Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering, gave a brief 15 minute presentation at Supernova today entitled Search is a Hard Problem. He explained that with an audience like Supernova, he imagines we understand to some extent how difficult a problem it is, but it's probably a harder problem then we even appreciate. He laid out three reasons why this is the case:

* Scale and diversity are almost beyond comprehension
* Expectations and needs will continue to grow
* 20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before

I found the third point quite amazing. I would think with the number of queries that Google processes, they would have seen a much higher percentage of the queries before.

I found this here http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ud ... roblem.php

Quite remarkable!