As I already posted here the Research Director of Google, Monika Henziger, visited us yesterday evening. The “lecture”/presentation was about the past, present and future of Web Search Engines. I was really surprised to find out that she’s indeed german, although she has spent the recent years (after aquiring her promotion at Princeton) in the US, nontheless she held the presentation in german, which was really easy on the ears – especially due to the fact that it’s always hard to following something after 5pm.

Duration: 60 minutes followed by 30min of questions

After explaining the basic stuff (reverse indexing, etc) she told us about load balancing and the way it’s handled with google (roughly). Then she presented some new (beta) studies/projects of google (personalized websearch and some others) and recommended to have a look at the Google Labs page for more information and invited everyone interested to get involved after graduation to contact her then (monika[at]google.com).

It was really interesting to see and hear someone from the actual it-working-world, although the basic parts of information/web retrieval were a little boring to me, as I’ve worked my way into the deeps of that last year when I had to do a presentation and paper about “Information Retrieval on the internet” (the german paper, 30pages, pdf-format can be found here (2.893 KB)).