positions, Mehran managed the data mining research and development group at Epiphany for several years, and was involved in a number of machine learning research projects at Stanford, Xerox PARC, SRI International, and Microsoft Research. He received his BS, MS, and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, and evidently still has issues with regard to leaving.