a shrine of insignificance

I may be an elitist with a computer science degree and working on a Ph.D. in information retrieval and user interfaces. But when my old officemate interviewed with Google I was horrified to hear that a person with a Ph.D. and over 20 publications as a student was being told that if he went to Google he’d work 40 hours a week programming and would only be allowed to research, which is what a Ph.D. is suppose to do, if their was an open space in Labs and the higher-ups liked his code. Frankly, my opinion of Brin and Page from what I’ve read about them and Google is that they got tired of how a research institute like Berkeley operates and ran off to make money and do things their own way. While this sounds great to most people, the type of people the doctorate is intended for are people who care about research and learning for learning sake. Not people who quit their education to make a quick buck. People say that Google isn’t focused on money, but if that were true they would be a large research group at a university under Drs. Brin and Page, not a publicly traded corporation under Messers Brin and Page. Lastly, I hear a lot of talk about “how Google could improve their searches/algorithms” yet most of what we hear about what comes out of Google is the application of the existing PageRank algorithm to new collections. It seems like Google is in the indexing business and not the searching business. Even more recent papers on Google itself are focused on infrastructure improvements like distributed file systems and server load balancing, not improving the algorithm itself. In fact the only algorithm changes I’ve heard of are the possible weighting of certain pages like wikipedia, myspace, and their advertisers higher than other pages. The big issues in web retrieval, synonym, determining context, and authority are being handled as if they are graph theory and statistics problems and not linguistic problems. In fact, not a while back there was talk of a their automatic translation software which worked purely on statistics and had no knowledge of language what so ever. I never heard more about it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t work.

plb

Filed under: General on January 31st, 2007