ACM Events - DMSIG - A Tour of a Modern Search Engine 5/24/2010

May 18, 2010 - PRLog -- DESCRIPTION: 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.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY: 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.

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Founded in 1947, shortly after the unveiling of ENIAC (the first general purpose electronic computer), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is the world’s oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. ACM provides a vital forum for the exchange of information, ideas, and discoveries. ACM is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology. With a world-wide membership, ACM is a leading resource for computing professionals and students working in the various fields of Information Technology, and for interpreting the impact of information technology on society.