Mountain View, May 24: A Tour of a Modern Search Engine

LOCATION: LinkedIn, 2027 Stierlin Ct., Mountain View, CA 94043

Date: Monday May 24th, 2010; 6:30 pm Notice: NEW MEETING day of Month for 2010 - the fourth Monday of each month!

Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year. Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.

SPEAKER: Hugh Williams, PhD Vice President of Buyer Experience Engineering at eBay

Title: "A Tour of a Modern Search Engine"

Search engines are ubiquitous tools for modern life. In this talk, Hugh Williams explains the architecture of a modern search engine, and discusses how search engines provide search over tens of billions of documents in less than a second to millions of users. He discusses how they rank documents, use large data sets to inform their ranking algorithms, and measure their relevance. He also discusses his role in search at eBay, and explains the unique challenges of working on the world's most famous real-time search engine.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Hugh Williams has spent the past sixteen years researching and developing search engines and web services. He is presently the Vice President of Buyer Experience Engineering at eBay Inc., where his responsibilities include eBay's search engine. In the past he managed a large R&D team at Microsoft's Bing, and was a tenured professor in Australia. He has published 99 works, mostly in the field of Information Retrieval, and including two books: "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL" and "Learning Mysql" for O'Reilly Media Inc. He holds 2 US patents and has 25 patents pending. He has a PhD from RMIT University in Australia. His personal interests include baseball, bobbleheads, and cycling.