A Whirlwind Tour of a Search Engine

Thanks to Krishna Gade and Michael Lopp,  I had an opportunity to speak at Pinterest’s new DiscoverPinterest tech talk series.

I spoke for around 45 minutes, taking the audience on a tour of the world of (mostly) web search — skating across the top of everything from ranking, to infrastructure, to inverted indexing, to query alterations, and more. I had a lot of fun.

Here’s the video:

I also had the chance to listen to four of Pinterest’s engineering leaders discuss their work in browsing, content-based image retrieval, infrastructure, and graph processing and relevance. They’re up to some interesting work — particularly if you’re interested in the intersection of using images, human-curated data, and browsing.

On a social note, it was great to see several of the folks I worked with at Bing. Krishna took a selfie with Yatharth Saraf and I. Those were truly the days — we were in many ways ahead of our time.

Shameless advertisement: if you’d like me to present on search (or anything else) at your organization, please feel free to ask. I have a 30 minute, 1 hour, and whole day tutorial on search engines. I’m also available for consulting and advising!

See you next time.

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