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Google, Yahoo & MSN Research Laboratories: What Makes It from Idea to Product?
By Mike Valentine

The Research Laboratories session at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 brought representatives from the top 3 engines to talk about how projects emerge from their labs to become actual search tools. Each offered a different perspective and each seemed to have a differing emphasis on moving from ideas to products.

First up was Peter Norvig, Research Director at Google, who began by asking, "What comes out of research?" He suggested that most of the tools emerging from Google labs are developed in a "Bottom up fashion ... We have a bunch of engineers trying things out and some of them bubble up to the top." He gave several examples and revealed that one of the most popular publisher tools, Adsense, came out of looking for a way to monetize Gmail, the free webmail product.

He showed an example of factual search, "What is the population of Japan?" The answer of a Google search on that query produces a direct answer as the first result on the page. 127,417,244. Followed by the source link and more possible sources displayed below. Clear fact based questions can be drawn from authoritative sources, continually updated and displayed as "One Box" searches.

He discussed "Statistical machine translation" based on a model of English documents online compared to model of other languages such as news stories done in differing languages as a source for reliable quality for statistical comparisons. Norvig proudly displayed results of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) competition for this type of translation shows Google coming out on top. They do it by looking at same text in different languages using online info without anyone actually speaking the languages.

Moving to more challenging computational and algorithmic research projects, Norvig discussed work being done on image processing in an attempt at "face localization" to determine from group photos, where a photo was taken. Identification of people on the web can't be done so easily. The best they've reliably achieved is to determine if a face is that of a male or a female.