3pointD.com

Google’s search czar, Udi Manber, gave a short pre-lunch presentation on what he has to deal with at the company:

“Search is hard, very hard, because of scale of what we have to deal with. The scale we operate at is almost beyond comprehension. The main thing is the diversity. The log boggles the mind. Also the expectations. If there’s one piece of information I can give you: 20-25 percent of the queries we will see today, we’ve never seen before.” Manber quoted Oliver Wendell Homes: “The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries,” but it cannot be dealt with like mathematics. Udi: We can say the same thing about search. (more…)

Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky opened Supernova 2007 this morning by approaching the socially networked environment of the World Wide Web from two different directions. Caruso’s basic thesis was that people needed to break out of their insular social networks and take additional risks in order to bring in a greater variety of viewpoints and push innovation forward. Shirky called for the industry to rely more heavily on love, and posited that love would be a better indicator of where the IT industry is headed than business models are. (more…)