Killam Trust Lectures @ Dal

Last night I went to one of the Killam Trusts lectures at the Rowe building on Dal campus. Daniel M. Russell of Google was presenting on the topic 'Divining user intent'.

While there was nothing revolutionary to me in the presentation, it did give me some interesting insights into the importance of 'meaning' when searching. The focus on comfort level seems almost obsessive, but I can't deny that it's important, and probably is crucial to Google's business model.

My favorite item in the material covered was the insight into using large distributed systems to gather information in aggregate.

The funniest anecdote of the night was a remark of when Google first premiered it's site, the main search page was so simple and 'empty' that people were still waiting for the rest of the content to load. Apparently adding a copyright footer changed people's impressions of the front search page. In an age of gaudy search engine pages with sites trying to be everything to all people, Google's front page still remains devoted to what they do best (whatever else they decide to do).