Google Search insight from Udi Manber

Udi Manber is a VP of Engineering at Google. Started as a professor at the University of Arizona, after that he was senior VP at Amazon and before he started to work for Google he was Yahoo's chief scientist. Popular Mechanics asked him in an interview 20 questions regarding Google Web Search (how it works, future improvement plans), so if you want to know a little more about how search works and what plans they've got it's a worthy reading. I've extracted below some of the affirmations I consider more interesting from this inteview:

• "Last year the Google research team did over 450 improvements" to the Google Web Search algorithm. Impressive, though by improvements I'm not sure if they mean bug fixes too or simply optimizations they did to make search better.
• "We make the decisions solely based on how good it is for search, how good it is for users not how this affects ads". Pretty self-explanatory, he was asked if when proposing new features or optimizations for the web search algorithm they take into account what impact this will have on the ad revenue - obviously not.
• "At Google we do not manually change results". This is one interesting affirmation, given when asked if they interfere manually on the search results - they don't, every change they make they do it on the overall algorithm rather than handling the exceptions manually (except, of course, in some cases when they deal with spammy websites).
• "The results we show you are based not only on what we know of the Web, but also what other people have searched for". This is interesting too, at least for website owners. It's not clear if he refers specifically to the suggestions Google does via the OneBox results (the Related Searches he mentions in the interview), or if he says that Google will rank certain results better just because those specific results were what other users (searching for similar keywords) were looking for. For instance, you do a search for photofiddle and you click on the second page in the search results, than a different user does the same thing, and another and so on - his affirmation might be interpreted that when a new user will search for photofiddle, Google will show on the first position the result that had the best click-through rate.
• "I can imagine if you give us permission to [fold the context of your social network into search results], and we find that that’s useful for some queries". Showing search results in Google not only from the regular web search index and based on your web history, but also from your other stored information in different social networks (myspace, facebook, digg, delicious)
• One of his favorite features recently introduced in Google Translate is CLIR. How this works: you enter a word in English for instance, and select as an output search Spanish. What Google will do is translate your query into Spanish, search for that translated Spanish word, and return the results to you translated back into English (with the possibility to see the Spanish results too). Currently supported languages: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish

As mentioned above, it's an interesting read, so if you have some time and willing to learn more about Google, take a look here: 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber