Qi Lu had grown up in China too poor to afford decent meals regularly. His fortunes changed when he attended a talk by Carnegie Mellon professor Edmund Clark, who was impressed by Lu's questions.
Clark persuaded him to apply to Carnegie Mellon University, and it eventually led to a PhD and then jobs at IBM and Yahoo. Lu led Internet search at Yahoo for 10 years . He quit in 2008 to start a company or return to China, but was grabbed by Microsoft to lead its search efforts.
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer gave Lu plenty of resources and several years of support. Lu's job is to develop Microsoft's search engine Bing as a serious competitor to Google.
This may not be easy, but Lu is eminently qualified to make an attempt, as his association with search is as old as the technology itself. Excerpts from an interview with Lu by Hari Pulakkat.
Why is search so hard?
You can think of search in many ways as rocket science for the masses. The web is so vast, there are trillions of URLs and people consume the web through very simple interfaces, typing a short query. You need to understand the user purpose based on a very short form of input.
What inputs can you have, apart from the keywords?
Today, most of the information we use is based on keywords. Location is increasingly becoming important, particularly for mobile searches. We have this model called the W4 model - who, when, where, what - that is a strong predictor of possible purposes.
The time (of a query) turns out to be a strong predictor of information need. For mobile devices you have a clear indication of who the person is. With increasing social network connections, we can look at 'who you're with'. And now 'what' is also another key source.
For example, on mobile devices you may be using a calendar, and we have an additional source of information . We aspire to build technologies for the next few decades so that we can systematically bring knowledge at the time when people need it.
There are two technological pillars that represent this quest. First, the computational understanding of user intent. How do we use software and computational models to understand the purpose? Our second pillar is called knowledge. The web is evolving into a full-blown digital society. It will substantially outgrow the intellectual heritage of its reservoir documents.
We want to understand the purpose of our users, understand the digital universe and use those to empower every human being with knowledge to enrich their lives.
GAURAV KUMAR
PGDM-3RD SEM.
Clark persuaded him to apply to Carnegie Mellon University, and it eventually led to a PhD and then jobs at IBM and Yahoo. Lu led Internet search at Yahoo for 10 years . He quit in 2008 to start a company or return to China, but was grabbed by Microsoft to lead its search efforts.
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer gave Lu plenty of resources and several years of support. Lu's job is to develop Microsoft's search engine Bing as a serious competitor to Google.
This may not be easy, but Lu is eminently qualified to make an attempt, as his association with search is as old as the technology itself. Excerpts from an interview with Lu by Hari Pulakkat.
Why is search so hard?
You can think of search in many ways as rocket science for the masses. The web is so vast, there are trillions of URLs and people consume the web through very simple interfaces, typing a short query. You need to understand the user purpose based on a very short form of input.
What inputs can you have, apart from the keywords?
Today, most of the information we use is based on keywords. Location is increasingly becoming important, particularly for mobile searches. We have this model called the W4 model - who, when, where, what - that is a strong predictor of possible purposes.
The time (of a query) turns out to be a strong predictor of information need. For mobile devices you have a clear indication of who the person is. With increasing social network connections, we can look at 'who you're with'. And now 'what' is also another key source.
For example, on mobile devices you may be using a calendar, and we have an additional source of information . We aspire to build technologies for the next few decades so that we can systematically bring knowledge at the time when people need it.
There are two technological pillars that represent this quest. First, the computational understanding of user intent. How do we use software and computational models to understand the purpose? Our second pillar is called knowledge. The web is evolving into a full-blown digital society. It will substantially outgrow the intellectual heritage of its reservoir documents.
We want to understand the purpose of our users, understand the digital universe and use those to empower every human being with knowledge to enrich their lives.
GAURAV KUMAR
PGDM-3RD SEM.
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