[svlug] ACCU tonight 'A Tour of a Modern Search Engine' Hugh Williams

[Walter Vannini]

When:      Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Topic:     A Tour of a Modern Search Engine
Speaker:   Hugh Williams
Time:      6:30pm doors open
         7:00pm meeting begins
Where:     Symantec
         VCAFE building
         350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road)
         Mountain View, CA 94043
Map:       <http://tinyurl.com/334rv5>
Directions: VCAFE is accessible from the semicircular courtyard between Symantec buildings <http://tinyurl.com/2dccgc>
Cost:      Free
More Info: <http://www.accu-usa.org>

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.

Dr. 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.

Meetings are open to the public and are free of charge.

---- Upcoming ACCU talks -----

Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Jason Evans
"Memory debugging with jemalloc after application deployment"

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The ACCU meets monthly. Meetings are always open to the public and are free of charge. To suggest topics and speakers please email Walter Vannini via walterv at gbbservices.com