As Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and less well-known upstarts nip at its heels, Google has hundreds of wizards racing to come up with smarter answers
Manber heads the elite team that works incessantly to improve search results Illustration by Alex Robins, based on photograph by Dan Krauss/The New York Times/Redux, photograph of illustration by Wolfgang Stahr
High on a wall of the lobby at Google's (GOOG) sprawling headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a projector displays a live sampling of the 2.5 billion searches made on Google every day. One after another, every second, they appear and just as quickly scroll out of sight: "Route 81 closed," "cushing's disease and canine diabetes," "weather." It's a graphic reminder of how many people, some 720 million a month worldwide, rely on the search giant for links to information, entertainment, products, and just about everything else on their minds.
Yet upstairs from the lobby on this bright September morning, two dozen Google search engineers and executives are gathered around a long conference table, not to celebrate their success but to wrestle with their failures. Headed by Udi Manber, one of nine Google vice-presidents for engineering, these are the leaders of a cadre of engineers and scientists known as the search quality group. They are the masters of the mysterious mathematical wizardry that has made Google one of the most powerful companies in the world. And every week, in a quixotic quest to provide the perfect answers, they meet to grill each other on how to improve Google's search results.
Better than anyone, these folks know that while Google may outperform other search engines, it still spits out plenty of clunkers—irrelevant sites or even occasionally no sites at all for a particular query. They also know that every disappointing result means someone is less likely to click on ads—the source of nearly all of Google's $22 billion in revenues last year—and more likely to try another search engine. "If it turns out that somebody offers a better service than we do," Manber, a former academic and executive at Yahoo! (YHOO) and Amazon.com (AMZN), says with characteristic understatement, "that's a concern."
Today more than ever, Manber and the brainiacs in the search quality group can't afford to falter. Google's competition has recently gone from pitiful to plentiful: Microsoft's (MSFT) new Bing search engine picked up 1.5 percentage points of market share in August to hit 9.5%, according to market researcher Hitwise, while Google's share fell from 71.4% to 70.2%. Bing's gain is partly thanks to a $100 million marketing blitz complete with television ads knocking Google every which way but in name. Microsoft's pending deal for Bing to become Yahoo's underlying search engine, creating a combined entity with 27% market share, could produce Google's first sizable competitor in years.
In addition, there are new upstarts, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wolfram Alpha, a "knowledge engine" that attempts to answer factual queries in a more organized, comprehensive way. These and other companies are offering search services in such specialized areas as breaking news, updates from friends, and scientific research. Twitter, for instance, has become some news junkies' go-to site for finding out about plane crashes and other news that Google's computers haven't yet provided links to. "Google's very good at searching content as if it's out of a library," says Kimbal Musk, chief executive of OneRiot, a search startup for real-time posts and news from Twitter, Digg, and other social sites. "Twitter let people know another kind of search is possible."
Source : BusinessWeek
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