Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look
Jeff Dean (Google)
Colloquium
Thursday, October 21, 2004, 3:30 pm
EE-105
Abstract
Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user interface design. I'll describe some of the challenges in these areas, discuss some of the applications that Google has developed over the past few years. I'll also highlight some of the systems that we've built at Google, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. Along the way, I'll share some interesting observations derived from Google's web data.
Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Distinguished Engineer in Google's Systems Lab. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented several search quality improvements, and built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, he was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1996 working with Craig Chambers on compiler optimization techniques for object-oriented languages.