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Seattle Conference on Scalability: Scaling Google for...

GoogleTechTalks · Youtube · 3 HN points · 3 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention GoogleTechTalks's video "Seattle Conference on Scalability: Scaling Google for...".
Youtube Summary
Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, leads the product management efforts on Google's search products -- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google's first female engineer and led the user interface and webserver teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google's search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial...
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Apr 08, 2016 · 3 points, 0 comments · submitted by simula67
When Marissa Mayer was working on Google User Experience she mentioned that Google did this : https://youtu.be/LT1UFZSbcxE?t=3462
Sep 25, 2014 · anon1385 on Dear Rupert
>While Google doesn't, as far as I know, "fix" search rankings to give themselves an edge

They certainly have done that in the past. Marissa Mayer admitted it in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT1UFZSbcxE#t=44m50s

>When we rolled out Google Finance, we did put the Google link first. It seems only fair, right? We do all the work for the search page and all these other things, so we do put it first. That’s actually been a policy, then, because of Finance we implemented it in other places. So for Google Maps, again, it’s the first link.

btian
No she didn't. See, that's the problem with quoting out of context, i.e., what Rupert Murdoch is best at...
thomasahle
If you start 10 seconds earlier, you'll see that she's not talking about ordering the "search results", but about the extra information added to some searches. Stock quotes, maps, calculator and stuff.
anon1385
Are you seriously arguing that information shown on the results page after you ask Google to perform a search, in response to the specific search term you use, is not 'search results'? Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess…
thomasahle
It's not search results in the way people normally talk about them; and it certainly has nothing to do with the search rank system.
Google freely admits to putting their own links first. Here's what Marissa Mayer said in 2007:

We didn't actually have Google Finance until about a year ago. Up until then we were ordering the links based on various published metrics... We had the five top finance sites in their order of their popularity listed there. So we rolled out Google Finance, we put the Google link first.

(You can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT1UFZSbcxE - that quote starts at 44:50.)

Your observation regarding Bing is quite interesting. Your theory may very well be right, but there's a hilarious alternative:

It's known that Microsoft uses Google's rankings (see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-... ). This would then propagate onto Yahoo, which uses Bing's engine, which means that Yahoo is told their own site is less popular. But Yahoo puts their site first, which may mean they're artificially boosting its ranking, under the guidance of you know who!

So 2012 Marissa Mayer may be artificially boosting Yahoo's rank to defeat 2007's Marissa Mayer's artificial boost of Google's rank. Ha!

timothya
I was talking about organic search results; i.e., the standard list of links that come up for a query.

Marissa was talking about this: http://i.imgur.com/RQhOH.png

Evbn
Assume yahoo has a better finance website than Google. Then ponder the results for these queries:

    AAPL
  
    Finance

    Finance website

 And then articulate what is wrong with Google's results.
jkn
Mayer's answer actually starts at 44:34 and gives the proper context: she's talking about the order of links in the OneBox (the area at the top that shows the current stock price and a plot), not the order of links in the main results. Danny Sullivan wrote a long post about this:

http://searchengineland.com/dear-congress-its-not-ok-not-to-...

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